The Practice of Discipline
Certain challenges in life can be described as being inevitable. Nearly everyone must face such typical events throughout the course of their life where surpassing a particular challenge is a sign of growth and experience, and, having been dealt with, such a trial is not expected to arise again. Most individuals in our society are familiar with such periods in their lives where they were made to begin walking as infants, coached into learning how to ride a bicycle later on, encouraged to start driving a car during the teenage years, earned a high school and/or college degree, etc. Such challenges and ordeals are expected. They are perceived as being completely natural and acceptable. Society encourages the pursuit of them and rewards their conquering. Many of us, however, face challenges of a different sort in our lives. These challenges stem from decisions made by the individual, not by society or its norms. In fact, the very reason why such a decision quite often sets challenges ahead for the individual who makes it is due to the fact that it goes completely against societal expectations. The initial conscious decision to go against the grain and not fall into line often sets the stage for a slue of hardships and tribulations, and, chances are it will result in a life-long battle to maintain devotion. I made such a decision.
Around the age of 17, I began to notice that my belief system was becoming increasingly opposed to that of my peers, my family, and even some good friends. For the first time, I began thinking about what I truly believed in and about the direction in which I was headed. One would be hard pressed to find an individual who has not experienced distress over such thoughts. At one time or another, pressure from these or similar thoughts will plague just about everyone during their lives, especially throughout the teen years. The differences in the individual will be shown and defined through the kind of choices that are made during such a period. At that point, when the questions concerning my identity first came into play, I was not much different from the average adolescent. However, when I began to ponder precisely how and what I felt about many pressing issues in my life, I noticed my opinions were quite contrary to those expressed by most people a...
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...e I know where I stand is where others will fall. Unfortunately, standing up for one’s beliefs can, at times, bring about instances of very open physical aggression from those who are in opposition of that individual. I witnessed this first hand on a night when I was approached by a fellow student while exiting my dorm hall at school. He had noticed the X’s on my hands, a prominent symbol and show of expression in the Straightedge community. The interaction began when the young man—who, ironically enough, was intoxicated at the time—proceeded to pin me against a wall and scream in my face which was quickly followed by some hateful words expressing his contempt for the Straightedge lifestyle and an invitation to engage in a fight. During, and directly following, the event, I was in a total state of shock, for I was not used to opposition quite that extreme. Though seemingly ridiculous and unfair at the time, this experience was indeed a wake up call that helped to reiterate the fact that my decision to go against the norm is not, and never will be, an easy task.
The main purpose here is to educate. By using examples and sharing I hope to help others.
Ernie Barnes was and still is one of the most popular and well-respected black artists today. Born and raised in Durham, North Carolina, in 1938, during the time the south as segregated, Ernie Barnes was not expected to become a famous artist. However, as a young boy, Barnes would, “often [accompany] his mother to the home of the prominent attorney, Frank Fuller, Jr., where she worked as a [housekeeper]” (Artist Vitae, The Company of Art, 1999). Fuller was able to spark Barnes’ interest in art when he was only seven years old. Fuller told him about the various schools of art, his favorite painters, and the museums he visited (Barnes, 1995, p. 7). Fuller further introduced Barnes to the works of such artists as, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Correggio, which later influenced Barnes’ mannerist style of painting.
Jacob was an African-American artist, who eventually flourished in the art world during the Depression of 1920s, painting African-Americans life in Harlem, making social statements and thus, explaining their life during that time. Additionally, this made his art significant to spectators who praised his works. With no formal training in painting, it was easy for Jacob to ignore the rules that set him apart from other African-American painters and others, before him and in his time, such as Palmer C. Hayden, and Archibald Motely, Jr to whom he was compared. Jacob Lawrence artwork communicated historical data and his perspective of people he was familiar with in his culture. His work expressed how African- Americans struggled for health and social justice, how they were ignored by the Republican administrations, racial equality and eventually, why African-American voters would shift to the Democratic Party.
Jacob Lawrence painting the “Blind Beggars” shows an elderly blind couple walking down the street. It is assumed that they are a married couple. The blind woman is holding on to the blind man who is holding a begging cup in his hand. Children are playing around the couple going about their own business as the couple walks past them. The “Alabama Plow Girl” photographed by Dorothea Lange shows a young child from the bottom only. You can only see the young girl bottom of her dress, along with her legs and feet. Her feet are in dirt and you can see a plow in front of her. The girl has no shoes on, plowing the fields in Alabama. From the photograph, you can tell by her feet and legs that she is a young girl. The young girl being shoeless shows
born in Topeka, Kansas, and was sometimes referred as the "the father of black American art."
