I want to talk about the paintings and how they relate to public art as a whole. These painting in my opinion are perfect examples of public art and what public art should be. They do not show bias and just tell the story of how things were formed. In the First painting Development of Arts, it starts off with just cave paintings because that is the first thing we as humans created to share stories and document events which since then have been known as art. It is great to see how art as evolved from a way to document events like the Neanderthals did as well as the greeks and Egyptians to what happened in the middle ages where art was used to honor god and not show man, to again what the Renaissance did with showing what men are and document our culture and not a higher being as much. My favorite part of these paintings are the top two areas where they depict students learning the arts and then a place for modern art to show that we are indeed in a creation period of our own and we can continue to shape art from here at UO. (Maruska)
The Development of Sciences is a little different but mostly the same. It starts in the stone age and moves to the iron age where the tools were made to survive, to the early Egyptian age where tools were made to make building monuments and structures, the greeks who started making tools to think about stuff outside of this world, The Renaissance shows the creation of the printing press as well as some science such as calculus and the expansion of physics, The Eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the industrial revolution and the creation of lightbulbs, followed by the modern scientist such as Einstein and Curie who expanded our modern knowledge of science immensely, the last box is again filled with students because I think it is a representation of what we can accomplish. All the previous discoveries have only given us a foundation of what we can accomplish so we should see it as a challenge to add another row to the painting. (Maruska)
This example of public art to me is great because there is no bias about what happened, there is only the facts on here of how science and art have developed over time. This made me think about the reading and how public art is viewed. I do not think it is right to change how a person was seen in there memorial purely based on the fact that you want to please everyone. The FDR memorial is a controversy because of all the changes that had to be made. “Yet this public sculpture was deemed inadequate by disability activists, who insisted that Roosevelt’s memorial more blatantly commemorate their own interests.” (Doss 7) this is proof that because someone didn’t like how he was portrayed he should be changed. Roosevelt did not want to be known for his disability and thats why he never showed that he had it, he wanted to be seen by more than just his disability and the memorial now depicts him as a frail man in a wheelchair instead of the powerful man he portrayed himself as. I think that if you are creating a memorial for someone you have to show the world who they are not what they didn’t share. History can not be changed to please someone else and neither can historical people. Jefferson’s memorial is placed with him staring at the white house because he had a mistrust in the presidency, it seems weird that if this is how Jefferson is portrayed and not for what he did to transform this country, FDR should be shown for what he did and not for his disability.
Doss, E. (2006, October). Public art controversy: Cultural expression and civic debate. Retrieved from http://www.americansforthearts.org/pdf/networks/pan/doss_controversy.pdf
Maruska, B. (2013). A response to the runquist murals. Retrieved from http://blogs.uoregon.edu/runquistmurals/
