From a young age, Hopkins junior, Dylan Kwang has immersed himself in the arts. Having taken painting and illustration classes all throughout elementary, middle and high school, art is something that has always been an influence in his life.
Over Thanksgiving break, I had the privilege of visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Unfortunately, their collection of European painting from the years 1200-1800 are mostly not on display due to ongoing renovations. There was, however, a new and different exhibit I had the opportunity to see, and it was absolutely fascinating.
Located in the heart of the National Mall is the Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery. Part of the Smithsonian Institution, the two galleries are adjacent and attached to one another, forming a joint museum that focuses on Asian art. Currently on display at the Freer Gallery for the next year is the exhibit “Hokusai: Mad about Painting,” which I went to view over this Thanksgiving break.
I first became familiar with Shirin Neshat during my senior year of high school. Her piece “Rebellious Silence,” a black and white photograph of a woman’s face bisected by a gun barrel and written over with Farsi poetry from her “Women of Allah” series, was a standout work in the Global Contemporary section of the AP Art History exam’s 250 works.
We’ve all grown up with Coldplay. From their saddest songs like “The Scientist” or “Yellow,” to their jubilant hit, “Hymn For the Weekend,” their artistic and instrumental style of music has an almost universal appeal. Not to mention that from their seven studio albums released between 2000 and 2017, they’ve managed to rack up 29 Grammy nominations and six wins.
I’ll just start off this review by saying that there was very little possibility that I was not going to enjoy Knives Out. I’ve been in love with the murder mysteries ever since I stayed up all night reading Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None in sixth grade, so a film based around the key motifs of her style — an eccentric detective, an ornate mansion, a web of lies and an overly-complicated murder plot — was almost certainly going to be a hit in my eyes.
Thanksgiving Day was marked by a rare occurrence this year — a Lil Uzi Vert tweet storm. Addressing his long delayed sophomore album Eternal Atake, Uzi began: “I wanna let My Family know… and I say Family because all the fans left a long time ago. Only Family Stays so if you stayed I’m Thankful for U.”
In the promo video for Seth Meyers’ first stand-up special on Netflix (or anywhere, as far as I can tell), he asks a group of children if they’d like to play with a new action figure, “Stand-Up Seth.”
If you’re like me, vague memories of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials: The Golden Compass and its cinematic iteration wove themselves intermittently throughout your childhood. Although they were less beloved than Harry Potter, less modern than Percy Jackson & the Olympians and less classic than The Chronicles of Narnia, they are perhaps the most timeless and successfully constructed stories of them all (although the 2007 movie adaptation garnered a fair amount of criticism).
Disney was a big part of my childhood. And over time, after releasing sequels to my favorite movies and acquiring film production companies such as Pixar in 2006 and Lucasfilms in 2012, Disney managed to become an even bigger part of my childhood. But building up to the Nov. 12 release of Disney+, a new streaming service for Disney-owned content, I wasn’t that excited.
This past weekend, in conjunction with the two-day jazz symposium at Hopkins, An Die Musik LIVE! presented two jazz luminaries on Saturday night who were pivotal to the free jazz scene in France at the turn of the 1970s.
The Office of Multicultural Affairs hosted the 32nd Annual Culture Show on Friday, Nov. 15. The event featured performances by 14 student groups — from the Gospel Choir’s heavenly harmonies to the Ladybirds’ sharp, graceful dance routines — all of which were centered around the event’s themes of resilience and strength, succinctly summarized by the event’s tag line: “We Rise.”
The University held a free two-day symposium, “Paris/Algiers 1969: Declarations of Freedom by the Black American Avant-Garde,” on Friday, Nov. 15 and Saturday, Nov. 16. The Centre Louis Marin for Interdisciplinary French Studies organized the event with the support of the French Embassy in the United States, and the symposium director was none other than Hopkins Professor and Chair of German and Romance Languages and Literatures, Professor Derek Schilling.
As the crowd chanted “Taco Bell! Taco Bell!” five minutes into “Super Art Fight: Thanksgiving Thrashing,” I knew this night was going to be wild. This Thanksgiving edition of the strange collision between wrestling and live art, or “the greatest live art competition in the known universe,” as it calls itself, took place at Ottobar on Friday, Nov. 15.
This past Sunday, Nov. 10, “Not a Film Fest: Anticolonial Conversations in Baltimore” wrapped up with its third and final day. Baltimore-Palestine Solidarity (BPS) presented the event, which began on Oct. 20 at the Baltimore American Indian Center and continued its second day on Oct. 27 at the 2640 Space before concluding this Sunday at the Creative Alliance in Patterson Park.
I find myself listening to music all the time, whether it’s while working out or just sitting on my bed, but once I get hooked on one song, I will continuously play it on loop until someone begs me to stop humming the earworm-triggering tune.
Before coming to Hopkins, I had already started laying out extravagant plans for concert-viewing in D.C. The fall lineup is always ripe, no matter what part of the country you’re in, and I even had an app that scanned my Spotify music library to track who was passing through and where they were playing.
Present day commemorations, whether in the form of service, art or expression, are irreplaceable markers of historical narratives that must not be forgotten. The Greek Chamber Music Project (GCMP), is an arts presenter and record label devoted to performing the eccentric music of Greek composers. On Tuesday, Nov. 5, GCMP presented an emotionally-charged and impactful program at the Peabody Institute in memory of the Holocaust, called Remembering the Jews of Greece: A Musical Journey.
The Writing Seminars Department invited the acclaimed poet Richard Kenney to share his philosophy on writing poetry and read some poems from Terminator, his new and fifth published book of poetry and his first since 2008.
