Anthony-Ray Kouta
Arts Scholar
Semester One Reflection: “Expectations vs. Reality”
I think that this Semester could’ve overall been better for me, I didn’t expect to have this much work in college. I was told that there would be a lot of work I would need to do outside of class but I thought it was an exaggeration and I could understand. Before this year I didn’t understand the need to study until the first midterms came around. I was unprepared for the workload and the amount of information I needed to remember. Also, I realized that long lectures are hard for me to get through as I get sleepy in the middle of them and professors go through a lot of information incredibly fast.
ART 110 and English 101S.
Well, my art class is easy to connect to art scholars as this subject is the same I think that the connection between CPSA and English is more interesting. At the begging of the semester, my professor expressed how academic writing in college doesn’t always mean the same thing for everyone. It would be ok for someone to use African American Vernacular English (AAVE) in their paper as long as they are able to express themselves clearly. This made me think about CPSA when we explored that art has no clear definition and everyone has a different perception of what good art is.
In my Art class, the connection I like to make is that there is no “right” way to draw or paint, there are just different techniques that you can use to make a final product. The same idea that is shared in CPSA their is no correct template for art.
I did not expect this course to explore voguing and what it means to the LGBTQ community. It was a pleasant surprise that I enjoyed a lot. They were way more fun and instructive than I thought they would be. For example, the Driskell Center was really interesting and I loved learning about what it stood for in terms of Black artistry.
It’s been way more social and draining than I thought would be, while it is more entertaining than I anticipated it is very tiring. I will set more time aside to study alone I think as my social battery runs out extremely fast these days. Hanging out with friends on campus brings me a lot of joy but I think it’s been a distraction for me overall.
In response to COVID-19, I honestly didn’t think much about it, I just knew I would continue to wear my mask in a crowded area. I’m not surprised that the University is not enforcing it anymore but I’m glad that if you test positive you are sent home.
I think that when we were talking about the mob mentality of art I started to think about some of the things that I liked and if it was influenced by popular trends, and I also started to rethink whether or not I wanted to go to concerts because the idea of my emotions being basically swayed by the crowed without me being able to notice or control myself scared me a bit.
Well, when we learned how to vogue I was happy to learn the 5 elements of voguing: Hand, catwalk, duck walk, floor performance, and Spins & Dips. My best friend has always been passionate about voguing but I’ve never understood the concepts until this class. This is the knowledge that I will take with me everywhere as the LGBTQ community puts a lot of emphasis on this artistry and I want to be able to support it too.
Semester Two Reflection:
"Making Connections"
My theater workshop leader Kat was truly fantastic and I think she is one of the members of the art scholars I was truly able to build a mentoring relationship. This stems from the conversations we had during class, even though I wasn’t very familiar with theater she did her best to relate it to things I knew, and I would try my best to ask her question or tips during class. She was really supportive throughout this past semester and I was hoping to improve for myself but also because of how much help she gave me. Seeing her outside of scholars is rare, so keeping constant communication is what I’ll work on.
I recommend to upcoming students to not be afraid to ask questions, if you are struggling, or even if you have a fleeting thought, speak on it. Everyone in Art Scholars is here to help, they are here to give constructive feedback and will make you feel like you’re part of a community.
When I came to the Art Scholars colloquium for the first time I was quite worried at first because I thought that my artysry wouldn’t match my fellow peers. I always loved to dance but I stopped for a few years I was picking up an interest in drawing but I was still brand new so I thought that I was lacking in both and I wouldn’t be able to distinguish myself from others in scholar. However, I was actually able to relate to a lot of people in scholarly, and not just there put this campus as a whole and mainly through my dance. Surprisingly I found out that a lot of people that I had classes with were interested in dance through Tiktok, a lot of their accounts showed up on my For You Page and I saw them do dance challenges. This inspired me to do the same and I made friends that way, learning dances together and talking about our favorite genres of dance. It was comforting to talk to people who had a similar passion for dance, even if it was just recreational knowing that being on campus revived their urge to dance was an amazing feeling. In the next semesters, I won’t have a lot of classes with the friends I made as we either have very different majors or our schedules don’t align but I’m sure we c work through this if we schedule hanging out accordingly.
