Overall, I am very content with my decision to take Mural Art in Mexico and the United States. I learned so much about the Mexican Revolution, and also developed a deeper appreciation for the affects of art on people. My favorite part of the class was visiting the Orozco and the Hovey Murals because seeing the art we had been studying in person really helped me understand the intentions of each muralist. Furthermore, I think the fact that Dartmouth has both of these murals available to students is very unique and provides great content for learning. In addition, I enjoyed watching the movies assigned for class because I thought it was a nice way of applying the information we had been learning about Kahlo, Riviera, and the Mexican Revolution. By writing my research paper, I was allowed to discuss a topic I am thoroughly interested in (women’s rights) as well as discuss the importance and prominence of public art. In the future, I think I will take more Art History courses because of my good experience in Spanish 7, and I am also very interested in the service trip to Nicaragua.

Thank you for a great class and term Professor Moody!

My oral presentation consisted of me taking the class through my WordPress website. This was beneficial for me because it was a nice check-in to see what sorts of edits and submissions I wanted to add to my ePortfolio. In addition, it was helpful to see my peers websites because I was able to take some formatting ideas from them and apply them to my own site. Furthermore, the oral presentation was a good source of confirmation that I was heading in the right direction with my ePortfolio.

The peer review and group activities we did in class, I thought, were very helpful in terms of getting valuable feedback to improve my research and my paper. Furthermore, I enjoyed how Professor Moody paired us into groups based on our research topics, that way I was conversing with other classmates who were focusing on Frida in some way. I found that by these conversations, I was able to feed off of the ideas of my peers, as well as borrow sources for research, and compare and contrast different interpretations of artwork.

My first draft of my research paper was a difficult process because even though I knew what I wanted to write about, I had a lot of difficulty putting my thoughts together. As I wrote the third response paper, it became clear to me that what I wanted to focus on was the feminist aspects of Kahlo, O’Keeffe, and Lacy’s art and how being feminist artists eventually allowed them to become public figures. However, there are so many differences between the style, intention, and genre of these three artists’ work that putting all of my ideas together took a lot of trial and error. However, I found that writing about these women was particularly empowering, and I now have a deeper appreciation for the work that they did for women, be it purposefully or not.

Finding sources was one of the more difficult parts of this assignment. I had never been to the Sherman Art Library before, so finding the books I needed was challenging. I found that JSTOR was much more helpful in finding scholarly sources of Kahlo, O’Keefe, Lacy, and feminist art. JSTOR sources offered helpful analysis as well as important quotes from the artists themselves. Furthermore, I found that including actual images of the paintings that I was analyzing was beneficial in making my explanations and arguments as clear as possible.

When deciding on what topic to discuss for my research paper, I knew I wanted to incorporate Frida Kahlo in some way, shape, or form. I had studied aspects of feminism, regarding women and the death penalty, in the fall and was very interested in the topic. When writing a research paper, I have found that the process is much more enjoyable when actually researching and writing about a topic one is passionate about. Therefore, I figured combining both Frida and feminism would create a topic that I would thoroughly enjoy learning about. Furthermore, I thought that adding additional artistic feminist efforts to my paper would allow me to create a more convincing argument, being that the feminist themes of Kahlo, O’Keeffe and Lacy’s work allowed their work to be internationally acclaimed.