A visit to Zoellner Art Gallery

Tuesday – June 28, 2016

It was a lovely morning on Tuesday, June 28, 2016. My StepUp friends and I together with our beloved instructor for American Culture and Pragmatics visited Zoellner Art Gallery, which is located nearby the business school of Lehigh University. It is an amazing art gallery for a university since I had never heard about any universities in this world that have art galleries before. Universities as the highest level of educational stages should have at least one art gallery since it is essential to keep the educated people aware of their traditional and historical heritage. It will certainly add to the making of a civilized world, not only in terms of cognitive knowledge or insight but also emotional and spiritual discipline, which is deeply rooted in our predecessors.

As I entered the lobby of the gallery, I was amazed by a beautiful sculpture of a horse. Moreover, it is made of bottle caps, wonderful! The artist who had the idea must have been an extremely talented person. What is more interesting about it is that it is not shaped only for a regular look. It beautifully looks like a royal horse from India or perhaps from somewhere in China. It is absolutely inspiring. I am actually thinking of starting to appreciate more about every little thing ever made by my fellow human even though it is just a bottle cap. I used to save bottles to be sold for recycling or only for saving water. I believe one of the reasons is because it is simply bigger and more useful than the caps. Zoellner Art Gallery of Lehigh University is absolutely smart for having that artistic horse.

For a long time, before, I only knew that an art gallery only has an owner, a painter, and lots of paintings inside. I had never really thought of someone who worked so hard and careful to prepare everything needed in an art gallery for making it ready to welcome the visitors. This someone is known as a preparator. Just like the name, he or she is in charge of making a preparation. It is an art gallery; it needs maintenance handled by a qualified person in order to keep the gallery properties to stay in shape.

Encaustic is a new vocabulary I got at the very beginning of our art gallery visit. It was explained to us by the preparator as a kind of painting that combines wax and oil on the canvas. It needs a cool climate to maintain its original shape and if something bad happens to any paintings, the wax needs to be reheated. There are lots more to talk about the art gallery visit. I think I am going to have to continue it in my next journal. So, that is all for this section.

As the second part of my Zoellner Art Gallery visit journal, I am going to write more about it as we were moving forward to different sections of the gallery. So, there we were in the basement where we could see artifacts from the pre-Columbian history, Spirit Boards of Papua New Guinea, and artistic paintings as well as photographs that invited us to try to interpret or simply to enjoy the amusement they serve. Whatever our interpretation or impression might be, arts are one of the beauties made by the human as an expression of ideas and emotions.

As we moved deeper into the gallery, I became more impressed with the ideas of the painters and photographers. They indeed have successfully perpetuated the life pieces, which might be unnoticed by anyone else during that time they noticed it. All the paintings and photographs are indeed conveying meanings or intentions. Some of the meanings might be an act of criticism. Whatever it might be, we would just try to appreciate those works of art just like those artists have appreciated the pieces of life they noticed when everyone else was in a state of ignorance. Every ordinary human has an individual taste of art as a unique part of life.

“Open Air School” (La Escuela de Aire Libre), 1932, a painting by Diego Rivera who was a Mexican, was one of my favorites. A record about it states that the painting is the early renaissance depictions of Jesus Christ with his apostles. What made me interested in it, is the universal message about the importance of education. As the name of the painting reveals, we could see that Jesus as a teacher was teaching his apostles or students in an open-air, not in a building. They made a circle, very close to each other, and could see the spirit of the message. Everyone should be able to learn from the painting that we do not have to be inside of a beautiful building with advanced technology to get a good education. Surely, we can do it everywhere, what matters is our own spirit for learning, for education.

Another painting that caught my attention was the one made by Pedro Meyer, a Mexican artist. “Slaughterhouse” is the name of the painting. I was a bit shocked when I first saw it. I have never known and seen that there is a way to slaughter animals as shown in the painting. I felt bad for the cow, it might be too painful. Even though I enjoy eating meat but I think I will not eat it if I know the way they slaughter it is like how I saw in the painting. It is just art though.