For the freshman, I recommended not being afraid to share your work as it can lead people to new friendships being formed. You can build bonds with people by just being yourself and showing off your creative side, or even just compliment other people’s work to make connections.
During the Vangoh experience, I was reminded of my appreciation of visual art. I enjoyed it with friends I made in Art scholars and we all felt different emotions watching it and talking about it. It was so interesting because of how different our perspectives were. The different art mediums and field trips that you’ll participate in due to art scholars, will open your eyes to a more broad and diverse outlook on what can be and look like.
The workshop was definitely the best for me, I always had minor stage fright but performing regularly in our workshop in a friendly environment eased me into feeling way more comfortable on stage.
Socialize with the people around you, we are all here because we love art. This is a place where we can connect and relate to each other through our passions.
Semester Three Reflection:
"New Schedule"
This semester has been very eventful for me in terms of needing to readjust to a new routine. My classes are harder than last year, commuting has had its challenges and my 4 year plan has changed at least 3 times. Yet one thing that has helped me a lot with managing my stress and just bought me to join has been Art Scholars. This semester multiple themes have been addressed by art scholars one of them was how art can recontextualize previously learned history and beliefs. I am now attempting to highlight this concept in my project as I want to showcase how dance has had an impact on the culture, politics, and community building in specific regions of the world. We also tackled the topic of initiating the creative process, we tried various techniques, from brainstorming on paper to drawing a bunch of ideas, the variety of imaginative processes has allowed me to think of new things to add to my project or even take away from it. Trying multiple methods is the key to giving you a strong base that you can be confident in. Finally being able to handle feedback has been a very important theme throughout this semester, for the video proposal for example our peers told us the strengths of the tour project while also giving suggestions for improvement without saying anything negative per se. It’s important to consider peer reviews as they are unbiased from your perspective and applying them can help your project evolve. If you are unsure whether you agree with the feedback given to you, for a paper for example maybe making a separate document with the suggestions and comparing the two may help.
The teachings learned in the Art’s Program have also been spotted in some of my other work or readings outside of colloquium; one article I read recently for one of my Psych classes, was how listening to your favorite music could ease your pain. An experiment was conducted where participants were given a small sensation of pain and after got to listen to either one of their favorite songs or an unknown early sound. There were significant results that showed that listening to their favorite music helped them cope with the pain. The Arts program has often focused on the idea that art can affect your feelings strongly, from making you cry to creating the biggest smile on your face, so to me the belief that music, for example, could lessen your sensation of pain makes sense, it’s like giving candy to a kid after taking a shot, it’s meant to divert to pain to something that makes you happy.
I think my DANC200 class has been the course that had the most synergy with Arts Scholars, it was one of the inspirations for my capstone project too, because just like in the Arts Scholars program it promoted the knowledge of how art (specifically dance) impacted people, not just in how they felt, but the changes that it may have cultivated in politics, media or cultures. Making greater connections and analysis behind each body of work to find a deeper meaning or intentions behind the art is also something that it had in common with the Arts programs. I think that last year my answer would be different as, in terms of community with other people I think that the Art Scholars program helped me a lot with opening up to new people and being a bit more extroverted. This year I think it helped me with constructively taking criticism. My peers were always very nice of course but it’s never a good feeling when you receive criticism; this semester I had to understand that even though I may not agree with every suggestion that is given to me, keeping them in mind isn’t hurting me and the purpose of the criticism is to synthesize the best version on my work as Imay have my own biases.
