Museum of History, Anthropology and Art - Week 3 Rodolfo Enrique

 Week #3 - Internship Journal Blog

Museum of History, Anthropology and Art of the University of Puerto Rico

by Rodolfo Enrique López-Gutiérrez/YAP 2022


This week has been my favorite one so far- it was productive as much as it was eventful. On Monday I had finished working on medium sized 2D environments for my Stop Motion workshop. I had the idea to bring these environments to encourage participants to test their puppets in their habitat and inspire them to create ones of their own. It was very fun since they're all made of recycled things like milk cartons and boxes from electronic devices, construction paper, small discarded objects, pipe cleaners, gift wrapping paper, and more. With all these I was able to make a beach, an ocean, and a rainforest. 

Green Turtle (Carey) nesting ground environment for the Stop Motion Workshop.


Puerto Rican Parrot rainforest environment for the Stop Motion Workshop.


Manatee contaminated reef environment for the Stop Motion Workshop.


One of the most highlighted events of the week was giving my first tour at the museum’s exhibition. Lisa and Oneida encouraged me to be a part of the tour for a ‘Campus Life Summer Camp’ group that was visiting, and to pick a topic from the exhibition I felt confident explaining. I chose environmental awareness since most of my work and projects goes around the topic and I’m very familiar with it. Although as much as I knew, I learned things I had no idea that happened, like mining exploitation at Puerto Rico in the 70s. But overall, after the tour I felt happy to be part of this exhibition and share my knowledge with the freshmen students. Also, at the end of the tour, everyone got a cool Taíno art temp tattoo, including myself! 

Rodolfo Enrique giving tour in the environmental conservation area of the exhibition "El Cartel: Voz para la resistencia." (Photo by Lisa Ortega, educator of the Museum of History Anthropology and Art of University of Puerto Rico)


After Tour participants get to have various Tainos stamp tattoos.


Lisa Ortega, educator of the Museum of History Anthropology and Art of University of Puerto Rico, the tour 

in the Taíno and Mummy room.


As usual Gabriela, Beth and I set up tables, materials and chairs for the next workshop; today was an ink drawing workshop. Leo also helped, Leo is a good friend I recently met, he’s cool, social and he frequently comes to assist and help in the workshops. Even with 4 assistants, we spent a long time preparing the ink pallets since we had to carefully mix the water and ink to make a gradient from black to light gray. After finishing with the materials and the ink everyone could start gathering around the tables, but we still had to wait for the professor to arrive. Unfortunately he didn’t show up because he had a medical appointment. As a new assistant I wasn’t quite ready for this kind of scenario, but Gabriela quickly brought the idea of making a new workshop, one of illustration a story using various magazines. She explained to us how to fold a paper into a little creative book for us to cut and collect images to create a story or simply gather images that catch our attention. In the end everyone was very opened minded and stayed to enjoy the workshop and they created some very amazing collages and drawings. 

Gabriela, Beth, Leo and I preparing the Ink workshop.


Leo and I after the workshop.



The next day was Gabriela’s turn to give her own workshop; the goal was to create a vejigante mask out of cardboard. Vejigantes are folkloric characters in Puerto Rican festival celebrations, mainly seen during carnival times. They come in different colors and have all sorts of odd and interesting features, some demon-like others more lizard-like. I wanted to create one based on a drawing I had done for a school assignment some time ago. It was a Vejigante with a lizard-like face appearance but had various horns, some pointing upward and two pointing down by the sides of the jaw. The base face color was an azure blue with yellow and red on the edges of each horn, plus white spots scattered all over its face. Many participants had created Vejigantes with more human-like face features. One of them had small horns with a pattern of green and orange and black stripes under the mouth, another had short rectangular horns with a pink nose and pink dots around the eyes. Gabriela was making a new one featuring horizontal horns much like a Viking helmet. Mine was turning out pretty similar to the drawing although it was pretty complex to make it look the same. I did a few changes and alterations, like adding a long hanging tongue from the mouth and removing the teeth. 

Gabriela and I after the Vejigante Mask workshop.


After the awesome activity I went to show Beth my work and we started talking about a super cool comic she’s working on for an assignment. I lost track of time and it was already time to leave work. I was about to leave when I remembered I had to go upstairs to pick up my mask. When I’m walking down the stairs I notice the lights are off but I didn’t worry too much since I didn’t need the door password to leave the museum, and often by the time I leave some of my coworkers are still getting ready to go. However, when I’m at the mummy room and I’m about to open the exit door, I accidently activated the museum’s security alarm. It was a bit surprising but I waited patiently because I knew someone would eventually show up, luckily less than two minutes passed and Chakira was nearby and saved me from the situation. In the end it’s a new story to tell.

 This week also had an exiting and interesting workshop managed by Yolanda Velazquez, this one was of creating your own diorama using a small box of matches. Of course we placed the matches a side since we where not using them, we started gathering all kinds of magazines like fashion, fishing, National Geographic, space, nature, ancient civilizations, science and more. There was a couple of nature magazines with tons of pictures of plants, landscapes and animals. They reminded me of the large dioramas at the Natural History Museum therefore I made one of my own based on the diverse plants and creatures of the history of our planet. Some of my partners made dioramas regarding social movements, music, "Vejigantes" and other cultural topics and elements.

 

My little project at the Diorama workshop.


Work Selfie with Lisa Ortega and Oneida Matos.


Rodolfo E. López Gutiérrez/YAP 2022

Museum of History, Anthropology and Art

University of Puerto Rico 

Internship Week 3


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