Archive for the ‘Arts & Culture’ Category
A group of university students and alumni has returned to the United States after three weeks in Kenya, where they were part of a cultural exchange program which aims to transform lives through music.
The group, from Berklee College of Music in Boston, taught music, performed, donated instruments to a local community center and learned about traditional Kenyan music.
Music is an integral part of life in Kenya.
“Growing up, I sang a lot in school. And we had competitions and choir and music every year,” says Sam Lutomia, a staff member at Berklee College of Music. Born and raised in Kenya, he now lives and works in Boston. “When I moved to the States, I got exposed to a higher level of music and I was like, ‘Is there something I can do now that I’m in the States?’”
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He co-founded Global Youth Groove, with the goal of exposing Kenyan young people to Western music and encouraging them to pursue a career in music.
“I started talking with students at Berklee College of Music and faculty members and they all responded positively,” says Lutomia. “And we started collecting instruments. After that, we traveled to Kenya last month to start a community center.”
Thirteen Americans made the trip, including four high school students from the Boston area. Among them was 17-year-old Marina Miller.
“We started out in Nairobi,” she says. “We got a chance to meet with local musicians and listen to them play.”
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In Kakamega, in western Kenya, the Americans presented a gift.
“We’ve gathered like 20 instruments,” says project coordinator Aaron Colverson. “They include acoustic guitar, electric guitar, acoustic violin, flute, clarinet, saxophone, also a trumpet and a trombone. We had some recorders and also an entire drum kit, lap tops and recording software.”
Dozens of young Kenyans, between the ages of 15 and 30, took workshops offered by the group.
Berklee student David Chapman says, for some of the Kenyans, it was their first time seeing and touching such instruments. “Their music classes would just be them reading books about western instruments.
The workshops offered a more hands-on approach.
“We would lecture for a while and teach, everything would be very interactive,” Chapman says. “If anyone had any questions or wanted to play with instruments, we would always welcome that.”
The group also held workshops in orphanages and performed at a national music festival.
“When you put music in front of kids, it seems that their minds open up,” says project coordinator Aaron Colverson . “Music gives them a chance to express themselves through songs and writing the songs.”
Throughout the trip, the group met with local musicians and listened to them play. They also learned about traditional Kenyan instruments, dances and songs.
The short trip has had a lasting impact, according to Nairobi native Wambura Mitaru, who studies at Berklee.
“Up until today, kids are talking to one another,” she says.”There is one young man, his name is Scott from Kenya, and he plays violin. He met with Aaron Colverson from Berklee. They really got to jam with each other and play the violin and Scott got to learn about different things. He now plays everywhere, when he can.”
Trip leader Sam Lutomia is happy with the enthusiasm generated by the exchange program. He hopes the trip becomes an annual event and would like to expand to neighboring countries.
World leaders and heads of state are always in the public eye. We watch them on TV and see their photos in newspapers and magazines.
But when New Yorker staff photographer Platon Antoniou – who uses just his first name professionally – embarked on a journey to capture images of world leaders, he wanted to discover the personalities behind the public faces. He also wanted to explore power.
When world leaders came to the United Nations for the General Assembly in September 2009, Platon felt it was the right moment to complete his project. He set up a studio on the floor of the General Assembly. His goal was to show each of these politicians up close, in a very personal way.
“Nick Clegg, deputy prime minister of England in the new British coalition government, he’s in the book. I said to him, ‘I want you to think of something that has nothing to do with business or politics, something that’s deeply human.’ And the most beautiful look came over his face,” Platon says. “At the end of the photo shoot, he said to me, ‘Do you know what I was thinking about when you took that picture?…I was imagining rubbing my baby’s foot.’”
Sometimes, the moments are unsettling, such as when photographing Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe.
“Very chilling. He didn’t say much. He was dressed perfectly in a very gentlemanly suit. His entourage was very suspicious, eyes were moving around their surroundings all the time,” Platon recalls. “He had the strangest skin. It looked like it was really oily but it was actually very dry, but stretched so finely over his flesh. His eyes were just deep crystal irises of cyan blue.I remember he walked away after his sitting and another head of state came to sit for me and refused to sit on the same chair. So I said, ‘What’s wrong with this chair?’ He said, ‘I’m not sitting in this chair, there is blood on it.’”
Capturing Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi on film was also unforgettable.
“I see this giant crowd marching towards me and, in the middle, is Qaddafi marching in a slow motion movement,” Platon says. “And he had all this incredible regalia, all these robes, and his hat that tamed his wild black hair. And he was surrounded by female bodyguards dressed head to foot in dark green military clothing. It was a scene from a James Bond movie.”
Also featured in “Portraits of Power” are President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran and President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela.
“I got eight seconds with Chavez. It was the shortest photo session of my life. And although he gave me such a little time, he gave me so much in terms of his personality and his spirit. I do believe I captured his power as a human being, not just political power.”
In Platon’s book, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas face each other on opposite pages.
“Netanyahu approached me and he’s a very confident person. You feel a force of energy from him. He has very big charisma. He grabbed my hand and shook it strongly and he put his other hand on my shoulder and he said, ‘Platon make me look good.’ So it became a running joke between us. The irony is that I think he does look good in the picture. You can see in his eyes that he’s actually talking to you saying, ‘I will look good in this picture. I will look good,’” Platon says. “Abbas was very different. He seemed more fragile as if he was feeling the world on his shoulders. He seemed very humble and he seemed a very dignified person.”
