I found Tuesday’s Night at the Museum to be an incredibly gratifying experience. Although, regrettably, only two floors of the museum were open to us, I don’t suppose I can complain about that since the Brooklyn Museum was open after hours specifically for us Macaulay students, and the floors we did have access to were filled with fascinating exhibitions. Starting from the top down, I first explored the fifth floor. My most significant impression from the artworks on this floor was how diverse they were in origin, time period, etc. I found the juxtaposition of modern art with that of a more classical background very thought-provoking, as it inspired me to ponder the similarities between the two. I also thought that the fifth floor exhibits did an incredibly good job at highlighting the inequalities so ever-present in the art world. Here, Black, Indigenous, and Asian art was highlighted in a way that is so uncommon for most art spaces, as these communities are commonly underrepresented in the museum world which I notice tends to favor, for lack of better phrasing, dead white guys. I noticed a major theme of examining the reason why these marginalized voices have historically been so cast out of academic and artistic spaces and I felt that the fifth floor almost served to stress how art from historically marginalized communities belongs in a museum just as much as that from white artists.
One of my favorite parts of the fifth floor exhibit was probably that dealing with orientalism in art. As I had learned from a description on the wall, American artists throughout history fetishized Arab culture despite many of them never even having visited it. Of course, to these American artists, an Arabic scene was just generically Middle Eastern, with traditions of different countries being blurred into one vague, exotic ideal of what they thought the region was like. The same is true for East Asia as well, especially as chinoiserie came into vogue in both Europe and America. Something I noticed was that white women painted in kimonos looked modest, whereas Asian women painted in kimonos were hypersexualized by the artist. I felt that putting these paintings in the same exhibit serves to facilitate a meaningful conversation about the history of unfair–to say the least–depiction of women in art based on their race.
The third floor served as a stark contrast to the fifth, as it was filled with ancient Egyptian art. Ancient Egypt is close to my heart, as I admittedly was very into ancient Egyptian mythology as a child…in any case, I highly enjoyed looking around at the ornate tombs and artifacts. One of my favorite works was a mummy portrait from the Roman Period known as Woman with Earrings. I found myself drawn to this portrait because the woman looks so realistic. Compared to Egyptian art of other periods, I found the Roman influence incredibly apparent. Something about her, perhaps because she looks like just another woman I could see on the street, piqued my interest. She is beautiful in a very approachable way, I suppose. 
If given the chance, I would instantly come back to the Brooklyn Museum. Not only did Night at the Museum offer me the opportunity to visit a museum I hadn’t been to beforehand, it also gave me the opportunity to connect with my Macaulay peers from other campuses, and I even got to reunite with some old friends from middle and high school! In summation, I believe that events such as this one are instrumental in bringing together Macaulay students from all campuses and giving us a space to culturally enrich and intellectually challenge ourselves.
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