ART 10F Final

Who mopped the floor with their hair?

Janine Antoni

Which artist said the following: "my painting is not an allegory or a story, its more like a poem"

Joan Mitchell

Who said the following: "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world"?

Ludwig Wittgenstien

What group of artists was robert motherwell part of?

the new york school

Romare Bearden Quotes

•"I CHOSE SOME OF THE PHOTOGRAPHIC MATERIALS FOR A CERTAIN REASON," HE ONCE SAID. "I WANTED TO GIVE AN IMMEDIACY, LIKE A DOCUMENTARY MOVIE.''

Doug Aiken Quotes

•"I wanted to take this one specific song and see if that could become the structure for this artwork, and if that song could be reinterpreted in many different ways and eventually create its own landscape." •These people sing more to themselves then to each other, And the viewers become lost, subsumed by the immense figures projected loose the awareness of each other and perhaps experience very private moments while being in a very public place.

Norman Lewis Quotes

"FOR MANY YEARS, I, TOO, STRUGGLED SINGLE-MINDEDLY TO EXPRESS SOCIAL CONFLICT THROUGH MY PAINTING,".LEWIS SAYS "HOWEVER, GRADUALLY I CAME TO REALIZE THAT THE DEVELOPMENT OF ONE'S AESTHETIC ABILITIES SUFFERS FROM SUCH EMPHASIS; THE CONTENT OF TRULY CREATIVE WORK MUST BE INHERENTLY AESTHETIC OR THE WORK BECOMES MERELY ANOTHER FORM OF ILLUSTRATION ...."

Sophie Calle Quotes

"For months I followed strangers on the street. For the pleasure of following them, not because they particularly interested me. I photographed them without their know-ledge, took note of their movements, then finally lost sight of them and forgot them". - "At the end of January 1980, on the streets of Paris, I followed a man whom I lost sight of a few minutes later in the crowd. That very evening, quite by chance, he was introduced to me at an opening. During the course of our conversation, he told me he was planning an imminent trip to Venice. I decided to follow him".

Judy Pfaff Quotes:

"I'VE BEEN VERY INVOLVED IN NOT HAVING A SIGNATURE MATERIAL. I THINK THERE IS A SIGNATURE STYLE. IT'S LIKE HANDWRITING.

Jacob Lawrence Quotes

"IF AT TIMES MY ARTWORKS DO NOT EXPRESS THE CONVENTIONALLY BEAUTIFUL, THERE IS ALWAYS AN EFFORT TO EXPRESS THE UNIVERSAL BEAUTY OF MAN'S CONTINUOUS STRUGGLE TO LIFT HIS SOCIAL POSITION AND TO ADD DIMENSION TO HIS SPIRITUAL BEING."

Alison Saar Quotes

"Perhaps the difference between the latest body of work is that in the past my work has always viewed politics and the sword of healing approach, and I think this is the first time I've had a show that is just out right angry and maybe a little more aggressive in terms of pushing back,"

Stanley Whitney Quotes

"The drawings were very important to me; they were key to figuring out the space. Even now with the paintings, no matter how structured they are, the lucid stuff really belongs to drawing."

Tara Donovan Quotes

"There is a sense I get of wanting to choreograph someone's experience of my work. Because the surfaces of my work do often shift and follow the perspective of the viewer, there is a perceptual movement that coincides with a person's physical movement within the gallery space."

Bill Viola Quotes

"WE HAVE TO RECLAIM TIME ITSELF, WRENCHING IT FROM THE "TIME IS MONEY" MAXIMUM EFFICIENCY, AND MAKE ROOM FOR IT TO FLOW THE OTHER WAY -TOWARDS US". "WE MUST TAKE TIME BACK INTO OURSELVES TO LET OUR CONSCIOUSNESS BREATHE AND OUR CLUTTERED MINDS BE STILL AND SILENT. THIS IS WHAT ART CAN DO AND WHAT MUSEUMS CAN BE IN TODAY'S WORLD". BETWEEN 1974 and 1976, viola lived in Italy, where religious paintings and sculptures are displayed in the cathedrals. The continuing integration of historical art into contemporary public and religious life inspired Viola to design installations that mimicked the forms of devotional paintings, diptychs and altarpieces. - BETWEEN 1974 and 1976, viola lived in Italy, where religious paintings and sculptures are displayed in the cathedrals. - The continuing integration of historical art into contemporary public and religious life inspired Viola to design installations that mimicked the forms of devotional paintings, diptychs and altarpieces.

Yang Fudong Quotes

- "Having onlookers forced me to see things differently," and "I was bearing in mind how the audience might interpret the whole process". - "Will they think the people around me, the builders and crew, are part of an artwork or are simply working on the installation of one"?

Thorton Dial Quotes

- "I KNOW THAT I DON'T HAVE TO ASK NOBODY FOR A LICENSE TO MAKE ART. MY ART TALK ABOUT THAT FREEDOM. PEOPLE HAVE FOUGHT FOR FREEDOM ALL OVER THE WORLD. I TRY TO SHOW THAT STRUGGLE. IT IS A WAR TO BE FOUGHT. WE'RE TRYING TO WIN IT."

Takashi Murakami Quotes

- "I USED TO THINK OF RELIGION AS SOMETHING KIND OF FALSE AND HYPOCRITICAL, BUT AFTER THE EARTHQUAKE DISASTER, I REALIZED IN A TIME LIKE THAT, RELIGION AND FAIRY TALES AND THINGS LIKE THAT ARE ACTUALLY A NECESSITY". - THAT THOUGHT BECAME THE STARTING POINT FOR NEW WORK, "IN THE LAND OF THE DEAD, STEPPING ON THE TAIL OF A RAINBOW" . - "SUCH CHAOS IS NATURAL, BUT WE HAVE TO MAKE SENSE OF IT SOMEHOW, AND SO WE HAD TO INVENT THESE STORIES. THAT IS WHAT I WANTED TO PAINT"

James Turrell Quotes

- "I make spaces that apprehend light for our perception, and in some ways gather it, or seem to hold it...my work is more about your seeing than it is about my seeing, although it is a product of my seeing."

Andy Warhol Quotes

- "I used to drink it. I used to have the same lunch every day, for 20 years, I guess, the same thing over and over again."

Richard Serra Quotes

- "I was interested in my ability to move in relation to material and have that material move me."

Marjan Teeuwan Quotes

- "I'm attracted to tasks that seem too large for me—tasks that are almost impossible,"

Ann Hamilton Quotes

- "JUST AS CLOTH IS A STRUCTURE BINDING INDIVIDUAL THREADS INTO A LARGER WHOLE, THIS PROJECT IS DESIGNED TO ENCOURAGE ASSOCIATIVE LINKS BETWEEN TEXTS AND TEXTILES AND THEIR INDIVIDUAL FORMS OF KNOWLEDGE AND EXPERIENCE."

Carrie Mae Weems Quotes

- "LET ME SAY THAT MY PRIMARY CONCERN IN ART, AS IN POLITICS, IS WITH THE STATUS & PLACE OF AFRO-AMERICANS IN OUR COUNTRY". - "BLACK EXPERIENCE IS NOT REALLY THE MAIN POINT; RATHER, COMPLEX, DIMENSIONAL, HUMAN EXPERIENCE & SOCIAL INCLUSION ... IS THE REAL POINT". - "Despite the variety of my explorations, throughout it all it has been my contention that my responsibility as an artist is to work, to make art, beautiful and powerful, that adds and reveals; to beautify the mess of a messy world..." -•"When we're looking at these images Weems has said, "we're looking at the ways in which Anglo America—white America—saw itself in relationship to the black subject. I wanted to intervene in that by giving a voice to a subject that historically has had no voice."

