Hi, people of the universe and beyond, it’s Alx from the class of 2027. Last semester, I took a class called Black Feminist and Queer Culture with Professor Jamal Batts from the Black Studies Department. I loved the class, from the professor and everyone in class down to its syllabus. The class was amazing because you learned about how to surveil how blackness, gender, and sexuality are represented in contemporary, meaning recent, arts and culture. We looked at different types of media, such as film, video, art, conceptual art, reality television, and the internet, so that we could visualize and analyze how Black women and queer people have been depicted in the media. In the class, we also learned certain critical principles and theories of Black Feminism and Black Queer Studies so that we can use them as a critical lens through which to view all these different types of media.
The class also had a component where we had two field trips to New York and Philadelphia to visit the different art museums in each city. So, at the end of the class, our professor, Prof. Batts, took our entire class to New York and took us to the Whitney and other Black history museums all throughout New York. The whole trip was free, and he paid for our tickets as well as public transit and food while on the field trip. I was actually dead tired the day of the trip. It was a Saturday morning, and we had to be on the bus at 6 a.m. so that we could hurry up and depart and make it to New York early. I didn’t get to do my makeup or anything because I was too tired, so I just brought my makeup bag with me on the bus. On the bus ride there, I was talking to my friends and chatting, and then I fell asleep and knocked out. I didn’t wake up until we were at the George Washington Bridge connecting New Jersey and New York. At that point, I started doing my face care routine, my moisturizers, my primers and serums, and then my makeup. I looked amazingly cute, if I do say so myself.
Then, our first stop was at this cafe outside the Whitney Art Museum. I had a croissant and a coffee that I didn’t have to pay for. Then we went inside the Whitney. It was so amazing; I had the best of time, and I got to see so many different types of art from different types of artists. A couple of my favorite pieces of art from the Whitney Museum included Maja Ruznic’s “Deep Calls to Deep” and Mary Lovelace O’Neal’s “Blue Whale aka #12.” The Whitney had so many amazing and beautiful works of art from people of different origins and different perspectives on life. It illuminated me so much; I truly enjoyed my time there.
After the Whitney, we went to eat some food at this restaurant. It was nice; we all got to order something to eat that we didn’t have to pay for and got to really enjoy New York cash-free. It was like bringing our cash-free campus everywhere with us, and I loved that perk. After we ate our food, we headed to 52 Walker, an art museum in New York. 52 Walker was so cool, and it had a giant structure within it, which was also an art piece. They had this amazing collage of cutouts. It was so… I can’t describe it with words, so I’ll put a picture of it down below.
After 52 Walker, we got on the subway and headed to Brooklyn to go to an art museum, called the Brooklyn Museum. It was an amazing museum, and it had some amazing exhibitions. Inside, they had the Alicia Keys exhibition she did with her husband. One of my favorite artists from the Brooklyn Museum had to be Ernie Barnes. I loved his piece, “Study for Spoken Word.” They also had my husband, Jean-Micheal Basquiat, in there; they had his piece, “Untitled” (Langston Hughes). I also very much adored Barkley L. Hendricks’s Jamaican Landscapes; they are all so serene and peaceful and reimagine Jamaica in a beautiful way.
After we explored the Brooklyn Museum, we got dinner from a burger place while we waited for our bus to take us back. The food was also free again, which we all loved. We ate our food and started to discuss all the different art pieces we saw and the different insights we got from them. It was a nice time to debrief and connect what we experienced that day to what we learned in class. On the bus ride back to Swarthmore, I fell asleep because I had exhausted myself on such an amazing day out in New York, thanks to Swarthmore. Swarthmore has tons of resources for its students and wants them to take advantage of them and use them to explore themselves and the world around them.
