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More handpicked essays just for you.
How do culture and society influence art
How do culture and society influence art
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Los Intocables by Erik Ravelo Los Intocables (The Untouchables) is a controversial art series by the Cuban artist Erik Ravelo. Ravelo uses powerful images to bring attention to and comment on the exploitation of children throughout the world. These images are provocative and bring to the audience’s attention important issues that are occurring in the world around them. Los Intocables shocks the viewer and opens his or her eyes to all the horrors children face in our world. These images together create an effective piece that upset the viewer and causes the people who looked at it to desire change. Erik Ravelo is a contemporary cuban artist notorious for creating artworks that disturb the normal and make his audience uncomfortable. His piece Los Intocables takes subjects that no one wants to talk about and brings them to the light. The subject matters Ravelo uses for his series are neither light “In any rhetorical situation there will be at least one controlling exigence which functions as the organizing principle: it specifies the audience to be addressed and the change to be effected” (Blitzer 7). In Los Intocables case Ravelo’s audience is people who are ignorant to the mistreatment of children of the world, and the change he wanted to effect is to make the world a better place for children. Ravelo was able to use Facebook to share his pictures all over the world. However, Ravelo’s pieces were deemed inappropriate and too grotesque and were removed. Shortly after his series was removed from Facebook, a petition was started to allow Ravelo to share his work on Facebook. Ravelo was trying to reach not only the native people of each respective country but all people of the world. Using subject matter that was culturally relative to not only one country but several allowed Ravelo to reach a broader audience. Ravelo wanted to open the eyes of as many people as possible in order to spark a
Raul Ramirez is a very confident, creative student that is in Mr.Ward’s high school english class in The Bronx,New York, who loves to paint. Raul used to paint his sister by bribing her with whatever he could scunge up,but know his girlfriend just sits for him. He knows that painting will not give him much money and tells the readers by saying “People just don’t get it.Even if I never make a dime --which,by the way,ain’t gonna happen--I’d still have to paint.” Raul is also a very shy teenager that wants to be an artist and will be the first person in his family to be a painter if he becomes one. The thing is even though his “brothers” don’t support him--by laughing at him and saying he's loco-- he still wants to paint and says it by saying
Barbarian Nurseries by Héctor Tobar is the novel not only about Latino culture, history, and immigrant right, but most importantly, the novel attempts to deliver the idea to readers about the unique perspective of the word “barbarian” of Tobar. According to the dictionary and the origin of the word, there is more than one definition of barbarian. During the mid-fourteen century, the word barbarian represents the foreign country from Latin barbaria. From 1610s, the barbarian was started to define as the rude, wild person. In the novel, the characters of barbarian are both Araceli and Scott and Maureen Torres-Thompson referring to different definitions of the word.
In Borderlands, the realities of what happens by the border instill the true terror that people face every day. They are unable to escape and trapped in a tragic situation. After reading my three classmates’ papers, I was able to learn a lot more about this piece than I originally encountered just on my own. I was able to read this piece in a completely new light and expand on ideas that I did not even think of.
A quick read of Ana Castillo’s poetry will provide a reader with much knowledge of the style she uses. The style used in “Seduced by Natassja Kinski” and “El Chicle” is conveyed vividly. A key ingredient to Castillo’s style is imagery. Castillo uses imagery to portray the environment, object movements, emotions, and everything else that is of utmost importance. Also important to Castillo’s style is her choice of words. Castillo refers to all words in poems as gold. Every word must be picked and placed with all the care in the world. Along with her imagery and choice of words, metaphors, poetry form, and flow are essential to creating the two featured poems.
For centuries, the Mexican-American experience has been one of adversity and endurance. The plight of these native peoples has been ignored and many times erased from the American conscience. They have struggled for acknowledgment, they have fought for equality and they have gone to battle for respect. Luis Valdez’s play, Los Vendidos, is just one of many contributions to this effort. A powerfully moving play, Los Vendidos, or the "sell-outs", is a piece created to gain acknowledgement, heighten awareness and to create a sense of camaraderie amongst the people fighting in the Chicano Movement of the late 1960’s and 70’s. Created by a population that had been victimized, beaten and driven to the ground by the powerful grip of American society, this work is just one example the artistic medium of expression used by the participants of the Chicano Movement. This play addresses numerous issues regarding the Mexican-American experience and the attempts to "Americanize" a population that was prevented from assimilating into American culture and society. However, some of the issues presented that I found to be most intriguing were the portrayal of both women and war veterans in addition to the overall Anglo-American reaction to the Mexican-American people.
The Tortilla Curtain and Black Boy are two of the many books which illustrate the discriminations going on in our unjust societies. Through the words of T.C. Boyle and Richard Wright, the difficulties illegal Mexican immigrants and African Americans had and still have to face are portrayed. Though their experiences in poverty were terrifying, the minorities’ desire for a better future was what helped them through their lives.
Recently, an exhibit of his prints and drawings made its way to the United States from The British Museum in London to The New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Once one arrives at the beautiful old adobe museum, it is necessary to enter the main courtyard and walk directly through the large wooden doors. After that, one must enter a closed room with large glass doors where the title of the exhibit is written. In this room, the walls are painted a vibrant crimson red, which accentuates the blacks, greys, and white tones of the prints and drawings. After turning to the right after a short corridor, one must again turn to the right and find the wall labeled, “Los Caprichos.” It is upon this partition that one immediately notices the ominous yet exquisitely crafted masterpiece The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters from c.1798-99.