Mickalene Thomas 1971 -

- An African American is from New Jersey, she went to college in Portand, Oregon. Her relationship to her family, she openly talks about the fact that her parents were addicted to drugs and her difficult childhood

Faith 47

- Anonymous artist in london - Animals as symbols for freedom - Some of the work is associated with religion

Lowery Stokes Sims

- Art Curator - MMOA Curator - Studio Museum of Harlem

Jenny Holzer Quotes

- "Life is routinely shocking.If I am reflecting life then art will be shocking. Who wants to go through life sleep walking? It's dangerous out there...we should all look around...it's an opportunity for an artist to give something to the public." - "I went to language because I tried to be a painter and was awful, so I thought ok I will write. Language lets one communicate and that can be useful. It doesn't always work, but it's a start. It's a traditional vehicle, I find it useful and sometimes evocative, especially when I use text by other people. I like offering a huge amount of content for people's enjoyment, fear, passing." Jenny Holzer"I went to language because I tried to be a painter and was awful, so I thought ok I will write. Language lets one communicate and that can be useful. It doesn't always work, but it's a start. It's a traditional vehicle, I find it useful and sometimes evocative, especially when I use text by other people. I like offering a huge amount of content for people's enjoyment, fear, passing."

Yayoi Kusama Quotes

- "My work does battle at the boundary between life and death, questioning what we are and what it means to live and die." - "By translating hallucinations and fear of hallucinations into paintings, I have been trying to cure my disease," - "A POLKA-DOT HAS THE FORM OF THE SUN, WHICH IS A SYMBOL OF THE ENERGY OF THE WHOLE WORLD AND OUR LIVING LIFE, AND ALSO THE FORM OF THE MOON, WHICH IS CALM. ROUND, SOFT, COLORFUL, SENSELESS AND UNKNOWING. POLKA-DOTS BECOME MOVEMENT...POLKA DOTS ARE A WAY TO INFINITY." - "My desire was to predict and measure the infinity of the unbounded universe, from my own position in it, with dots". •"I love pumpkins because of their humorous form, warm feeling, and a human-like quality and form". •"My desire to create works of pumpkins still continues. I have enthusiasm as if I were still a child".

Niki de Saint Phalle Quotes

- "Saint Phalle's career was built at the juncture of art, personal charisma, and political gesture."

Ana Mendieta Quotes

- "THE OBSESSIVE ACT OF REASSERTING MY TIES WITH THE EARTH IS AN OBJECTIFICATION OF MY EXISTENCE".

Chiharu Shiota Quotes

- "THE SILENCE REMAINS.... - "AND THE MORE I THINK ABOUT IT, THE STRONGER IT IS. THE PIANO LOSES ITS SOUND; THE PAINTER NO LONGER PAINTS;THE MUSICIAN CEASES TO MAKE MUSIC. THEY LOSE THEIR FUNCTION, BUT NOT THEIR BEAUTY--THEY BECOME EVEN MORE BEAUTIFUL". - She said she made the piece after traveling and living in Berlin, and she went home and she did not fit into her Japan culture anymore. "it was trying on old shoes, but they didn't fit anymore".

Doris Salcedo Quotes

- "THE SILENT CONTEMPLATION OF EACH VIEWER PERMITS THE LIFE SEEN IN THE WORK TO REAPPEAR. CHANGE TAKES PLACE, AS IF THE EXPERIENCE OF THE VICTIM WERE REACHING OUT...THE SCULPTURE PRESENTS THE EXPERIENCE AS SOMETHING PRESENT-A REALITY THAT RESOUNDS WITHIN THE SILENCE OF EACH HUMAN BEING THAT GAZES UPON IT" . - "THE WAY THAT AN ARTWORK BRINGS MATERIALS TOGETHER IS INCREDIBLY POWERFUL. SCULPTURE IS ITS MATERIALITY. I WORK WITH MATERIALS THAT ARE ALREADY CHARGED WITH SIGNIFICANCE, WITH MEANING THEY HAVE REQUIRED IN THE PRACTICE OF EVERYDAY LIFE...THEN, I WORK TO THE POINT WHERE IT BECOMES SOMETHING ELSE, WHERE METAMORPHOSIS IS REACHED".

Cornelia Parker Quotes

- "The work really makes itself; I am just rearranging the materials" . - "I resurrect things that have been killed off ... My work is all about the potential of materials - even when it looks like they've lost all possibilities." - "Subconscious of a Monument" is composed of fragments of dry soil, which are suspended on wires from the gallery ceiling. These lumps are the dry clay which was removed from beneath the Leaning Tower of Pisa in order to prevent its collapse. - "I find the pieces of silver have much more potential when their meaning as everyday objects has been eroded. Thirty Pieces of Silver is about materiality and then about anti-matter. In the gallery the ruined objects are ghostly levitating just above the floor, waiting to be reassessed in the light of their transformation". - "The title, because of its biblical references, alludes to money, to betrayal, to death and resurrection: more simply it is a literal description of the piece."

Monica Gryzmala Quotes

- "Whenever I leave a work, I feel as if I leave a part of me, a part of my body behind... there's a connection - an invisible line from Berlin to London to New York." - "Time is a very important component of my work. The pieces are all like time capsules."

Kerry James Marshall Quotes

- "YOU CAN'T BE BORN IN BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA, IN 1955 AND GROW UP IN SOUTH CENTRAL LOS ANGELES NEAR THE BLACK PANTHERS HEADQUARTERS, AND NOT FEEL LIKE YOU'VE GOT SOME KIND OF SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY. YOU CAN'T MOVE TO WATTS IN 1963 AND NOT SPEAK ABOUT IT. THAT DETERMINED A LOT OF WHERE MY WORK WAS GOING TO GO..." - "IT IS POSSIBLE TO TRANSCEND WHAT IS PERCEIVED TO BE THE LIMITATIONS OF A RACE-CONSCIOUS KIND OF WORK. IT IS A LIMITATION ONLY IF YOU ACCEPT SOMEONE ELSE'S FORECLOSURE FROM THE OUTSIDE. IF YOU PLUMB THE DEPTHS YOURSELF, YOU CAN EXERCISE A GOOD DEAL OF CREATIVE FLEXIBILITY. YOU ARE LIMITED ONLY BY YOUR ABILITY TO IMAGINE POSSIBILITIES."

