Thoughts for the week

This week we took a look at an article called "Radiance of the king"  The article opens up discussing cross-cultural pollination and how Obama has become the new super hero of the world. As I look through these painting I can understand the idea of these painting being a narrative through the eyes of the artist.  On the first page we see Obama on a motorcycle and McCain on a horse, and on the motorcycle it reads change that we can believe in. Not only is it cleverly done but, it's expressing how the artists and others feel. You can get a feel for how much it meant that he was elected president. He's depicted with some of the most prominent figures in history, George Washington, Martin Luther King. He was even shown as super man. I do think that when he was first elected it was a culture shock to some in the United States, but over all I feel that it was seen as Republican and Democrat like any other election. I never thought to think what kind of an impact it would have made in other cultures, and these paintings are a good example of  it. So I do think these painting are an ambassadors of cross cultural pollination. It's pretty safe to say that us electing an African American president was a huge deal to them and they are showing it. In the article it was referred to as positive globalization.
On Thursday we took a look at some coffins from Ghana and those were really interesting. The coffins were shaped and formed to become an image of what they did. For example we saw one shaped into a cocoa bean this person was more than likely involved with that process. We also saw one that was shaped into a fish. More than likely that persons occupation was a fisherman. This idea of burying the dead has come out from Christianity which has made it's way through Ghana. This is another example of cross cultural pollination. Perhaps we will begin to see these types of caskets or ideas in western civilization with caskets looking like fish or some other kind of narrative not that we don't have forms of it already but it's just not a common practice. Our funerals tend to have a nice traditional casket. I also noticed a relation between there culture and ours. There mourning colors are black and red. although we don't necessarily wear these colors all the time to funerals we do associate black with funerals as well.