Category Archives: The Rubin Museum Project

Spring Break: PAF3015-Style

15 Wednesday May 2013

Posted by in Cristina M. Balboa Blog, The Rubin Museum Project, Uncategorized

≈ Leave a Comment

I’m eager to hear what my class did over spring break. I don’t want to hear about the trips, the catch-up-on-homework, or any partying that was done. I want to hear about the museums they visited.

As part of my Baruch-Rubin Fellowship, I creating a course unit on museums – how they inform us about communities; how to “read” them critically to acknowledge the choices artists, museum staff, and we as museum consumers make; and how the experience of going to a museum informs our work differently than, say, reading an article on the same topic.

We started by reading about the choices made in museum exhibits and about how art can inform qualitative studies. Then last week, we were fortunate to have Laura Lombard give us a tour of the Rubin Museum, focusing on our course themes: the choices made in architecture, lighting, exhibit progression, apolitical representation of a very political region; the diversity of Himalayan people coupled by the Buddha as one string that pulls them together as a broad ‘community’; the symbols of the artwork that ‘made the familiar strange and the strange familiar’; and the experience of sitting in the shrine room, or trying to learn like the Dalai Lamas in the Lukhang Temple Room. By the students’ discussion at our debriefing, they completely got the points we were trying to impress upon them.

Next week students report back on their spring break assignment: to visit a museum or exhibit that informs them on the community they have chosen to study. One student is going to the Museo del Barrio; another to the Met’s Byzantium and Islam exhibit; one to MoMA’s video game exhibit. I’m curious what other museums they will visit, the value they will see in informing their work, and the excitement they (hopefully) feel about visit a museum with critical, informed, and curious eyes.

Mandalas in Popular Culture

13 Monday May 2013

Posted by in Laurence Kirby Blog, The Rubin Museum Project

≈ Leave a Comment

The mandalas on display at the Rubin Museum are designed to precise specifications and with tight constraints on their designs. Their geometrical symmetries are coordinated with other conceptual symmetries: for example, each direction is associated with a specific color, animal, element and seed-syllable. And the mandala has, foremost, a spiritual or meditative purpose.


But if you do an internet image search for mandalas, you come across a much wider variety of forms. Some of them, like the ones shown here, may still be constructed with a spiritual meaning or purpose. Others are purely decorative. But what unites them is their abundance of rotational symmetries.

Feet on the gas or the brakes?

07 Tuesday May 2013

Posted by in Cristina M. Balboa Blog, The Rubin Museum Project, Uncategorized

≈ Leave a Comment

In my class Qualitative Studies of Communities, students are trained to be critical consumers of information. With this Rubin Fellowship, I have brought in documentaries and museums as sources of information in order to help students critically consume them. This is a new experience for me and my students. In the midst of critiquing a documentary they were assigned to watch as homework, one student asked “at what point are we just being too critical? When do we get to just watch a film without dissecting it?”

It’s a fair question. And it can be applied not just to documentaries but museums as well. With scholarly writing, I automatically read an article a few time to make sure I get the gist of what the authors want us to learn and then critically analyze the piece. But with only 16 weeks in the semester to help students build the skills of critical thinking, analysis and writing for the study of communities, we do not have the luxury to re-view or re-visit the museums or documentaries we are meant to learn from. The unfortunate result is that I send students into an assignment with a hammer, and everything looks like a nail; if the goal of the course is to critically consume information, what are the limits of that critical thinking?

I have resolved this issue by telling myself that while students apply critical thinking to all the readings and data sources in this class, in real life they will have more of a choice to decide when to be critical and when to go along for the ride the author, director, curator, or artist invites us to take. Perhaps multiple interactions with the data should be required: once to experience it the way its creator intended and once to critique that experience. Once with our feet on the gas, and once with our feet on the brake. I hope to explore this more deliberately the next time I teach the course, and welcome any suggestions on how to address this.