However, this semester I believe that I was less active in the Art Scholars community, though I was one of the more talkative ones in Collaqium, I haven’t been in any workshops or field trips outside of the one that I needed to do for my assignments. If I schedule myself better I probably have participated in some art scholars' workshops as I think that they were helpful in terms of community building with my fellow scholars. Attending AAB meetings also looked like it would’ve been a lot of fun as many of the activities they presented interested me I just didn’t know how to make the time for it. Honestly, I haven’t experienced many challenging opinions except one which was more of a creative suggestion given by a couple of people. For my capstone project, I planned on learning 7 different dance styles and throughout this semester some people have been telling me that 7 may be too much and that I should revise that number to a smaller group. I don’t think that 7 is too much, given the amount of time I am given and the prior dancing experience I have. I believe in my abilities which is why I am making a conscious decision to not lower this number, I understand how from a different perspective this may be much but this isn’t deterring me from my stance. I have thought about lowering it many times, but my answer has stayed the same each time.
Final Reflection:
"That's All Folks!"
As I spent time in Art Scholars I think that I have been exposed to so many different mediums of self-expression. While also being pushed to think about the why behind pieces of art; when watching a movie for like Wendell & Wild for my pentathlons, I found myself reporting details that may seem insignificant like a switch in the color used in the background of a scene but going into great details to explain the relationship between colors and emotions. Relating such things to my major, or previous ideas mentioned in my classes like scholars is a skill that has been of great use in my other endeavor’s.
One thing that I will say surprised me throughout my time in this program is my love for contemporary dancing. As a dancer myself, I never really understood the appeal in this style of dance but after two specific scholars event: the Po poems benign translate through dance and the dance film screening done by one of the guest speakers. I have now been able to see the creative vision behind these types of dance; requiring the audience to truly pay attention and make creative assumptions. It’s a style of dance that the audience can only get out of as much as they put in, so the more thoughts the more interesting it becomes. When we also when to Bus Boys and Poets, the “My 48 Summers” reading inspired me to read again, it demonstrated that books for people my age and older don’t have to be full of long text, or paragraphs to have a powerful meaning behind them.
In my two years in this program two main ideas have been stuck in my head as they felt extremely powerful and applicable in multiple scenarios. One is that art is often used as a catalyst for community building and the other is that the way different mediums of art can interact with each other to make the audience feel completely different then if the different artistic elements were alone. This truly came into play when I was working on my Capstone; as dance is my favorite art form I decided to center my project around it. The researched that I have done for my project truly aimed to asses the relationship between dance and community building. I mean I was able to find multiple communities on this campus to help me learn different dance styles. Also when dancing you usually interject it with music and seeing how different songs could affect the interpretation the audience had on my dance moves let to a lot of experimentation. Which forced me to really think about what the message I wanted to portray through my dances when aided by the music choices.
During my freshman year the Pentathlon encouraged me to go to so many different events; each which had different artistic mediums, pottery, dancing, painting, crocheting, the list goes on. I was able to try so may different art forms and I will be using them in the future. The crochet workshop that I was a part of was so useful to me as I always wanted to tey it in hopes of making clothes or accessories. I may not be the best now, but I was able to create a strong foundation with peers.
Learning from one another. Another skill that I gained from this program. Being able to take constructive criticism, building upon each other's idea’s even when we weren't particularly familiar with a art style was always promoted in the CPSA250 class. As we all worked on our capstone project, all the students had very unique ideas and while none of us are experts in every field of art we gave each other feedback during our critiques weeks. Ways to improve, or help give form to an idea another student may have, for example when it came to the curation plan of each of our projects, many of us struggled on how to make our project appealing to the general audience at Arts Fest. For me I was advised by my peers, to have a Qr code for my short film, have the video on replay and really give it my all during my live performance, another student that was writing a comic book, was given the idea of showing character sheets, and descriptions.
The future is still uncertain but I can already see how the Scholars program will have provided me with a strong foundation from which to draw from. When carrying a year long project for example, creating a schedule and appropriate benchmarks, or finding a correlation between something personal to you and an unorthodox topic. My research skills have greatly improved through this process, providing incredibly useful abilities for future research opportunities. As I want to become a Psychiatrist, I need said experience for medical school, so this helped me get a step up in the research field that isn’t strictly scientific. Finally personally perseverance and the strength to stand behind your creative choices are abilities that I have seen myself and many others in scholars gain. Everyone will not always agree with you so having the drive, conviction and belief to achieve your goal is a essential skill; and I am grateful to have gained it in Arts Scholars.