I Am Man

Post #251: Dedicated to: I Wish; Stevie Wonder

Today I led two 1.5 hour tours of very large groups of people in the hot sunshine. I filed, I hosted, I dealt with a couple appointments and meetings, and finally got back to my room, ready to knock out. I was supposed to attend a talk at 4:30, and it was 3:50. Okay, Clara, I told myself. Just close your eyes for 15, 20 minutes, and you'll be good to go. My alarm woke me up around 4:15, but I was still so exhausted. I got my computer out, ready to send an email out to the Humanities Center, asking if the talk was going to be filmed and recorded and in the library so I could check it out and not actually have to attend (read: so I could go back to sleep), but decided against it. So I packed my bags and headed off.

And I'm so glad I did. I often forget about this, but every once in a while am reminded of it: intellectual stimulation is entirely captivating. Being surrounded by people with brilliant ideas and brilliant methods of portraying those ideas is so exciting and intriguing.

Today's guest was Hank Willis Thomas, photographer and visual artist extraordinaire. His talk is in conjunction with an art exhibit going on at my school, called "And The Winner Is..." The entire exhibition basically revolves around a giant skee-ball (Yes, skee-ball. Like what you used to play for tickets and prizes at Chuck-E-Cheese) competition between all 1,920 members of the Haverford community: students, faculty, staff, and guests. It's a truly fascinating project exploring at the entirety of competition and cooperation within a community, and I'm looking forward to playing a few rounds of skee-ball myself!

But back to Hank. Most of his works surround race and images, the notion of "branding" an image, and ideas of representation – how one "race" is represented by another, etc. His talk really made you think about yourself and your own pre-conceived notions of everything in the world. It made you look into yourself and see where you stand in the world, in our society. This is precisely one of the many reasons I love anthropology – because his talk was like a giant, anthropological microscope honing in on certain aspects of present-day culture and yourself as a human in that culture, questioning the validity, the logic, the reason behind why notions of "race" even exist in the world. Why? How? Who? When?

Not that anything ever gets answered, but it's the best feeling in the world to be intellectually stimulated, to have the chance to listen to and meet such artists and get a sense of why they do the work they do, to get a glimpse of their personal history.

I'd forgotten how enjoyable these lectures and talks could be, and you can bet that I'll be attending several more of the Monday afternoon series of artist talks while this exhibit is still going on.