Sand Mandala Base

08 Monday Apr 2013

Posted by in Laurence Kirby Blog, The Rubin Museum Project

≈ Leave a Comment

Next time you’re in Baruch’s Vertical Campus, I encourage you to drop by the Mathematics Department Office on the 6th floor. Newly installed on the wall, in a utilitarian  position behind the photocopier, is the base of a Sand Mandala which was made at Baruch last September by visiting Tibetan monks.

The base is not the mandala itself — that was swept away at the end of the day. The base is an embodiment of the mathematics underlying the mandala’s construction. It’s what’s left of the mandala after you’ve swept away the sand, the color, the decoration, the ritual — and the mandala itself. It’s nothing, and yet it’s something — it’s symmetry.

My Life Mandala: An Art-Making Activity in a Career Planning Class

29 Friday Mar 2013

Posted by in Michelle Wang Blog, Uncategorized

≈ Leave a Comment

Mandala-Making Workshop Photos – BMCC

The term mandala is Sanskrit, and it means “circle,” which is the symbol of eternity, unity, and completeness. According to Fincher (2010), mandala means center, circumference, or magic circle. Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung associated the mandala with the Self, the center of the total personality. He suggested that the mandala shows the natural urge to live out our potential, to fulfill the pattern of our whole personality. Growth toward wholeness is a natural process that brings to light one’s uniqueness and individuality, a process that Jung called “individuation.” Self-awareness is a central concept in career planning and development because understanding one’s self is crucial for job search success. The dilemma for many college students’ job search process is their overwhelming desire to locate any job rather than to satisfy their true passions. Thus, a job search can become a highly instrumental, task-oriented process, preventing students’ opportunity to discover themselves and their life’s purpose. The idea of bringing this sacred art, Mandala into career planning class is to help students utilize their visualization to create their career and life. The art making project is called “My Life Mandala.” Such an individual life mandala can serve as a guide with which to meet their life goals.

On Monday, March 11, 2013, Dr. Laura Lombard, Manager of University Programs and Partnerships at Rubin Museum of Art came to BMCC and conducted a mandala-making workshop in my Career Planning class. In the first 30 minutes, twenty two students learned the history and symbolic meaning of Mandala. Later, students spent 40 minutes to create their mandala-making project – “My Life Mandala”.  The mandala can serve as a guide for meeting their life goals. During sharing circle afterwards, a student said, “This artwork is very colorful. Hopefully it will bring many colors into my life. This mandala will hopefully help me center myself and help me concentrate and keep me focused to do what I want to do.” Another student said, “I enjoyed making my mandala. I decided I would create two hearts that are floating toward each other. One grand heart that ties it all together represents family and finding healthy love.”

Bruner (1986) described learning as a multifaceted process in which thoughts, emotions, and actions do not occur in isolation, but are aspects of a larger, unified whole. Students’ learning supports the statement that art is an effective medium in supporting students’ learning and in building connections with subject knowledge.

References:

Bruner, J. (1986). Actual minds, possible worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Fincher, S.F. (2010). Creating mandalas: For insight, healing, and self-expression, Shambhala Publications, Inc., Boston, MA.

Why is a mandala like a math problem?

27 Wednesday Mar 2013

Posted by in Laurence Kirby Blog, The Rubin Museum Project

≈ Leave a Comment

The Buddhist mandala ritual is a process wherein “the meditator approaches the divine center from outside via many intermediate steps” (Martin Brauen, Mandala: Sacred Circle in Tibetan Buddhism, p. 185). The mandala’s function as an aid to meditation and the gaining of wisdom takes on another significance when we apply it to gaining mathematical wisdom.

In mathematics classes, students are taught to approach the solution of a problem by ascending intermediate steps, in an interesting parallel with meditation practice. In class, we have experimented with structuring our solution and proof methods in terms of this metaphor.

“Why is a mandala like a math problem?” I asked my students. “You have to start from nothing, enter from the outside and find the gates to ascend to successively higher and more central levels of enlightenment until you are enlightened about the heart of the problem at the center or apex.”

