Date: 2/19/20

For this week, I checked out some sites such as the MOMA, the Cooper Hewitt, the Brooklyn Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art regularly host lectures and talks open to the public that relate to the design field for networking events. Finally, I decided to go to two events that can be fixed into my schedule. So today I will be talking about the event I went to in Manhattan, it was for community programs and events called “International Center of Photography”.

For the “International Center of Photography” event, I needed to buy the ticket before I came in, it was $12 for one student.  This is the world’s leading institution dedicated to photography and visual culture. Cornell Capa founded ICP in 1974 to champion “concerned photography” which is socially and politically minded images that can educate and change the world. Through these exhibitions, education programs, community outreach, and public programs, ICP offers an open forum for dialogue about the power of the image. 

During this event, we had artist talks and public discussions about different history backgrounds of documentary, photography and films. For example: Tyler Mitchell’s I Can Make You Feel Good, he is the photographer and filmmaker’s first US solo exhibition, utilizes the tools of documentary reportage, portraiture, fashion photography, art photography, and filmmaking to explore new ways of interpreting Black identity today. A Visual History of Hip-Hop with photography by documenting a cultural movement through portraits and demonstrating how photography helps create legends. The cult classic film from James Coupe’s The Warriors using 1979 as templates to explore contested notions of community, race, gender, and class in the twenty-first century. Selections from ICP Collection which the mid-twentieth- century works, it examined the role of images in enduring narratives about the Lower East Side, a densely populated, multiethnic, and modern neighborhood that is both quintessentially American and uniquely New York. 

Through these events, I learned about the importance of different cultures of history, and the influence for different generations of art and design. I still remembered one of the men who is a Spanish and lived in Jamaica. He was sharing his experience during the I Can Make You Feel Good exhibition, he told us people don’t think he is a Spanish and always treat him as Afircan American in this country because his skin color of black, and this influenced him a lot how other people treat him in his life. Finally, all the information and experience of the discussion were very valuable, it was a pretty good event to get to know different kinds of culture and people. It helped us as designers we should always create the best user experience for our users in life because different countries users and viewers might feel things differently, we should be clear who our audience is and how our design influences others.