Doris Salcedo 1958 -

- A Cloumbian installation artist and sculptor who lives and works in Bogata - SALCEDO'S work gives form to pain, trauma, and loss, while creating space for individual and collective mourning. These themes stem from her own personal history. Members of her own family were among the many people who have disappeared in politically troubled Colombia. Much of her work deals with the fact that, while the death of a loved one can be mourned, their disappearance leaves an unbearable emptiness. - This installation, produced for the 8th international Istanbul Biennial, contained approximately 1,550 wooden chairs stacked between two buildings to address the history of migration and displacement in Istanbul. - Salcedo's early works were made with simple items such as wardrobes, tables, and chairs, as well as clothing and thread. By molding and reshaping these objects—embedding a chair within a doorframe, grafting two tables into an unstable hybrid—she created dysfunctional objects, telling us of lost or destroyed previous lives. Each article of clothing, for instance, implied a nameless wearer. - Pieces of common furniture, like the tables in Plegaria Muda, play a key role in Salcedo's vocabulary. Since the beginning of her career, she has made sculptures and installations using domestic materials charged with a significance accumulated over years of everyday use. - Throughout her career, Salcedo has conducted extensive interviews with victims of political violence, transforming their experiences into sculptures that convey a sense of how their everyday lives are disrupted. - A sense of grief and loss is palpable in the concrete furniture - wood tables, dressers, armoires and chairs rendered useless by the artist's interventions. Chairs have been upended, armoires have been stripped of their handles and empty drawers and other cavities have been filled in with rebar and concrete

Lawrence Weiner 1942 -

- As one of the founders of '60s Conceptual art, Weiner, is a key figure in postwar art history. - Weiner's works exist only as language & can be displayed in any form, he is closely involved in manifestations, detailing the size of the font, the surface texture & placement of the paint or vinyl letters & inventing new fonts. Texts appear on walls & windows of galleries & public spaces, as spoken word in audio recordings & video, printed books, posters, cast or carved objects, tattoos, graffiti, lyrics, online, etc..... - Accordingly, his first book Statements (1968) contains 24 typewritten descriptions of works, where only a few had actually been made, suggesting that a work's existence requires a readership rather than a physical presence. - For 40 years he has stuck to his conviction that stripping things down to their bare essentials is the path to transcendence. Like & even more so than contemporaries like Minimalist sculptor Donald Judd, Weiner pared down art not to just to pure form or language but to thought itself. - Although Weiner's work proposes a radical subversion of art, it is bound up in'60s idealism, that supposed anything was possible & that true clarity could be obtained beyond any material measure.

Tara Donovan 1969 -

- BORN IN QUEENS, NY, she is a sculptor and installation artist. her work uses everyday manufactured materials such as scotch tape, styrofoam cups, paper plates , toothpicks, and drinking straws to create large scale sculptures that often have a biomorphic quality. - Tara Donovan is a well known and acclaimed American artist who fabricates site-specific installations using commonly found materials, like sticks and pencils. She relies on the unique properties of the chosen material, such as the transparency of scotch tape, and turns it into a driving force behind her compositions. Her installations are similar to organic structures, a visual feature that became a trademark to Donovan's body of work. - Known for her commitment to process, she has earned acclaim for her ability to exploit the inherent physical characteristics of an object in order to transform it into works that generate unique perceptual phenomena and atmospheric effects. - This work consisting of of large scale installations and mixed media, characterized by her signature experimentation in invented topographies, otherworldly environments, and seemingly organic structures from inorganic materials draw the viewer in by their beauty, and their remarkable apparent but mystical nature. •These are all mass-produced objects following imposed rules manipulation and accumulation. •Donovan's work demonstrates the range of her single-material structures built from the repetitive assembling of of the humble items, straws, paper plates, toothpicks, when stacked and amassed as free-standing units, generate radically new forms which embrace complexity, craft and process. •These large-scale installations, sculptures, drawings, and prints utilize everyday objects to explore the transformative effects of accumulation and aggregation.

Valerie Cassel Oliver

- Contemporary Art Museum Houston - Fine Art Museum Richmond Virginia

Cornelia Parker 1956 -

- Cornelia Ann Parker (born 1956) is an English sculptor and installation artist. Cornelia Parker is known for her sculptures and installations that explore the potential of matter, often subjecting commonplace objects to processes such as crushing, wrapping, exploding or dropping - Parker is known for her acts of destruction, which in turn produce ephemeral, beautiful installations out of wreckage. In her work nothing is stable. Objects fall apart, collide, combust, explode or are compressed to remerge as new and surprisingly forms. - In 1997 Parker was working as artist in residence at ArtSpace, San Antonio, Texas. She heard that a small church had been struck by lightning and had burnt to the ground. Having gained permission to collect the charred remains, she arranged and displayed the fragments on wire, densely grouped towards the center and more sparsely distributed towards its periphery. - Her work Heart of Darkness 2004 is an installation created with burnt wood retrieved from a forest fire in Baker County, Florida. In this piece we witness the transformation of the most ordinary objects into something compelling. We are moved by the transformation and transfixed by what it once was when recognized. - Parker's utilizes the deliberate gesture of making, unmaking and remaking anew. Cornelia Parker's work has been concerned with formalizing things beyond our control, containing the volatile and making it into something that is quiet and contemplative, compare it to the "eye of the storm". - No longer usable, the objects become representative of a past function, visually transformed to have a different existence as a collective work of art. - Constructed from found objects and standing some 30 feet tall, the design is based on the Bates family motel seen in Alfred Hitchcock's film Psycho (1960), which in turn was modelled on a painting by Edward Hopper called House by the Railroad, 1925). - Just like the building in Hitchcock's stage set, Parker's house is a scaled-down façade with the supporting structure left open to view from behind.

Felix Gonzales Torres

- Cuban-born American sculptor, photographer, and conceptual artist known for work in a variety of media that addresses issues of identity, desire, originality, loss, the metaphor of journey & the private versus the public domain. - González-Torres's openly gay sexual orientation is often seen as influential in his work as an artist. González-Torres was known for his minimal installations and sculptures in which he used materials such as strings of lightbulbs, clocks, stacks of paper, or packaged hard candies. - In 1987, he joined Group Material, a New York-based group of artists whose intention was to work collaboratively, adhering to principles of cultural activism and community education. - This work of art appropriates imagery from Time magazine, presenting 460 individuals killed by gunshot in the United States during the week of May 1-7, 1989. Images of the deceased are accompanied by their name, age, city, state, and a brief description of their death. - One of a number of works comprising stacks of paper that Gonzalez-Torres produced beginning in 1989, "Untitled" (Death by Gun)was conceived as a nine-inch stack presented directly on the floor, endlessly replenished, thus ensuring that it can be distributed indefinitely. Visitors are encouraged to read the sheets and take them away to keep, display, or give to others. - Felix Gonzalez-Torres The idea of travel runs throughout the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Cuban-American artist who immigrated, via Puerto Rico, to the United States in 1979. Two of Gonzalez-Torres's stack pieces, about migration In "Untitled" 1992/1993, the sheets of paper are printed with a black-and-white image of a bird in the sky based on a photograph by the artist. - The idea of travel runs throughout the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Cuban-American artist who immigrated, via Puerto Rico, to the United States in 1979. Two of Gonzalez-Torres's stack pieces, about migration In "Untitled" 1992/1993, the sheets of paper are printed with a black-and-white image of a bird in the sky based on a photograph by the artist. - Gonzalez-Torres is known for producing works of art that encourage the viewer to interact with them. His stacks of variously printed papers appear to be minimalist sculptures but differ because the artist invites the viewer to take a sheet and makes the gallery's replenishment of the stack a part of the exhibition challenging the idea of the unique art object that was a hallmark of Modernism. Appropriated images and text printed on these takeaway sheets were often subtly political or poignantly romantic. - Gonzales-Torres made subtle references to his own life and set these autobiographical records in public spaces to challenge the boundary between private and public. - An example of this is his Untitled (Billboard)(1991), a black-and-white photograph of a recently occupied tousled double bed that was displayed on two dozen billboards throughout Manhattan. - By possessing a sheet of paper (or a piece of candy from an artwork, the viewer collaborates with the artist. - The same collaboration pervades the artist's candy or cookie spills. Piled usually in the corners of galleries or spread across a gallery floor—like minimalist floor installations—the candy sculptures had a designated ideal weight; pieces of candy were intended to be replenished by the exhibitors as the supplies were depleted. - Gonzalez-Torres demystifies the art object participation, generosity, expected experiences in an art gallery or museum. - For Untitled (Perfect Lovers)(1991), he synchronized two industrial clocks placed side by side. Inevitably, because batteries fail & things tend toward entropy the clocks would slowly begin to advance at differing rates, out of sync, having moved, however briefly, perfectly together. - In all his work—including billboards, stacked prints, text installations, photographs, strings of light, & found objects—Gonzalez-Torres included the viewer as an active agent in producing the work's meaning. He set his life into the into the public sphere, hoping to help viewers get passed the personal to arrive at a collective experience about the social good & the human spirit. Gonzalez-Torres died of AIDS-related illness in 1996.