The Medicine Buddha Mandala (HAR 65660), currrently on display at the Rubin Museum and shown here, is particularly apt for this purpose, since it has at its heart, not a deity, but a book, representing wisdom or knowledge.

One student, Albert Ng, responded that the mathematical process of “taking something more or less simple and adding and inferring as we go along in the hopes of proving a final piece” resembles the mandala, “because this journey of proof can be so difficult and alluring it almost seems like a dream”.

Cross Cultural Protection: Begtse Chen and the World of Comparative Religion

08 Friday Mar 2013

Posted by in The Rubin Museum Project, Wendy Raver Blog

≈ Leave a Comment

His head is on fire.  His right hand brandishes a sword and his left hand is, in the opinion of some of my students, “throwing a gang sign.”  He wears a garland of heads, and when my students look closely, they remark that we’re not seeing generic heads, but faces of the dead, each unique.  Five skulls are mounted on his crown, and he stares at us head on, laughing.  And perhaps dancing.

 The Tibetan-Mongolian god Begtse Chen assumes many roles: he is a protector  and warrior, wrathful god and warrior god, consort to a goddess who rides a corpse-chewing bear.  For my students, Begtse Chen also serves as an ambassador to the arts and to religious interconnections.  They can’t take their eyes off  his image, when we visit the Rubin Museum.  His image generates connections to the material we cover in class, and to their lives.

If they didn’t remember the various stories about Begtse Chen we read in class, my Nature of Religion students will now never forget them.  They see Begtse Chen here, standing freely, but they’ll spot him elsewhere in the museum, on thangka paintings with Buddha, and begin to define his role in Tibetan Buddhism.  They’ll continue to associate him with Mahakala and other protectors in the Rubin’s collection.  They’ll connect his image to that of Kali and Durga, and reconsider the role that gender plays in art.

They will also make connections with other material we cover in class. Always, a student will mention Anat, goddess of ancient Cannan, who wears a necklace of skulls and a girdle of severed hands.  Anat wades knee deep in the gore of the battlefield, laughing   They may recall Bes, the Egyptian protector deity who also offers a demonic divine image, menacing yet adorable.  They will also connect Begtse Chen to the numerous examples of warrior figures in Mesoamerican art, images of grimacing skulls and armored warriors whose role we are still attempting to understand. Looking closely, they’ll see that this particular sculpture has an opening in the back, ready to receive offerings or hold relics.  We’ve seen this before:  in Africa, in Greece, in Medieval Europe and in the ancient Danube River valley.

Multiple approaches are central to the study of religion at Hunter College, and Begtse Chen offers numerous examples within comparative religious studies.  However, he offers greater connections to our students who are not religious studies majors.  For the pre-med and nursing major, Begtse Chen’s similarities to the Bardo images bring to mind the transitions from life to death, offering them a broader perspective on approaches to dying.  For the political studies and geography major, his Mongolian origin and connection to Tibet and India open a deeper understanding to the connections between Mongolia, China, India and Tibet, connections which resonate strongly today.  Psychology majors may consider the role of a menacing image in fear and intimidation, and they may recall the archetypes offered by Carl Jung.  Chemistry majors may consider the process in transforming the copper alloy into this sculpture by studying it and the example of Tara in the hollow metal casting display on Gateway to the Himalayas floor, and mathematics majors may find a connection between the proportions and execution of the sculpture, and how this relates to painted dimensions of Begtse Chen.

All of my students, regardless of their backgrounds, will face Begtse Chen and confront themselves.  Approaching this one sculpture will open up a greater understanding, not only regarding class material and fields of study, but what requires defending in their lives. And as he stares at each student, tongue pointed and fangs bared, he asks them to find their own approach.

By: Wendy Raver, Lecturer, The Program in Religion, Hunter College

Mandala-Hunting in the Rubin Museum of Art

07 Thursday Mar 2013

Posted by in Laurence Kirby Blog, The Rubin Museum Project

≈ Leave a Comment

The newly installed 3rd floor exhibits at the Rubin Museum of Art www.rmanyc.org include a beautiful group of mandalas, conveniently situated for comparison of their symmetry properties – the Mandala of Chandra is strikingly different from the others.

