Earlier this month,
The New York Times published an article as a part of a series devoted to summer trips in which a writer tried something for the first time. The recollection took readers to the Spook-a-Rama in Coney Island on a 1950s summer day. Fifty years later, the author would view an exhibition at the Brooklyn Art Museum that included Diane Arbus's 1961 photograph
The House of Horrors, Coney Island, N.Y. - a dark interior shot of that same amusement park ride. She described it below:
"Works of art (a painting or photo, a novel or poem or play, a symphony or song) can serve as bridges to the past, connecting us to a distant time. And for me, Arbus's House of Horrors, Coney Island, N.Y. seems like a private bridge that no one else can cross in precisely the same way."
We asked staff and friends of University Museums to share stories of art that created that same personal bridge to their past. While we were eager to hear about works of art from the University Museums collection, we were thankful for the emotion and excitement by art from outside of our campus walls as well. Read below to discover a memory by University Museums Director, Lynette Pohlman, and read the other stories on our blog
here.
"My family believed in democracy. Even when deciding the family vacation, we held a vote and it was determined we'd be going to Washington DC to visit the Smithsonian. I was seven years old.
Walking up the steps to the Natural History Museum and then through the HUGE doors to come face-to-tusk with an elephant was awesome. As we toured the museum's dioramas of the world's cultures, societies, environments, I had many 'aha moments' - I was learning and comprehending as I never had before.
That learning experience was profound because I understood the many stories. I never wanted to leave the elephant.
It was not until I was 11 years old, that I realized the Smithsonian was more than one building (19), and that there was more than one museum in the United States (my parents were relieved we could attend other museums to fulfill my museum passion!).
When I was 25, I could finally articulate what happened when I was seven. I experienced visual learning-those profound, repeating 'aha moments' came as I understood the objects, their context and the many stories portrayed in the museum's dioramas. As a dyslexic individual (not diagnosed until adulthood) the reading of symbols (numbers and letters) was difficult as they always shifted around on the page. Reading and math had been a challenge. But reading objects, works of art, was my natural learning style for understanding the world and came so very easy.
If sighted, we are all visual learners, even when interpreting numbers and alphabets. For each of us to use all our senses to understand and then transform our world is critical. I have no doubt one of the reasons Iowa State University and University Museums has visual literacy and learning, can be attributed to the 'aha' moment in the Smithsonian at age seven."