Thelma Golden

- Curator for Museum of Fine Arts Boston

Elliot Bostwick Davis

- Curator of Fine Arts Boston - Curator of Contemporary Art Museum Houston

Donald Judd 1928 - 1994

- Donald Judd is a landmark figure in the history of postwar art. In the 1950s, he studied philosophy and art history and took classes at the Art Students League in NYC. - Donald Judd whose rejection of both traditional painting and sculpture led him to a conception of art built upon the idea of the object as it exists in the environment. - Judd's works belong to the Minimalist movement, whose goal was to rid art of the Abstract Expressionist reliance on the self-referential trace of the painter in order to form pieces that were free from emotion - In the mid-to-late 1960s, Judd produced and exhibited a large number of his iconic forms. These range from what are referred to as "stacks", which are hung at even intervals from floor to ceiling; "progressions", whose measurements follow simple numerical sequences; and "box-like form" that are installed directly on the floor. - This sculptural vocabulary continued to serve as a basic foundation from which Judd developed many versions—in varied combinations of metals, colored Plexiglas, and plywood—until his death in 1994. - Judd's earliest freestanding sculptures were singular, boxlike forms constructed of wood or metal. - He saw the strength & clarity in singular forms, the character of which resulted from the combination of color, image, shape, & surface. - In 1964 Judd turned to professional sheet-metal fabricators to make his work out of galvanized iron, aluminum, stainless steel, brass, and copper. - This effectively removed from the artist's studio any hands-on art making, a shift that would hold great importance for the then-rising generation of Conceptual artists, who held that ideas themselves, exempt from any materialization, can exist as art. - To Susan Buckwalter 1964 introduces galvanized iron, a material he liked because it had no art historical context yet had a painterly quality in the way the light caught its surface pattern. - Four metal boxes, hung at regular intervals on the wall are connected by a lacquered aluminum pipe inset into the top front edges. The spaces between the boxes have as much presence as the boxes themselves, and emphasize the depth from front to back. - The alternation of open and enclosed volumetric spaces, and sequences of identical components, was to become a feature of Judd's work - Judd made a new kind of artwork untethered from the traditional frameworks of painting & sculpture, focusing instead on an investigation of "real space," or three dimensions, using commercial materials & an emphasis on whole, unified shapes. - Although it is hung on a wall like a painting Untitled (Stack) projects nearly three feet from the wall and climbs like rungs on a ladder from floor to ceiling. It is made of galvanized iron boxes, all identical and of equal importance. - While spatial concerns were foremost for Judd, color & materials always remained central to his conception of art. - Sustained & rigorous investigations of space and form, his project is tempered by a rich palette of industrial materials, such as stainless steel, aluminum, & translucent Plexiglas, the varied surfaces and finishes of which lend a sumptuous air to an otherwise austere undertaking. - Judd often presented his work in a series, a strategy that related to the reality of postwar, consumer culture as well as to the standardization & de-subjectifying nature of identical, multiple forms or systems. - The multiple was another way to reinforce their materiality. - Donald Judd saw no reason for a trace back to himself; his work was built upon the idea of an object's existence in its environment, and that was it.

Marjan Teeuwan

- Dutch - Her works are entire buildings, which she methodically dismantles and reconfigures to create mesmerizing, massive installations. For the past decade, Teeuwen has transformed dilapidated, soon-to-be-destroyed structures into highly ordered, ephemeral artworks. - Marjan Teeuwen cuts open the walls of abandoned buildings, joining rooms with massive holes, and uses leftover fragments to create densely textured walls and surfaces. - Teeuwen removed the walls from a post-war apartment block in Amsterdam and sawed the building's doors into hundreds of fragments, using them in turn to construct layered partitions. - Each "Destroyed House," as she calls the series of interventions, can take her as long as a year to create, and is the culmination of a complex process involving permits, large teams of assistants. - With a help of a contractor, an engineer and a team of technical assistants, she methodically converts the crumbling space into a three-dimensional collage. Chunky debris from a felled concrete floor or wooden wall might become the building blocks for a two-story-tall totemic sculpture; - It's impossible to look at Teeuwen's work and not think of conceptual artist Gordon Matta Clark's "building cuts," which he made throughout New York, New Jersey, and Chicago in the 1970s. - The holes and splits he cleaved into abandoned buildings were an act of anarchy: opening inaccessible, closed spaces to the public. - Teeuwen preserves her effort in photographs, just before the original building her is demolished.

Taki 183

- Early graffiti artist Taki 183, NYC 1971 - •In 1971, the New York Times publish an article about then-teenage graffiti artist TAKI 183. •The article was groundbreaking. A mainstream publication was, for the first time, not only discussing graffiti but speaking with an artist and getting insight into why they do what they do. It also spawned more graffiti artists in New York City, which would become the hotbed of activity that would influence graffiti art around the world. - GRAFFITI OR STREET ART HAS ALWAYS, BEEN USED AS POLITICAL PROTEST, FROM THE ITALIAN GRAFFITO- MEANING SCRIBBLED OR SCRATCHED. - ANTHROPOLOGIST HAVE FOUND GRAFFITI IN ANCIENT EGYPT, ANCIENT GREECE & THE ROMAN EMPIRE. - SPRAY PAINT & MAKERS, NEWSPRINT & WJEAT PASTE ARE THE MEDIUM OF CHOICE.

Andrew Thomas Huang

- Experimental artist - Cyberpunk

Arthur Jaffa 1960, Tupelo, Mississippi

- FOR 30 YEARS JAFA HAS DEVELOPED A DYNAMIC, MULTIDISCIPLINARY PRACTICE RANGING FROM FILMS & INSTALLATIONS TO LECTURE-PERFORMANCES AND HAPPENINGS THAT TACKLE, CHALLENGE AND QUESTION PREVAILING CULTURAL ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT IDENTITY AND RACE. •JAFA HAS TRANSFORMED THE SPACE WITH A SERIES OF NEW ASSEMBLAGES THAT ENCOMPASS FILM, PHOTOGRAPHY AND FOUND FOOTAGE.

JR Anonymous French Street Activist/ Artist

- Formerly anonymous french street artist/activist - Emphasis on people and their stories - Insideout project

Pop Art

- In the late 1950-60s, several artists began to focus their attention on the explosion in visual culture, fueled by the growing presence of mass media and the rising disposable income of the postwar young. - For the first time in America, individual identity was determined by what people purchased largely dictated by television, film, & print advertising. - Pop artists critiqued the fiction of this new popular culture by embodying. Major figures: Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Red Grooms...

Katharina Hinsberg 1967 -

- German artist Katharina Hinsberg'sinstallation titled Mitten, roughly translated as middle, features a network of red beads hanging in a grid-like formation. Each red sphere is aligned with the next, creating a 3 dimensional matrix that the audience can walk into. - Mitten is part of a group exhibition called rasterfahndung, the German word for "dragnet" that alludes to the common theme of grid art. This piece was made for an exhibition that focuses on the importance of grids in art. The purpose of grids expanded and drastically changed the art world, turning the common visual techniques used in mapping and science into an experimental approach in art. - Hinsberg's work's often deal with movable structures, making the dimensions of the room, the settings of the artist and the actions of the audience interacting together. The experience of the viewer is an altered spatial concepts that change the perception of the exhibition space fundamentally.

