Camila Tellez is studying as an international student in the Master of Museum Studies at Macquarie University.  Camila is from Columbia and has a Bachelor of Fine Arts from that country.

Community and Art

by Camila Tellez

Every so often I find myself thinking about the importance of the community when it comes to Art.  How communities contribute to deciphering and giving meaning to what is consider Art today, and how Contemporary Art will find a way to engage with its audience (a community).

Although, I have not been able to answer these questions yet, I found that studying Museums Studies has put me in the right direction to find the correct answers to these interrogations.

For decades, museums have provided the necessary tools to educate communities in the understanding of their own history; and for centuries Art has been one of the many different mediums utilised by museums and communities to express their ideas and communicate with each other; a good example of it is the Cave of Altamira in Spain during the Paleolithic period, or to come to even closer to our time, the study of the behavior of light in Mont-Martre’s Cathedral, conducted by Monet during the Impressionist period.

A reproduction of the Cave of Altamira in Spain.

Image courtesy wikipedia commons. 

Although this statement is not an evident one, if we do not understand that, as members of “a group of interacting people living in a common location” (that is how Wikipedia defines the word community), it is our duty to truly comprehend that Art develops accordingly to the needs of the society.

Many of the greatest ideas in Art history are related to the whole concept of community ... 'where do we come from?'... 'where do we go?' ... and ... 'what does define us?' ... been some of the recurrent themes that artists have used to elucidate these philosophical questions.

To illustrate this, I would like to quote Goya’s ‘Shooting of May Third in Madrid’, Picasso’s ‘Guernica’, Warhol’s ‘Campbell soup’, and Tatzu Nishi’ s ‘War and Peace and in between’.

Though the mentioned artworks above belong to different periods of time, they have one thing in common. The four of them involve the community either by representing their own past (where do we come from), as Goya and Picasso did, or by illustrating their own present (what does define us?) as Warhol and Nishi did.

Even though, we all know that Art is not always the easiest way to communicate an idea, it has proved across the time to be an effective vehicle for communities to learn about their history, therefore a variety of museums such as community or local museums, like The May Gibbs Nutcote cottage, or the Historic Houses Trust, the Museum of Sydney or the Justice & Police Museum, have demonstrated that by utilising Art, history can be told in a dynamic way.

May Gibbs Nutcote Cottage in Neutral Bay, Sydney.

Image courtesy North Sydney Council website.

Having said that, I encourage and invite you to rediscover the history of your community by visiting local museums and indulging yourselves with the sometimes-different-but-always-fantastic art exhibitions present in MQ Art Gallery or the blockbuster hits presented at the MCA in Sydney.

CAMILA TELLEZ

Shooting of May Third in Madrid.

Image courtesy wikipedia commons.

Campbell's Soup by Andy Warhol.

Image courtesy flickr.

Guernica by Picasso.

Image courtesy wikipedia.

 

War and Peace and in Between by Nishi.

Image courtesy Art Gallery of NSW website.