Insightful Reflections on Art and Music

1. IMAGES and WRITING #5 GROUP ACTIVITY Study the images that follow and consider the questions that accompany each one. How do the subjects that the pictures address relate to the themes in the music of H’Sao? How do the musicians and artists convey meaning in their work, and what are your responses to it?

2. Here is a painting by Norman Rockwell entitled New Kids in the Neighborhood. See if you can describe what is happening in the painting and what might happen next. What in the painting suggests that they might play together? What in the painting suggests that they might not play together?

3. H’Sao put out an album called Oria and you heard many of those songs performed today . They decided to write songs about the problems that their country was facing as they were tired of the situation back home. In fact, the title, Oria, means are you fed up yet? Often music and stories depict what deeply offends or bothers people: social injustice, suffering, hatred, neglect. 1) What large or more global / universal issues (not that your parents took your cell phone away) bother you or concern you? 2) what songs do you know that point out problems that bother people? What are you fed up with (homework is not a large, global, or universal issue!) What songs have your heard that speak to problems? Please write a couple of lines of songs if you can.

4. You are looking at a photo of a project called “Dismaland – Bemusement Park” by British artist Banksy(a game in which visitors could navigate overcrowded refugee boats). Look at this image and see if you can decide what is happening in it and what will happen next. Then respond to the questions that follow. What does the boat represent to these refugees? What might have brought the people in the boats to this point and what might happen next? How would you respond to a “game” like this at a “bemusement” park (bemusement: “bewilderment or confusion”)

5. You are looking at a public mural painted in Sorocabo, Brazil that was inspired by a photograph that became famous over the summer. See if you can decide what is portrayed and what the artist is giving voice to. What do you think the image represents? Why do you think it was enlarged and painted on a wall in a public place? Why in Brazil?

6. You are looking at a painting showing three figures at a barbed-wire fence. Consider the image and see if you can imagine the story of these people and how they came to this place. What or whom do you think they are looking at? What would they say to you if they could speak?

7. Lake Chad water supply New York water supply You are looking at two maps with a bird’s eye view. One is a map, over time, of Lake Chad which has shrunk to a fraction of its original size, and one is a map of the NYC reservoir system. Today, the Lake Chad region is filled with violence and flooded with refugees from five different countries that used to border the original lake.   What do you imagine would happen to you if the reservoir system that supplies our water, and even the Hudson River, shrank to 1/20th of its current size? If this were only happening on the East Coast, what do you imagine the response of the rest of the country should be?