Kenny Scharf

- Graffiti Artist - 1980s

Jean-Michel Basquiat 1960-1988

- Graffiti artist - Most well known and successful dead artist of our time - 1980 - first public exhibition in times square - collaborated with andy warhol - times square show, 1980 - Focused on social commentary - Mulit-medium and often incorperated with text and words - By 1985, he was on the sunday NY Times magazine cover

Jacob Lawrence 1917 - 2000

- Great American Painter, Chronicler of African American Life - FUNDED BY THE WPA - THE WORKS PROGRESS ADMINSITRATION - HE PAINTED THE SERIES HE IS MOST WELL KNOWN FOR - PAINTED WHEN HE WAS 23 YEARS OLD - WAS THE GREAT MIGRATION SERIES (1940-41). - A SEQUENCE OF 60 PAINTINGS, THAT DEPICTS THE MASS MOVEMENT OF AFRICAN AMERICANS FROM THE RURAL SOUTH TO THE URBAN NORTH BETWEEN WORLD WAR I & WORLD WAR II—A DEVELOPMENT THAT HAD RECEIVED LITTLE PREVIOUS PUBLIC ATTENTION. •LAWRENCE SPENT MONTHS DISTILLING THE SUBJECT INTO CAPTIONS AND PRELIMINARY DRAWINGS & PREPARING 60 BOARDS WITH THE HELP OF HIS WIFE, ARTIST GWENDOLYN KNIGHT. •HE CREATED THE PAINTINGS IN TEMPERA, A WATER-BASE PAINT THAT DRIES RAPIDLY ON CARDBOARD & TO KEEP THE COLORS CONSISTENT, LAWRENCE APPLIED ONE HUE AT A TIME TO EVERY PAINTING WHERE IT WAS TO APPEAR, REQUIRING HIM TO PLAN ALL 60 PAINTINGS IN DETAIL AT ONCE. •DURING HIS LIFETIME, LAWRENCE OCCUPIED a COMPLICATED POSITION IN THE ART WORLD. •HE WAS CONSIDERED BOTH AN INSIDER AND OUTSIDER, CAUGHT IN A RACIALLY DIVIDED ENVIRONMENT AND EDGED TO THE MARGINS OF AMERICAN MODERNISM DESPITE SIGNIFICANT EARLY EXHIBITIONS AND ACLAIM. •WHEN LAWRENCE DIED ON JUNE 9, 2000, THE NEW YORK TIMES DESCRIBED HIM AS "ONE OF AMERICA'S LEADING MODERN FIGURATIVE PAINTERS" AND "AMONG THE MOST IMPASSIONED VISUAL CHRONICLERS OF THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN EXPERIENCE. -LAWRENCE IS PERHAPS THE BEST-KNOWN 20TH-CENTURY AFRICAN-AMERICAN PAINTERS. THROUGHOUT HIS LONG CAREER AS A PAINTER, LAWRENCE CONCENTRATED ON EXPLORING THE HISTORY & STRUGGLES OF AFRICAN AMERICANS.

Monica Gryzmala

- Grzymala is a Polish-born artist who's lived in Berlin. She makes installations as a kind of three-dimensional drawing, and her material is tape, all kinds kinds: packing, masking, adhesive, upholstery, etc. - She uses tape to make 3 dimensional drawings. While still in school she switched from building sculpture to drawing, exploring line and mark making. - Her drawings moved off the page and into space. She started using tape to draw in-draw on-a room. Walls, floors, ceilings, and the space between them became her canvas or page. - The sculptural interventions seem to twist and reconfigure the gallery space, charging it with a new and vibrant, organic and expressive energy much - maybe like a dancer might transform the space through which she moves. - Describing her use of materials in terms of distance rather than weight or amount, Grzymala claims her works are more akin to performance than conventional installation. By measuring her used spools of tape in length rather than number, she documents the physical effort she invests in every work.

Romare Bearden 1911-1988

- HIS WORK WAS A PRODUCT OF THE LIVE LIVED THROUGH THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE. - HE WAS AN AFRICAN AMERICAN ARTIST AND WRITER WHO DEPICTED AFRICAN-AMERICAN LIFE. - BEARDON BEGAN HIS ARTISTIC CAREER CREATING SCENES OF THE AMERICAN SOUTH. - BEARDEN GREW AS AN ARTIST NOT BY LEARNING HOW TO CREATE NEW TECHNIQUES AND MEDIUMS, BUT BY HIS LIFE EXPERIENCES. - LIKE THIS ONE, HIS EARLY PAINTINGS WERE OFTEN OF SCENES FROM HIS EARLY CHILDHOOD. •ROMARE BEARDEN BECAME AN INFLUENTIAL AND IMPORTANT ARTIST MIDCAREER, DEPICTING AFRICAN AMERICAN LIFE IN THE STREETS OF HARELM. •IN THE EARLY 1960S, AS HE BECAME INVOLVED WITH BLACK ARTISTS ENGAGED WITH THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT, HIS WORK WAS TRANSFORMED. •DURING THE POLITICALLY TUMULTUOUS 1960S BEARDEN STARTED WORKING IN COLLAGE - MADE OF CUT AND TORN PHOTOGRAPHS FOUND IN POPULAR MAGAZINES THAT HE THEN REASSEMBLED INTO POWERFUL STATEMENTS ON AFRICAN-AMERICAN LIFE. •He cut, painted, sanded, bleached and in all manner altered the found images and collaged them together to make bold statement about living as an African American while the Civil Rights movement and the fight for equal rights spread and escalated across the country.

Horace Pippen 1888 - 1946

- HORACE PIPPIN 1888 -1946 WAS 68 WHEN HE DIED. HE WAS A SELF-TAUGHT AFRICAN AMERICAN PAINTER. THE SUBJECT MATTER OF MANY OF HIS WORKS IS THE INJUSTICE OF SLAVERY & AMERICAN SEGREGATION. - HE WAS BORN IN RURAL PENNSYLVANIA, & GREW UP IN UPSTATE NEW YORK. AT THE AGE OF THREE PIPPIN MOVED WITH HIS FAMILY TO GOSHEN, NEW YORK. - THERE HE ATTENDED SEGREGATED SCHOOLS UNTIL HE WAS 15, WHEN HE WENT TO WORK TO SUPPORT HIS FAMILY. - PIPPIN LEFT SCHOOL TO SUPPORT HIS AILING MOTHER, AND AFTER HER DEATH IN 1911 MOVED TO PATERSON, NEW JERSEY, WHERE HE WORKED PACKING AND CRATING PICTURES AND FURNITURE; HE LATER WORKED AS AN IRON MOLDER. - PRIOR TO 1917 WHEN HE WENT TO FIGHT IN WWI, PIPPIN VARIOUSLY WORKED IN A COAL YARD, IN AN IRON FOUNDRY, AS A HOTEL PORTER & AS A USED-CLOTHING PEDDLER. -self-taught -slavery and segregation were often the subject matter of his work -was apart of "the harlem hellfighters"

