McMullen Musings – Page 3

By Reeno Hashimoto

On Friday, September 7th, Boston College students congregated at the McMullen Museum of Art to kick off the opening of Carrie Mae Weems’s Strategies of Engagement. Ambassadors asked fellow students to weigh in on some of the most polarizing issues of 2018. As students ascended to the third floor, they discovered a poster-laiden window. Each poster presented a series of current issues such as criminal justice reform, climate change, and income inequality with a blank space underneath. Boston College students, always up for a challenge, took only three dot stickers, placing them under issues of particular importance to them.

The twenty-four options from which students could choose their “Top Three” were criminal justice reform (44), climate change (85), free speech (18), national security (5), strengthening unions (4), pro-life legislation (4), gender equality (82), Second Amendment rights (3), promotion of democracy worldwide (6), LGBTQ rights (34), voting rights (7), racism (95), $15 minimum wage (9), freedom of religion (18), campaign finance reform (7), rising student loan debt (13), income inequality (40), national debt (11), cybersecurity (8), affirmative action (7), immigration reform (37), universal health care (42), reproductive rights (31), and gun control (69).

Racism, climate change, gender equality, and gun control were the issues most significant to Boston College students.

The McMullen Museum student ambassadors urge you to consider the following: what matters to you most and why?

McMullen Musings: T’Scharner and Emiliana Torrini

The Terrace is excited to feature a new weekly segment that presents our Pic of the Week in connection with a work of art outside the museum—be it, film, photography, music, etc. These McMullen Musings, as they will be called, are meant to serve as contemplative, creative writings that allow our readers to bring pop culture into the museum’s glass paneled walls.

Théodore T’Scharner (1826-1906), Landscape with Pond, n.d., oil on canvas, 17.7 x 29.6 in., Hearn Family Trust.

This week’s Pic of the Week is Théodore T’Scharner’s Landscape with Pond featured in the Nature’s Mirror: Reality and Symbol in Belgian Landscape exhibition. The work, oil on canvas, illustrates an open plain surrounding a pond reflecting the sky’s bittersweet visage. The sun subtly peeks through the dismal clouds, illuminating the surrounding area and shining down on the body of water below.

The painting emotes peace and tranquility while touching upon the somber air of loneliness. The foliage isn’t very lush, but earthy and tough; not an image of paradise, but of solitude. All of the aforementioned immediately bring Emiliana Torrini’s soft “Serenade” to mind.

Torrini’s voice, just above a whisper, sings hypnotically while a guitar’s strummings envelope the airiness left. As she sings, “New world forming / Picturesque in its stance … For the dark finds ways of being / Engraved in the light,” one can imagine the acoustic lullaby setting the soundtrack for the melancholic picture.

The focus of the painting seems to be that the sun is shining in spite of the weather; it is a gallant effort for the light to break through the hardened walls of darkness. The lyrics seem to allude to the painting once more as Torrini sings, “I can hear my name be reborn / On the cloud within the sky beneath the dawn.”

Art has long since been fascinated by nature and these two examples provide a landscape narrative like none other. It is one thing to merely offer a representation of what you see, but another completely to urge the observer, or the listener in Torrini’s case, to feel something. This is the intersection of all art: the truth, the feeling, and yourself.

Be sure to check out this Pic of the Week here at the McMullen and look out for next week’s segment of McMullen Musings!