The Metropolitan Museum of Art Response Assignment

For this assignment, visit The Metropolitan Museum of Art and select a current exhibition to explore. See the list here:
https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/current-exhibitions
Then, write a short response paper comparing an object from the exhibit that to your mind represents a monster, the concept of the monstrous, or any adjacent identities or ideas — such as the supernatural, divinity, gender identity, social organization, death (or the beyond) — with a text we’ve read (or will read) this semester.

Choose an object that you find visually interesting and clearly convey how the visual details (form, color, texture, composition) work together to construct the meaning you’ve identified. Use descriptive language to explain how the object’s focus connects to a theme or idea from our readings, whether in ways that are clear, tenuous/indirect, affirmative, or subversive.

Spend about half of the paper analyzing a narrow selection of the art object’s details, and the second half discussing its connections to a text from our syllabus. Pursue a similar approach to the text, discussing how the textual details work together to construct its treatment of the same theme. The comparison should go back and forth between the object and text, explaining how they work differently or similarly to convey similar ideas.

Take detailed notes on the object that will allow you to convey how the details connect, precisely, to the idea you are exploring. For example, if you are responding to the object’s construction of gender instability, describe and explain the ways that object supports, challenges, complicates, or provides a new perspective on gender in relation to what we’ve read. Then, provide an overview that synthesizes your position, the questions that this raises for you as a scholar, or connections to the outside world that you see as relevant in the cultural dialogue between text and visual art.

Your response paper should be at least 1.5 pages long, but no more than 2.5: the goal here is to present a narrow claim or idea about the object based on its visual details and connect it to our work in this course. The response paper should include an overarching claim, introduction, and conclusion, but these should be concise and condensed compared to a longer paper (i.e., your introduction might consist of 1-3 sentences, your conclusion 1-2 sentences). In addition, you should spend at least half of the paper articulating how the connection between the object and our course themes works, and why it is significant: do not spend unnecessary time describing your visit or providing an overview of the object or text.