Agnes Martin 1912 - 1994

- Harbor #1 (1957), one of Martin's earliest New York paintings, combines the geometric abstraction of her earlier Taos work with the newfound inspiration of the harbor landscape, evident in her choice of blue-gray palette. - Over the course of the next decade, Martin developed her working format: six by six foot painted canvases, covered from edge to edge with meticulously penciled grids and finished with a thin layer of gesso. Though she often showed with other New York abstractionists, Martin's focused work traveled new territory that lay outside of both the broad gestural vocabulary of Abstract Expressionism & the systematic repetitions of Minimalism. - Rather, her practice was tethered to spirituality &drew from a mix of Zen Buddhist & American Transcendentalist ideas. For Martin, painting was "a world without objects, without interruption... - Agnes Martin used Zen Buddhism to explore spatial & spiritual negation in a series of all-black 'ultimate paintings,' Martin would use the philosophy to abstract, reduce, & order the beauty —she saw in landscapes around her. - Her titles, including descriptors like "Tree," "Mountain," and "Water," highlight Martin's ability to tune out the noise of daily life & hone in on the underlying qualities of nature and of light. An incredible achievement given that Martin had more noise to tune out than many others as she struggled with paranoid schizophrenia throughout her adult life. - In 1967, at the height of her career, Martin faced the loss of her home to new development, the sudden death of her friend Ad Reinhardt, and the growing strain of mental illness; she left New York, and returned to Taos, where she abandoned painting, instead pursuing writing and meditation in isolation. Her return to painting in 1974 was marked by a subtle shift in style: no longer defined by the delicate graphite grid, compositions such as Untitled Number 5 (1975) display bolder geometric schemes—like distant relatives of her earliest works. In these late paintings, Martin evoked the warm palette of the arid desert landscape where she remained for the rest of her life. - While minimalist in form, these paintings were quite different in spirit from those of her other minimalist counterparts, retaining small flaws & unmistakable traces of the artist's hand; she shied away from intellectualism, favoring the personal and spiritual. - Her paintings, statements, & influential writings often reflected an interest in Eastern philosophy, especially Taoist. Because of her work's added spiritual dimension, which became more dominant after 1967, she preferred to be classified as an abstract expressionist.

Pipilotti Rist - 1962

- Her videos are short, with alterations to the speed, color and sound and her subject matter is the body, human sexuality, and gender. - Pipilotti appears in many of her own videos and often sings on the soundtracks; her family members frequently assist on the production. •Open My Glade (2000), commissioned by the New York Public Art Fund, the artist broadcasts a series of sixteen one-minute video segments on the largest video screen in Times Square in New York. •Interspersed with television programming, this collection of short videos consisted of close-up shots of her face as she uttered poetic, philosophical, and political statements

Mary Reid Kelly 1979 -

- In videos and drawings filled with punning wordplay, Reid Kelley presents her take on the clash between utopian ideologies and the realities of women's lives in the struggle for liberation and through political strife, wars, and other historical events. -DRAWING FROM HISTORICAL LITERATURE, DRAMA, AND EVENTS—AND CHANNELING THEM THROUGH FEMINIST INTERPRETATION—MARY REID KELLEY MAKES BLACK-AND-WHITE VIDEOS, DRAWINGS, AND COLLAGES - HER VIDEOS ARE A COMBINATION OF LIVE ACTION AND ANIMATION AND SHE IS THE STAR IN EVERY ROLE, DISGUISED BY ELABORATE COSTUMING AND MAKEUP, AND AGAINST VISUALLY RICH BACKGROUND SETTINGS. HER HUSBAND FILMS HER, AND THEN EDITS HER VARIOUS PARTS TOGETHER INTO A COHERENT STORY. - Performing scripted narratives in rhyming verse, Reid Kelley —with her husband Patrick Kelley and various family members—explores historical periods through fictitious characters such as nurses, soldiers and prostitutes . - Adopting a stark black-and-white palette while synthesizing art-historical styles such as Cubism and German Expressionism, Reid Kelley mixes historical periods, to trace the ways present concerns are rooted in the past.

James Turrell 1943 -

- James Turrell went to college for math and perceptual psychology and studied art on the side. - He discovered a strange optical effect in one of his projects for grad school, by placing a slide projector in an empty room and pointing its beam toward the corner, he found that he could make a cube of light that seemed to occupy physical space. - He discovered that he could make pyramids and rectangles of light, which seemed to lean against the wall or float halfway to the ceiling. - And then he started to experiment with outdoor light. He painted the windows of the room he was working in and scratched lines in the paint, allowing narrow slits of light to enter the room. He found that he could create patterns and illusions, much as he had with the projector. Because the light came from outside, there was no machinery in the room. He had created a gallery in which the art was made entirely of light. - BY the early 1970s, Turrell was exploring phenomenon with natural light. instead of scratching paint on the windows, he cut large holes in the walls and ceiling of the studio to create a view of the open sky. With the right size of opening and the right vantage and some careful finish work, he found that it was possible to eliminate the sense of depth, so the sky appeared to be painted directly on the ceiling. - TURRELL wanted to keep a room empty but fill it with electric light. He realized that he could modify the walls to create hidden chambers for the bulbs. In some of the installations, he tucked bulbs along a single edge of the room, in others, the whole frame of a wall glowed with brilliant color. He called them shallow spaces of construction. This is one of the earliest of these shallow spaces, "Raemar pink white," it contains the radiance of something from another world. - Turrell discovered that when he changed the color of the electric lights, he could change the apparent color of the sky. he called the series "skyspaces." - Turrell discovered the Ganzfield Effect of perceptual deprivation. It is a phenomenon of perception caused by exposure to an unstructured, uniform field or space. The effect is the result of the brain amplifying neural noise in order to look for the missing visual signals. Turrell exploits this phenomenon in this series of pieces. - Stepping into one of his "ganzfeld" rooms is like falling into a neon cloud. The air is thick with luminous color that seems to quiver all around you, and it can be difficult to discern which way is up, or out. - Not everyone enjoys experiencing Turrell'swork. There is a certain comfort in knowing what is real and where things are; to have that comfort stripped away can be rapturous, or distressing. - To see his work, you must first become hopelessly lost as they can be hallucinatory experiences. - Roden Crater, on Turrell's ranch outside Flagstaff, Arizona. - Maybe Turrell's greatest work, his most ambitious - is an extinct volcano on his ranch in Arizona, where he has been developing a network of tunnels and underground rooms since 1974. - The volcano has a bowl-shaped depression on its top known as Roden Crater. Turrell has never opened the crater to the public, but now he in a collaborative work with the University of Arizona. There may be in thefuture access. •Turrell explains that when he first spotted the crater from an airplane in 1974, he had no intention of buying the land around it. He just wanted to dig into the volcano. •By day, he walked the surface with a pile of surveying equipment, drawing topographic maps. At night, he he would lay on the top and study the stars. He tried to imagine how he would bring their light inside the mountain. And turrell has spent years shaping the rim of the caldera, in such a way, that it seems to distort the contour of the sky. He calls this "celestial vaulting". •Much of the work has incorporated into it the ideas of distance, isolation and other worldliness

Jenny Holzer

- Jenny Holzer is a conceptual artist. The main focus of her work is the delivery of words and ideas in public spaces and includes large-scale installations, advertising billboards, projections on buildings and other structures, and illuminated electronic displays. - A political activist as well as an artist, Holzer's aim is to disrupt the passive reception of information from damaging sources. As her reputation has grown, so has the ambition and scope of her work, which has traveled to public spaces around the world. - In her profound skepticism toward power, Holzer joins the ranks of anti-authoritarians in art from the birth of modernism (which is itself a rebellion against tradition) through the 21stcentury. - Her work calls attention to social injustice & sheds light on dark corners of the human psyche. The phrases are intended to generate debate and make us think critically... - While usually discussed in the context of video art and electronic media, Holzer's practice is rooted in several earlier art movements. Her interest in the language of advertising aligns her with Pop art. Her light-based text owes a direct debt to Minimalists Dan Flavin and Donald Judd. Finally, the site-specificity of her work aligns her with Land Art Earth Works Just as Robert Smithson Spiral Jetty is a part of the Great Salt Lake, Holzer's LED signs are part of the urban landscape. - Holzer is a pioneer in using public art as social intervention, she was one of the first artists to use information technology as a platform for political protest. Her success has encouraged a generation of artists to build public platforms, in cyberspace and real space, for sharing political views. - Softer, at Blenheim Palace, Oxford, which includes more than 50 artworks, focuses her dichotomy of language on the brutality of war, conflict, the military and hidden voices. Holzer's works are exhibited across the palace and gardens, as examples of how language can expose what is most hidden in culture.