One the most distinguished artists of the twentieth century, Jacob Lawrence was born in Atlantic City and spnt part of his child hood in Pennsylvania. After his parents split up in 1924, he went with his mother and siblings to New York, settling in Harlem. "He trained as a painter at the Harlem Art Workshop, inside the New York Public Library's 113 5th Street branch. Younger than the artists and writers who took part in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, Lawrence was also at an angle to them: he was not interested in the kind of idealized, fake-primitive images of blacks - the Noble Negroes in Art Deco guise - that tended to be produced as an antidote to the toxic racist stereotypes with which white popular culture had flooded America since Reconstruction. Nevertheless, he gained self-confidence from the Harlem cultural milieu - in particular, from the art critic Alain Locke, a Harvard-trained esthete (and America's first black Rhodes scholar) who believed strongly in the possibility of an art created by blacks, which could speak explicitly to African-Americans and still embody the values, and self-critical powers, of modernism. Or, in Locke's own words, "There is in truly great art no essential conflict between racial or national traits and universal human values." This would not sit well with today's American cultural separatists who trumpet about the incompatibility of American experiences - "It's a black thing, you wouldn't understand" - but it was vital to Lawrence's own growth as an artist. Locke perceived the importance of the Great Migration, not just as an economic event but as a cultural one, in which countless blacks took over the control of their own lives, which had been denied them in the South: When years later he told an interviewer that "I am the black community," he was neither boasting nor kidding. He had none of the alienation from Harlem that was felt by some other black artists of the 1930s, like the expatriate William Johnson.
When he was thirteen years old, he moved to New York City with her mother and two younger siblings right after his parents separated. As a teenager, he took classes in the library in 135th Street, which nowadays is the famous Schomburg Center. One of his teachers, Charles Alston (muralist, sculptor, and painter), exerted great influence on him. Alston created an art school for young people called the Utopia Community Center, where an after-school art program took place; Lawrence was successfully admitted. When he was 16 years old he dropped out of school, but continued receiving classes at the Utopia Community Center. Alston insisted him to attend to the Harlem Community Art Center, conducted by the sculptor Augusta Savage. Savage arranged him a scholarship for the American Artists School and a paid position in the Works Progress Administration. Lawrence was able to study and work with notable artists of the Harlem Renaissance, like Charles Alston, and Henry Bannarn in the Alston-Bannarn
Jacob Lawrence's unique career has earned him a National Medal Of Arts , election to the National Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Academy of Design,a National Council of the Arts commisionership, and dozens of honorary degrees and awards, including the NAACP's Spingarn Medal. His paintings has been freatured in several major art exhibitions and many different museums. Lawrence's parents came from the south but they moved to Harlem where Lawrence grew up. Lawrence was born in 1917 and grew up in Harlem during the Great Depression. He had many extraordinary educational oppurtunities as well as his first employment as an artist. In the studio of his mentor, Charles Alston, young Lawrence painted while the Harlem Renaissance was blooming with a generation of young artists and writers. He studied at the Harlem Art Workshop from 1932-1937 and at the American Artists School from 1937-1939. In the 1930's there was two main art groups,realism art and abstractionism art. Lawrence rejected both of them and made up his own style of art. His paintings are alive with human figures, usually African Americans,engaged in all different types of activities. He dipicted the figures in his paintings with dignity and grace. He got his ideas from several different sources. He used repetitive paterns and a lot of different colors and design which are commonly found in a quilt or an African textile. He made up to as many as 60 paintings which are each telling a story and the messages are usually of human triumph over oppression and injustice. Although his paintings often relate to the history and experience of black people their themes are universal. Lawrence allso made murals for his story telling. Throughout most of the 20th century , art institutions within black communities were the only places that exhibited the work of black artists. If other galleries did have black exhibits they were singled out as "Negro artists" or "Negro Art". Without gallery exposure, they were rarely noticed by influential people or obtain appropriate prices. In 1941 Alain Locke, a friend of Lawrence's introduced Lawrence's Migration series to the owner New York's Downtown Gallery Edith Halpert. Edith immediately organized an exhibition for Lawrence's art work, and Lawrence joined the select few group of artists she presented, which included Stuart Davis, Charles Sheeler, and Ben Shahn. Lawrence's Migration series was purchased and divided between the Museum of Modern Art and the Phillip's Collection.
Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.” Emerson is a firm believer of maintaining self-reliance and values rather than following the crowd. He also explains that in order to be truly successful in life, a person must make decisions and trust in his or her judgment. In today’s society, teenagers are more likely to not be self-reliant because the teens feel they will be judged for having different beliefs. People today need to realize that they should not conform to be like the rest of the world, they must not depend on the judgment and criticism of others, and people must refuse to travel somewhere in order to forget their personal problems. Through Emerson’s piece, readers are able to reflect on how people in the world today must try to be independent of others and uphold their personal opinions and philosophy.
