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2012 is off to VERY artsy start!!  On January 14th, I visited the Museum of Modern Art to view the Diego Rivera Mural and Sanja Iveković Sweet Violence exhibitions.

Rivera’s exhibit was a retrospective of the murals he created for the Museum during his first exhibition there in 1931.  Rivera’s major themes were the changing cityscapes of NYC during a bustling period of construction, the working class and the violence plaguing his native Mexico during the revolution led by Agrarian Leader Zapata.

Violence, particularly those against women, are a central theme to Sanja Ivekovic’s Sweet Violence exhibition.  Ivekovic uses video, media installations, as well as her own collection of personal photos during a 30 year period to highlight the distortion of female beauty in pop culture, advertisements and  history.  Also central to Ivekovic’s exhibition is the disintegration of her native Yugoslavia and the advent of a new country.

After all this heavy subject matter, I was delighted to go upstairs to view some of MOMA’s permanent Impressionist collection, which includes two massive panels of Monet’s Water Lillies.

The following Friday night, I took a tour of native Philadelphian Zoe Strauss’s exhibit of photography entitled Ten Years at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  These images were collected over a 10-year project to document the working class and beauty of everyday life.  As a part of her I-95 project, Strauss used the pillars of the beams that support I-95 to showcase her photographs of everyday people, buildings, cityscapes and landscapes.  While she does not consider herself a photojournalist, I could not help but feel she was akin to a photographer in a war zone.  Her photos are stunning in their rawness and reality.  Most people would not consider her subject matter to be beautiful.  She routinely captures glimpses into the personalities of crack addicts, the homeless, transvestites and prostitutes.  What the viewer is left with is a new appreciation for the side of life mass media attempts to sweep under the rug.  Strauss gives these people a voice as well as dignity.