Judy Pfaff 1946 -

- Judy Pfaff was born in London, England, in 1946. Moved to the US when she was 13. She's received every award an artist can receive, including a MacArthur Foundation genius award. Her work spans across disciplines from painting to printmaking to sculpture to installation, but is perhaps best described as painting in space. These spatial paintings inhabit and transform their environments. - Judy Pfaff is a pioneer of installation art and one of its most influential practitioners. Judy has a rare and remarkable sense of space and light and material. In the 1970s, when the dominant trend in art was - cool & refrained minimalism, in feeling and in form, Pfaff began making colorful, crazy jam packed environments that would encompassed the entire gallery. She uses an endless range of everyday and industrial materials such as wire, plastic tubing, and fabric into carefully structured installations that appeared to be spontaneous. - Drawing upon a wealth of spiritual, botanical, and art historical imagery, Pfaff's installations simultaneously and without contradiction reference the austerity of a cathedral and the temporality of a blooming flower. - Each installation considers the specific spatial geometries of the room, the ceiling, the street out the window, so that no two shows are ever alike. Although this work may look random, when you begin to get into them it is remarkable how all the elements seem to hang together and develop along with one another. She seems somehow to get order and disorder working at the same time. •Refusing to give narrative translation to her work, the urgent and ferocious need to work for the visual and tactile is remarkable in an era where language describes and demystifies artistic activity. •She's both extroverted and introverted and she has devised a working method that is capable of absorbing an enormous range of materials, processes and moods.

Kara Walker 1969 -

- Kara Walker is an artist whose work explores ideas around identity, race, sexuality and violence. She works in a variety of mediums, including painting, printmaking, sculpture and installation. - Her early experience as a girl influences the art work she makes. She was born in integrated Stockton, CA. and when she moved to Atlanta Georgia as a teenager she experienced racism still rampant in the south. There were KKK rallies in her town, and she was treated cruelly by her school mates. - Kara Walker incorporated the genteel eighteenth-century medium of cut-paper silhouettes to make stark visual images on racism in America. She has created a poignant body of works that addresses the very heart of human experience, notions of racial supremacy, and historical accuracy. - Drawing her inspiration from sources as varied as the antebellum South, testimonial slave narratives, historical novels, and minstrel shows, Walker has invented a repertoire of powerful narratives in which she conflates fact and fiction to uncover the living roots of racial and gender bias. - At first, the figures in period costume seem to be romantic & decorative, until we notice the horrifying content: nightmarish vignettes of the history of the American south. - Drawing from sources ranging from slave testimonials to historical novels, Kara Walker's work features mammies, & sambos and other brutal stereotypes in a host of situations that are frequently violent and sexual in nature. - The figures made out of cheap materials and devalued methods of craft, rejecting the heroic and the permanence of canvas. There are black bodies in radically unsentimental postures, exposing themselves to our gaze, and exposing a difficult history. - Kara Walker's purposefully provocative and seductively graphic work is extremely difficult to view - The picture's violence stings - so frequently followed by the slightly nauseating fear that rises with the recognition of one's own voyeurism, which derives from the detail with which she anchors her anger equally in every character—white and black, master and slave.

Keith Haring

- Keith haring was known as a graffiti artist, & social activist in the 1980's. - The subject always had a message, always highly political about sex, death, sexuality, the demise of culture & war. - The symbols of his drawing became ubiquitous & known all over the world as a universal language. - •One Harins most famous images is was a crawling child or "Radiant Baby," which he called "the purest and most positive experience of human existence." Haring often used the infant to represent Jesus in nativity scenes or alongside crosses. •Over time, the "Radiant Baby" gained darker significance through Haring's depictions of nuclear proliferation, in which the baby appears inside atomic mushroom clouds and scenes of war and violence. - His drawings were spontaneously made first with chalk then with spray paint in the subways & the streets of the city. - Haring was openly gay and much of his work has icons and symbols for safe sex. - He never kept his diagnosis of AIDs a secret; it was public knowledge and an accepted part of his persona in the media. Those publicly shared thoughts were reflected, in his work. - Haring's work was also in the times square show. He started to draw faces & animals, which were photocopied & pasted around the city in collages with appropriated news paper headlines of current issues. - He became friends with the street artists, Kenny Sharf, Jean-Michele Basquiat & young pop singer, Madonna, who used is drawings as a backdrop for one of her tours. - In his work Silence=Death Haring portrays multiple figures covering their eyes, mouths, and ears. - The piece is intended to illustrate the oppression and invisibility that AIDS victims felt in the 1980s. - Works like Haring's helped to give those living with AIDS more visibility at a time when many were suffering in absolute silence, with no voice, no visibility and no support from those around them. - Originally used during the holocaust, the pink triangle was used to signify those who were being targeted for their homosexuality. - Haring began to use this symbol boldly to bring attention Lesbian and gay rights. - And ever since the symbol has often been reclaimed & re-appropriated by the gay rights movement.

Kerry James Marshal 1955 -

- Kerry James Marshall made A portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His former Self is a monumental painting at 8'x6". Small, dark, scary, cartoonish, an uncomfortable racial self-caricature, it carries the power of Ralph Ellison's horrific " I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me". - He painted it in 1980 at 25 years old. It is one of the most important paintings of the 20thcentury. It is a picture of desire, self, drive, spirit and ambition that taught Marshall to paint. ABOUT PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS HIS FORMER SELF: •MARSHALL IS INTERESTED IN THE NUANCES OF INVISIBILITY, IN HOW MUCH GOES UNSEEN, AND THE MANY DIFFERENT WAYS WILLFUL BLINDNESS MANIFESTS ITSELF. •IN "A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A SHADOW OF HIS FORMER SELF," MARSHALL LIMITS HIS PALETTE TO BLACKS AND GRAYS, EXCEPT FOR THE WHITES OF HIS EYES AND HIS TEETH, ONE OF WHICH IS MISSING. •THIS FACE LOOMS IN THE DARKNESS, ALMOST READY TO DISAPPEAR BACK INTO IT. •Kerry James Marshall uses painting, sculptural installations, collage, video, & photography to comment on the history of black identity both in the united states and in western art. •His paintings focus on black subjects historically excluded from the artistic canon, & he has explored issues of race & history through imagery ranging from abstraction to comics •In these images you can see how deep a narrative he builds in his work, like a movie

Chris Burden 1946 - 2015

- LACMA'S entry plaza is home to "Urban Light," Chris Burden's sculpture in the form of a classical Greek temple composed of 202 restored, antique cast-iron street lamps. Installed in 2008, it's symbol of LA. - The cast iron street lamps are 17 different styles, which vary depending on the municipality that commissioned them. They range from about 20' to 30' are painted a uniform gray and placed, forest-like, out in front of the museum. The lights are solar powered and switched on at dusk. - Chris first began collecting street lamps in December 2000 without a specific work in mind, and continued collecting them for the next seven years. - He purchased his first two lamps at a flea market after bargaining down the price from $950 to $800. - Most of the street lamps came from the streets of southern California, including Hollywood, Glendale, and Anaheim. - The artwork has become an extraordinary beacon and visual symbol for Los Angeles. - Burden wanted the piece to be the formal entry to the Los Angles County museum of art -LACMA - on Wilshire Blvd. - The installed lamp post redefine the space, it's has become a landmark in the city, referring back to ancient public spaces with contemporary interpretation of an ancient temple.

