Maya Lin's creation in Washington D.C, the Vietnam Memorial, stands simple, sleek, and dark, reflecting back the lively surroundings with a somber, but poignant reminder of the deaths sacrificed to the United States during the Vietnam War. Along the wall is a list of all the casualties suffered in the war, listed in alphabetical order by year. Looking at the wall I find it hard to avoid the emotions aroused from the structure, having several friends that are currently in Aghanistan and Iraq, I suffer the touching reminder that just as easily their names could end up on a list. I think Maya Lin's design is ingenious, it shows simplicity, solitude, and stillness, a kind of self-realization, that I don't believe could as easily be conveyed by an enormous statue. The blackness of the wall reflects back the viewer, like a division between their lives and the one's lost, that cannot be crossed, but only remembered and honored.

Drifting

Treaty Signing at Medicine Creek Lodge

John Taylor and Howling Wolf depicted the same scene, a treating singing at Medicine Creek, yet both artists conveyed the scene in completely different perspectives. Taylor’s art, more representational than Wolf’s, depicts a scene of bare-chested, stern looking Native Americans sitting among a glade of well-dressed ‘civilized’ person. Taylor’s landscape is a realistic image of trees and people, spatially abiding by the laws of the nature. In sharp contrast Howl’s art the artwork is not linear and mathematical, but scattered and flowing, abstract, it is lacking the ingrained details that Taylor display. He uses chiefly primary colors that lack any shading, the trees are short and parallel to the height of the tents. There are a great number of Native Americans and few white people, who are settled around their own glade, while a number of Native American’s watch. Taylor also circulates most of his focus in the center of the piece, whereas Wolf has no specific focal point. Furthermore the depiction of the people themselves varies greatly, there are a large number of woman in Wolf’s piece, almost entirely, they have red in their hair an native American sign of commitment, suggesting that Wolf’s society values their woman more, or at least that their woman have a greater influence in Native American society, starkly contrary to Taylor who depicts no woman in his artwork.