During my trip to the Brooklyn Museum, I went to look at the Egyptian arts and Soul of a Nation. My time at the Egyptian art section was interesting because there weren’t many “paintings”, instead there were many cravings, sculptures, and little trinkets. One of the artworks that took my attention was Mummy Cartonnage of a Woman. This sculpture is made of gold, and with small colors of blue and pink in it. It stood out the most to me because as I wander around the museum, many of the sculpture was carved in stones, but this is in gold. Gold is actually not uncommon during Egyptian time so I was relatively surprised by this piece. The artist put a lot of details in the headpiece, and the serpent armlets, in order to make this piece stand out and give it a pop of color, the artist added blue color mainly on the face. During Egyptian times, the blue color is a symbol of fertility, rebirth, and power of creation which is really fitting for this sculpture of the Egyptian goddess Isis. The color blue is also mainly associated with gods and goddesses. I believe the artist put in a lot of thought and preparations into this piece because he thought about what the colors mean during that time, and the details to portray his piece of the goddess, he made it obvious with the blue color, and the flowers that represented Isis.

The second part of my trip was to go look at the Soul of Nation artworks, and to my surprise, there were many colorful and big pieces that stood out to me. The one that stood out the most was the Archibald Motley piece. This piece is such a brilliant artwork portraying the hardships and times of slavery in America. The more I looked at this artwork the more emotions I can feel emitted from it. The colors of this artwork are mostly blues and red/orange with some whites. Immediately at first glance when you look at it, the colors of the blue seems very ominous and gloomy portraying the tough times. Within the art you can also see a man being lynched, the statue of liberty [representing freedom], the Confederate flag, the Ku Klux Klan, skull and devil, Abraham Lincoln and MLK’s head floating on the tree, and the broken stained glass on the tree. This is such a powerful piece because it shows the artist trying to put in all the troubles that the African Americans suffered through. The brightest part of this whole painting is the white clouds that looks like it’s on the horizon with the crosses out of the clouds, but right in front of it is the protest for freedom and a crucifixion on fire. This is one of Motley’s last piece after finishing within the span of 10 years, and I would say this a great last piece of his to portray the Black social life.