Every semester, students leave campus to study abroad — and whether it’s taking the Tube through London, traveling Spain with a museum passport, making a documentary about queer nightclubs in Brazil, walking through African exhibits in South Africa, interning with the Irish Parliament or working for a non-profit in Germany — they all experience another place with its own art and music.
To Lucy Battle ‘21, the art and music in Dublin were about recording a moment in history. During her time abroad, she went ceilidh dancing with her friends, read poetry by William Butler Yeats, Samuel Beckett, and Shamus Heaney, and walked the streets of Europe exploring museums. To her, art opens up a different view of life events during the time period it was made.
“It’s always interesting for me to see the intersections of art and culture and politics because, for a long period of history, art has always been a way to express exactly what’s going on as it's happening,” Battle said. “It gives a different spin from what’s going on in politics, in the newspaper, in history — art is the more popular version of reflecting what Irish people were thinking.”
In London, Rachel Liacos ‘20 spent a year going to see musicals at the Globe theater, traversing all the free museums and viewing the graffiti art on the city walls — just a walk away from home. After her semesters in London, she can see where history is finding its way into art.
In Ireland, much of the art was political, according to Battle. When she was at a nightclub there, they played a song called “Grace” by Frank and Seán O'Meara. It was a ballad, telling the story of Grace Gifford, whose husband was executed during a revolution. Battle remembers her friend saying that this kind of political music would only play at an Irish (not a British) bar in Ireland, and how at American nightclubs they would only have pop songs.
For Kadijatou Diallo ‘20, who spent a semester in London and another in South Africa, Spain and Brazil (through a multicultural program), the nightclub experience was different.
“Every club I went to played American music — even in Brazil I knew most of the music they were playing,” Diallo said. “There were a lot of times where I thought I was going to a different place to learn about something that was outside of me, but I ended up learning a lot about myself and about how much American culture affects other places.”
During her semesters abroad, Diallo went to the National Gallery in London every other week, spent an entire day touring all the places on her museum passport in Barcelona and going to a museum in each new place she could. However, many of the countries Diallo went to seemed Westernized to her.
“I expected it to be this new thing and it looked exactly like how things look at home,” she said. “There’s a privilege in that — that I can go to all these different countries and still go to a museum and understand how to move in it because it's tailored to an American tourist.”
Kieran DeMasi ‘20 took a semester abroad in London and Freiburg im Breisgau, a metropolitan city in Germany, and found the art to be concentrated on combining nature and industry.
“German art has in the past has been focused on nature and breaking away from nature with industry — but now it's about the merging of the two. It made me appreciate how nature and industry can coexist and you can see the natural and the unnatural blending together,” DeMasi said.
The museums in Ireland, according to Battle, did not have as much fine art (instead, the museums were lined with historical artifacts such as Irish furnishings, pewter, and silver). For fine art, she had to travel to other parts of Europe.
“My friends and I spent a weekend in Amsterdam and went to the Van Gough museum — we planned a trip around finding that kind of museum,” Battle said. “Our program took us to Paris, so we got to the Louvre and Versaille, and that was the art experience — getting to go to Paris and wander around art museums for days.”
Whether it was looking at the graffiti on the streets or going to a museum in Paris, all of them got a different understanding of the culture of the country they went to through the art and music.