Winter Break | Rooftops in the Yucatan + Art Exhibits in DC

While on vacation in Mexico, we were driving through the Yucatan and passing through many small villages opposite to full-scale resorts. The contrast between the rich and the poor here was very evident, but I am writing this post because I also noticed that rooftop conditions exist in Mexico. In these smaller villages, many people used the rooftop to hang their laundry and had small porches on them with a bench or two.

T+64_, Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro 2010

I also managed to see two small art exhibits when back home in DC over the holiday. The first was an installation at the Corcoran called Where We’ve Been, Where We Are Going, Why. The Australian artists, Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro, experiment with Lego pieces to make maps of particular places in the world and their density maps. The work they do includes using consumerist culture and materials we find on the shelves everyday as inspiration points for expressing where we are going and the hold that globalization has on us, as people.

A Boy for Meg, Andy Warhol 1962

The second exhibit was in the National Gallery of Art in DC, and was a display of Andy Warhol’s early work titled Warhol: Headlines. The exhibit was part of a larger awareness project on the National Mall of Andy Warhol and how he inspired many pop artists after him. It displayed mostly how he made his early works and the effort he put in to recreating newspaper headlines in a new way by often leaving out words he found created a bias on the story. Although not so relevant to my project, it was nice to see the obsession he had with trying to get it right.