The innocence of Brazilian lower class children are lost in both films ,City of God directed by Fernando Meirelles, and in Pixote directed by Hector Bebenco. In both of these films the loss of innocence stems from a lack of authoritative power and most importantly the lack of a familial structure. This lack of innocence derives from the lower class socio-economic status the youth are born into. The children and teenagers are able to gain an astonishing amount of power when introduced to violent lifestyle of the streets . While both films comment upon the different causes and effects of Brazilian street culture, both films clearly exhibit how lack of authority and lack of a structure leads to the demise and death of many young street Children. In this essay, I will analyze and compare both films commenting upon the similarities in the causes and effects of street children in Brazilian society. In City of God , Rocket stands on the fence balancing equally between both the gang lifestyle and his escape. In Pixote, Pixote is forced into the gang lifestyle by by societal constraints, and authoritative figures that limit the choices . In this essay I will explain how societal norms and ideas inflicted on children mold the future of the Brazilian culture typical for teens and children in the slums/ favelas. The idea that, from birth these kids will become products of the favela, which leads to youth transgression.
Within Alexie’s diction and tone, “The Facebook Sonnet” belittles the social media website by showing how society are either focused on their image or stuck in the past to even live in the present. Alexie’s use of words and tone throughout the poem shows his feelings toward Facebook in a negative way. First, Alexie grabs the readers’ attention by opening the poem up with the word “welcome.” His sarcastic tone is already being shown in the beginning of lines 1-3, “Welcome to the endless high-school/ Reunion.
The poem “Exile” by Julia Alvarez dramatizes the conflicts of a young girl’s family’s escape from an oppressive dictatorship in the Dominican Republic to the freedom of the United States. The setting of this poem starts in the city of Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, which was renamed for the brutal dictator Rafael Trujillo; however, it eventually changes to New York when the family succeeds to escape. The speaker is a young girl who is unsophisticated to the world; therefore, she does not know what is happening to her family, even though she surmises that something is wrong. The author uses an extended metaphor throughout the poem to compare “swimming” and escaping the Dominican Republic. Through the line “A hurried bag, allowing one toy a piece,” (13) it feels as if the family were exiled or forced to leave its country. The title of the poem “Exile,” informs the reader that there was no choice for the family but to leave the Dominican Republic, but certain words and phrases reiterate the title. In this poem, the speaker expresser her feeling about fleeing her home and how isolated she feels in the United States.
The emotional letter that Juan left for his mother might be one of the most emotional scenes in the documentary. The pure emotions that the letter was written by Juan to her mother leaves the audience with the bonds and emotions felt between the kids and families. Juan Carlos’s father abandoned the family years ago and left to New York, consequently Juan believe it is his responsibility to provide for his family. He also wants to find his father in New York and confronts him about why he has forgotten about them. The story of Juan is not just about migration of children, but also the issue of family separation. The documentary does not dehumanize but rather bring the humane and sensitive lens to the story of Juan where the human drama that these young immigrants and their families live. Juan Carlos is not the first of Esmeralda’s sons to leave for the United states, his nine-year-old brother Francisco was smuggled into California one month earlier. Francisco now lives with Gloria, his grandmother, who paid a smuggler $3,500 to bring him to Los Angeles, California. Once Juan Carlos is in the shelter for child migrants his mother eagerly awaits him outside. After she sees him she signs a paper that says if Juan Carlos tries to travel again, he will be sent to a foster home.
As the past transgressions stem from hate that materialized in a society that lacked the knowledge to learn about acceptance, we have allowed us to move past this. “Los Vendidos” proves that with good hearten entertainment that gave the workers and the community a way to forget about in a sense and view it differently. This allowed them to display the facts that surround us and inhibit our way of life. It is said that we where all created equal and in doing so we opened the flood gates that allowed people from the outside in. Being a nation founded by immigrant, but yet we have a rather grotesque way of treating them. But people find ways to deal with such disheartening situation. The better they learn to cross the invisible boundaries that we all learn as young children will allow our society to evolve into a more utopian society.
We have been exploring the ideal beauty, the different norms for a woman to follow, the suppressions of real identification, and how all that affects those who might not “meet” those expectations. In this week’s material we are presented with Las Krudas, an all-women Cuban trio, that through hip-hop, they “address the cracks of a socialist national identity constructed in homogenizing terms” (Rivera-Velazquez pg. 100.) Basically, they try to break the norms of the idealized way of living one’s life, especially women’s way of living their lives.
...p from the world they live in, a world of separation and indicate themselves with their own realities. Art is handed over into society’s hands, as in one movement it is suggested - to fixate what is real, live like you create and create like you live; in other – abandon media’s proposed ideas and take the leadership of life in our own hands.
As my friends and I continued to explore the many murals of the crossing between 24th street and Balmy Street, I found a mural that not only connects to the topics we covered in class but also to my own family’s life and our “ancestral” home. On the far end of the alley full of murals, past the depictions of gentrification, aztec pyramids, and mobilized social uprising of the past, there was a fiery image of violence against a mestizo village by what looked as military soldiers of some type of government. From afar, you could not tell the exact event depicted in the mural because after all, Latin American history is plagued with abuses from the government against its indigenous communities, citizens of other nation states and even their own