“I just want to be someone, mean something to anyone, I want to be the real ME”, by Charlotte Eriksson. The quest of my journey is to discover my real purpose, my real goal but most importantly, find my real identity. This is known as the “Identity versus Role Confusion Stage” or as described by psychoanalyst Erik H. Erikson, the fifth stage of the Eight Stages of Man. It occurs between the ages of 12 to 18, where every person battles to establish a certain roll or skill that provides one with a sense of a sturdy foundation in the adult society. I too am currently going through this stage of life, dodging many obstacles in order to seek out my identity. The hardest obstacle- my attempt to fit in with my peers, but the extremes I took to find it, may have scared me for life. Nonetheless, it showed me a piece of my real identity and helped me figure out how to grow through it and better myself; it showed me the real me. In the past as well as today’s society, individuality is vital. Each teen wants to create a unique identity for ones’ self, and the start to creating that identity is in high school.
During the 1920's and 30’s, America went through a period of astonishing artistic creativity, the majority of which was concentrated in one neighborhood of New York City, Harlem. The creators of this period of growth in the arts were African-American writers and other artists. Langston Hughes is considered to be one of the most influential writers of the period know as the Harlem Renaissance. With the use of blues and jazz Hughes managed to express a range of different themes all revolving around the Negro. He played a major role in the Harlem Renaissance, helping to create and express black culture. He also wrote of political views and ideas, racial inequality and his opinion on religion. I believe that Langston Hughes’ poetry helps to capture the era know as the Harlem Renaissance.
A person’s identity is shaped by many different aspects. Family, culture, friends, personal interests and surrounding environments are all factors that tend to help shape a person’s identity. Some factors may have more of an influence than others and some may not have any influence at all. As a person grows up in a family, they are influenced by many aspects of their life. Family and culture may influence a person’s sense of responsibilities, ethics and morals, tastes in music, humor and sports, and many other aspects of life. Friends and surrounding environments may influence a person’s taste in clothing, music, speech, and social activities. Personal interests are what truly set individuals apart. An individual is not a puppet on the string of their puppet-master, nor a chess piece on their master’s game board, individuals choose their own paths in life. They accomplish, or strive to accomplish, goals that they have set for themselves throughout their lifetime. Individuals are different from any other individual in the world because they live their own life rather than following a crowd of puppets. A person’s identity is defined by what shaped it in the first place, why they chose to be who they are, and what makes them different from everybody else in the world. I feel that I have developed most of my identity from my own dreams, fantasies, friends, and idols.
Adolescence refers to the transition period experienced by children that occur between childhood and adulthood (Shefer, 2011). Identity is first confronted in adolescence between the ages 12 – 19 years old, because of physical and hormonal changes in the body. It is also due to the introduction of formal operations in cognitive development and societal expectation that this contributes to an individual’s identity to be explored and established (McAdams, 2009). The forces within and outside (family, community) the individual that promote identity development usually create a sense of tension. The basic task is, in Erikson’s terms, “fidelity or truthfulness and consistency to one’s core self or faith in one’s ideology” (Fleming, 2004: 9), in a nutshell: "Who am I and where am I
Role Confusion” occurs during adolescent years. This stage puts focus on achieving a sense of identity in occupation, sex roles, politics, and in other areas. For me, this stage was the harshest and toughest period of my life. I struggled to discover who I am, what I want to do in the future, and what skills I am capable of. I had to somewhat adjust how I perceive my identity and roles to how people around me and my parent’s perceive me. But because what I wanted to do and their expectations were very different, I had a lot of conflict, especially with my parents. At this period, I wanted to gain independence and valued my relationship with friends and spending time with them, but my parents always told me to think about what a “student” should focus on. I knew they respected my decisions and had trust for me, but I could feel the worry whenever they were talking to me. But luckily, as I gained different experiences through school curriculum and constantly found approaches to life, I was able to decide what I really wanted to and what was really important to me. Thus, I believe that these struggles were necessary for me to form a clear sense of who I am and what I have to do. Although this stage was a tough period, I had successfully built a sense of identity in few areas so I was able to have a favorable
During my adolescence, I experienced a lot of things. Of course I went through identity crisis; I didn’t know what should I do or what should I be. Moreover, sometimes when I was alone, I suddenly felt that what I am doing now is totally wrong. I often suffered from imaginary audience. I think imaginary audience is just stupid, but a...
In Erikson’s Identity vs. Role Confusion stage, I thought, “Who am I?” countless times like many other adolescents. I occupied much of my time trying to construct a firm identity of myself, which I now realized did more harm than good. Letting myself explore different interests would have helped me find my identity than me trying to fake some firm identity.