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About Me

San Francisco Modern Museum of Art 2017

My name is Catherine Zhao, and I am a freshman at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. I am originally from San Jose, California, where I live with my extremely supportive parents and goofy younger sister. I am currently a coordinator for Dartmouth's Camp Kesem, but in the past, I was a writer and an editor for my high school's yearbook, Valhalla, and worked as a caricature artist at an amusement park, Great America. I have always loved art and have explored everything in art from screenprinting to installation art to printmaking. In addition to my love of art and design, I love learning languages and I am fluent in Mandarin Chinese, studied Spanish all throughout high school, and learned a bit of Japanese, Python, and Java at Dartmouth. Besides all those other things I love, I also love dogs and mangos and laughing and the snow and look forward to experiencing and exploring more at Dartmouth and traveling more!

 

  

Clarion Alley, San Francisco 2016

I feel my writing has grown this term in that I am able to view, incorporate, and be open to various points of view. Art is an ambiguous subject that I believe cannot be defined, no matter how hard we have tried during our course to answer questions of what is art, who has the right to recognize art, and who authorizes art. But because it is such an open subject, it allows me to see a lot of different points throughout our course. For example, I enjoyed viewing different art from Los Tres Grandes and then viewing critiques of their art, viewing art of those closely related to them, such as Posada and Frida Kahlo, and also being able to read works by Vasconcelos and Azuela and view the journal of Kahlo.

I felt this term was very eye opening, not only in terms of writing but just in my world views. Being able to view the Orozco and Hovey Murals in person, draw information from a variety of sources, and reflect on my home in my final paper definitely has shaped me into a different person, even changing my views on the censorship of art. I hope to continue to write in this open-minded manner and be able to continually have Mexican and art history be involved in my life.