Platon tried to capture the essence of his subjects at a given moment. Leaders who have just risen to power, he notes, have a different feeling and look than what you see after they’ve been in office longer.
“Obama, for instance, it’s not the obvious charismatic Obama that we all fell in love with during the campaign. It’s the thinking Obama, the philosophical Obama.”
Among the more than 100 heads of state Platon photographed for his book, only four are women.
“The women I photographed seemed to be more comfortable in their seat perhaps because the battle is harder to the top and they have a better sense of humility and dignity.”
Platon’s quest to explore power continues, with a twist.
“I think it’s time for me to turn my lens onto the people who have been robbed of power, people who have shown great courage in the face of oppression, people like Aung San Su Kyi, who I recently photographed and got her on the cover of Time magazine,” he says. “I just got back from photographing all the leaders of the Egyptian revolution: humble kids, from 22 year olds who were torture victims, to parents who – with their kids – were in Tahrir square, to old ladies whose sons were taken and killed by the secret police. These are all everyday people who are so brave and who are actually really changing the world around us.”
Platon considers his book a sort of yearbook of those who are now running our world, and he offers it up to readers for their evaluation.
One of the nation’s most prolific art collectors is the U.S. space agency. For nearly a half-century, NASA has commissioned artists to document its missions and projects. Seventy of the 3,000 works in its collection are in a traveling exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington.
The art is mounted in a quiet corner gallery on the second floor of this cavernous museum, perched above an atrium filled with hanging spacecraft and missiles and crowds of visiting tourists. The show retraces milestones in space history through the unique visions and sensibilities of a diverse group of artists.
“The whole collection leaves me with this wonderful artistic notion of what we’ve been through over the 50 years of NASA history,” says curator Tom Crouch, “from the very first launches, down to the latest planetary probe, and you see it through the eyes and the experience of these artists, all different, all interested in some different aspect of this, and yet when you see it here in the gallery it all comes together.”
As you enter the gallery, you come face-to-face with a life-size portrait of astronaut Gordon Cooper by Mitchell Jamieson. It is 1963 and Cooper, in his silver-colored spacesuit, steps out of his Mercury space capsule after 22 orbits of Earth onto the bright sunlit deck of the recovery ship.
Nearby is a large painting by famed American illustrator Norman Rockwell of two astronauts suiting up for the first flight of the Gemini program in 1965.
“It’s like two knights putting on their armor going out to do battle,” Crouch says. “We have another Rockwell called ‘Behind Apollo 11’ that is nothing but faces in profile, from the three Apollo 11 astronauts, to the backup crew, to their wives, to scientists, engineers and managers who stood behind them and helped them get to the moon.”
A range of works in the show are inspired by the Apollo program which, as President John F. Kennedy envisioned, successfully landed the first men on the Moon in July 1969. The program carried five more crews to the lunar surface before ending in 1972.
Pop artist Andy Warhol captures the iconic image of Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the lunar surface in vivid neon pink, yellow and blue. And, oil painter Robert McCall imagines the sight of the rocket engine firing to propel the lunar lander back to earth.
Crouch says artist Crystal Jackson shows spectators watching the historic events unfold. “The Crystal Jackson in the show is called ‘The Moon Hut’ and it was a hamburger place outside the NASA main gate with a big moon and these wonderful characters who were down there drawn by the excitement of this program.”
The show also includes photographs by William Wegman, known for his Weimaraner dog portraits, here suited-up as astronauts peering out from the portholes of the International Space Station.
And high overhead there’s a twisted rubber sculpture made from tire fragments called “Remembering Columbia,” that evokes the loss of the Columbia Space Shuttle and its crew in a disastrous reentry accident in 2003.
Another commissioned piece by watercolorist Barbara Ernst Prey is the X-43, the fastest airplane in the world, clocked at more than 11,000 kilometers per hour. Prey studied the craft for months and did sketches at Edwards Air Force Base in the California’s Mojave Desert an hour before its launch from the wing of a high-flying carrier jet.
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“What was going through my mind is: Do I make this abstract? Do I make it concrete?” says Prey. “It kept on coming to me. It’s really about the blue sky and this object going as fast as it can across and just the energy. And that’s what I tried to get with the yellow and the different colors in the cloud going behind it.”
Prey stationed herself in front of a large TV screen to watch the flight. She says the experience filled her with a sense of awe. “It’s the amazing gifts that these people have to do amazing things, and I think that’s what I’ve really learned. And it helps you look differently because you are looking and you are thinking of the cosmos and universe and that helps you look at things differently.”
Visitor Barbara Baldwin from San Antonio, Texas shares that enthusiasm. “You know, growing up with space exploration was a neat thing,”she says. “I’ll never forget where I was when the men landed on the moon and what we did that day. Our family gathered around the TV that night. So I have great memories as a child.”
Hunter Thorton from Vidalia, Louisiana, came to the museum with some high school friends. He says it was a chance to put on his “Star Wars” movie gear. He is a fan of science fiction, but likes how the artists in this show interpret real events. “It really goes to show how America is propelling in technology and being in space. And hopefully one day we’ll be walking in costumes likes this for real.”
“NASA Art: Fifty Years of Exploration” was originally slated to make its last stop at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington. But popular demand for the show has extended its journey into 2012.