 Around the corner, an 18th-century Medicine Buddha Mandala from Inner Mongolia seems to modulate the symmetries somewhat – not that that’s saying much when you look closely at these paintings and consider their extraordinary complexity.

Not far away, a 12th-century Lotus Mandala of Hevajra reminds us that the mandala is also to be viewed as a three-dimensional structure. Through a mathematical lens as through any other, the mandala is capable of endlessly many interpretations.

And surely something about the symmetries of this three-dimensional Lotus Mandala reminds me of that odd-one-out from before, the Mandala of Chandra? Have a look for yourself – it’s easy to spot. I wonder if there’s any other thread that unites these two mandalas in different media and from hundreds of years and thousands of miles apart?

By: Laurence Kirby, Professor, Department of Mathematics, Weissman School of Arts and Sciences at Baruch College

Recent Developments

07 Thursday Mar 2013

Posted by in The Rubin Museum Project, Toy-Fung Tung Blog

≈ Leave a Comment

In December, I enjoyed meeting the other fellows and hearing about everyone’s projects. This semester, I am teaching 4 courses, with three preps. My new course is the senior seminar in literature and law, and I also revamped my humanities general education course. January flew by, as I continued to be snowed under with work, so I have not made much progress on my virtual pilgrimages.

On January 30, 2013 I was able to meet with Anne Lopes, John Jay’s Dean of Undergraduate Studies. Since we are required, under Pathways, to restructure the humanities general education courses, I thought I should consult with the Dean about the viability of my projected Pilgrimages Course. We decided that it should be a 200-level course, offered under the category “Learning from the Past.”

Dean Lopes is very enthusiastic about new curriculum offerings, and she liked the interdisciplinary conception of the Pilgrimages course. She especially liked the idea of capping off the religious-historical pilgrimages with the contemporary pilgrimage to the 9/11 memorial. This was the excellent suggestion made by one of the other fellows at the December meeting. Interestingly, this changes the entire framework of my course and really opens up the topic for contemporary college students.

While one of my original ideas was to bring together disparate cultures, which often clashed throughout history, the 9/11 memorial idea will allow me to make the course more universally appealing, as well as link religious and secular ideas of sacred ground.

By: Toy-Fung Tung, Assistant Professor, Department of English, John Jay College of Criminal Justice

Students’ Career Planning: Whose Responsibility Is It?

07 Thursday Mar 2013

Posted by in Michelle Wang Blog, The Rubin Museum Project

≈ Leave a Comment

Career planning and development is a lifelong process, but the related concepts and skills should be introduced to students immediately they arrive at college. Students’ career success requires not only the services provided by the Career Services Office but also the support of faculty members and top administrators. Ideally, support for students’ career planning and development should become a college-wide initiative and part of the academic culture. Nonetheless, such support starts with the faculty. We should constantly reflect on why we teach and how we carry ourselves in the classroom. Students know whether their professors have a passion for teaching or not. What message do we give to our students from the career planning perspective when we walk into classroom? Instructors’ attitudes toward students as well as toward their own teaching have a large impact on how well students learn (Bain 2004). However, teaching passion can deteriorate because of poor leadership styles, a discouraging working environment, poor people relationships, and problems within the college system itself.

Discussing the students’ academic performance and graduation and retention rates college-wide might provide a good opportunity for reflecting on leadership styles, college cultures, reporting systems, working and teaching environments, and the support system that the college provides to faculty. In truth, students’ college learning experience and academic performance rely on the college as a whole. Everyone, including the students, have a responsibility to make the college experience meaningful to students. As Dr. Stan Altman, Director of the Baruch College-Rubin Museum of Art Project, once said “We all have a social contract and responsibility to cultivate and nurture the next generation.”

Reference: Bain, K. (2004)  What the best college teachers do. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.

By: Michelle Wang, Assistant Professor, Cooperative Education, Borough of Manhattan Community College