Rain Room, 2012, Random International

- Random International's Rain Room (2012) is an immersive environment of perpetually falling water that pauses wherever a human body is detected. The installation offers visitors an opportunity to experience what is seemingly impossible: the ability to control rain. Rain Room allows visitors to the installation to walk through a downpour without getting wet. •Founded in 2005 by the artists are Hannes Koch and Florian Ortkrass, Random International is a collaborative studio for experimental practice. They use science and technology to create experiences that aim to question and challenge the human experience within a machine-led world, engaging viewers through explorations of behavior and natural phenomena. •The piece had previously shown in a number of international art venues, LACMA, MOMA, The Barbican in London

Norman Lewis 1909-1979

- LEWIS'S CAREER BEGAN IN THE 1930S, WHEN HE USED THE STYLE OF SOCIAL REALISM TO CONVEY BOTH THE STRUGGLES & EVERYDAY LIVES OF BLACK PEOPLE, SHAPED NOT ONLY BY RACISM BUT ALSO BY THE GREAT DEPRESSION. - HIS WORK CAPTURES IDEAS THROUGH COMPOSITIONS INSPIRED BY JAZZ, THE RHYTHMS OF THE CITY AND NATURE, PARADES, THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT, & THE ACTIVITIES OF THE KU KLUX KLAN. - BY THE 1940S, FEELING THE LIMITATIONS OF SOCIAL REALISM, LEWIS'S WORK TRANSITIONS TO ABSTRACTION. •IN THE LATE 1940S, HIS WORK BECAME INCREASINGLY ABSTRACT. •HIS INTEREST IN ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM WAS DUE PARTIALLY TO HIS DISILLUSIONMENT WITH AMERICA AFTER HIS WARTIME EXPERIENCES IN WORLD WAR II. •TO HIM, IT SEEMED EXTREMELY HYPOCRITICAL THAT AMERICA WAS FIGHTING AGAINST AN ENEMY WHOSE MASTER RACE IDEOLOGY WAS ECHOED AT HOME -BY THE FACT THAT THERE WERE SEGREGATED ARMED FORCES. LEWIS SAID HE STRUGGLED TO EXPRESS SOCIAL CONFLICT IN HIS ART, BUT IN HIS LATER YEARS, FOCUSED ON THE INHERENTLY AESTHETIC AND LESS ON EXPRESSED POLITICAL NARRATIVES. - WHILE HE WOULD CONTINUE TO FOCUS ON SOCIAL INEQUALITIES OVER THE COURSE OF HIS LIFE AND NEVER FULLY ABANDON REPRESENTATION, LEWIS BECAME INCREASINGLY INTERESTED IN EXPLORING THE EXPRESSIVE POTENTIAL OF HIS POLITCAL IDEAS THROUGH ABSTRACTION. - HE BECAME AN IMPORTANT PART OF THE DOWNTOWN ART SCENE OF THE ABSTRCT EXPRESSIONISTS, BUT IT WAS NOT UNTIL THE LATE 20TH CENTURY THAT HIS WORK & CONTRIBUTIONS WERE RECOGNIZED AS CENTRAL COMPONENT OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF ABSTRACT ART IN AMERICA. - THE PAINTER NORMAN LEWIS RARELY COMPLAINED IN PUBLIC ABOUT THE SINGULAR STRUGGLES OF BEING A BLACK ARTIST IN AMERICA. - BUT IN 1979, DYING OF CANCER, HE MADE A PREDICTION TO HIS FAMILY. "HE SAID 'I THINK IT'S GOING TO TAKE ABOUT 30 YEARS, MAYBE 40, BEFORE PEOPLE STOP CARING WHETHER I'M BLACK AND JUST PAY ATTENTION TO THE WORK,' - LEWIS WAS JUST ABOUT RIGHT. IN THE LAST FEW YEARS ALONE, HIS WORK HAS BEEN ACQUIRED BY THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART IN WASHINGTON; THE MUSEUM OF FINE ATS BOSTON; AND THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART IN MANHATTAN.

Lorna Simpson 1960 -

- LORNA SIMPSON IS AFRICAN-AMERICAN, SHE WAS BORN IN BROOKLYN IN 1960. BY THE TIME SHE WAS IN ART SCHOOL, FIRST IN NEW YORK CITY, THEN IN CALIFORNIA, THE CIVIL RIGHTS ERA WAS IN THE PAST; UNEMPLOYMENT WAS HIGH, POVERTY UNRELENTING, ETHNIC DIVISIONS BITTER & DEEP. - SIMPSON IS ONE OF A GROUP OF CONTEMPROARY AFRICAN AMERICAN ARTISTS WHO APPROACH RACE AS A DYNAMIC & CHANGING EXPERIENCE RATHER THAN AS A FIXED STATE IN HISTORY - THEY ADDRESS THE POLITICS OF THEIR LIVES WITHOUT RESORTING TO RACE-BASED POLEMICS OR CELEBRATIONS. - HER EARLIEST WORK WAS AS A DOCUMENTARY STREET PHOTOGRAPHER,.SIMPSON BEGAN EXPLORING ETHNIC DIVISIONS OF RACE IN THE 1980S ERA OF MULTI-CULTURAL ISSUES. - SIMPSON'S MOST NOTABLE WORKS COMBINE WORDS WITH PHOTOGRAPHS OF ANONYMOUSLY CROPPED IMAGES OF WOMEN AND OCCASIONALLY MEN. - WHILE THE PICTURES MAY APPEAR STRAIGHTFORWARD, THE TEXT WILL OFTEN REVEAL THE UNDERLYING RACISM STILL FOUND IN AMERICAN CULTURE. - THIS IMAGE IS GUARDED CONDITIONS, 1989. - THE SOLITARY WOMAN STANDS DRESSED IN A SHAPELESS WHITE SHIFT ON A WOODEN PEDESTAL, A VICTIM TO PERHAPS, SLAVE AUCTIONS, HOSPITAL EXAMINATIONS, CRIMINAL LINE-UPS -INSTITUTIONAL CONTROL...? - MAYBE -MORE OPTIMISTICALLY SIMPSON ALSO REFERS TO

Mary Lucier 1944-

- Lucier says the work came out of her of involvement with the composers who were working in live electronic music because it was more about phenomena. - And that her interests were about taking time and making it spatial. It was not at all about the physical body. - She worked minimally, she was conducting an investigation of the foundations of the medium by reducing the art form to its essential elements. - also worked with tvs

Ana Mendieta 1948 - 1985

- MENDIETA, who was born in Havana, Cuba in 1948, moved to the U.S. at 12 years old to escape Castro's regime. - There she hopped between refugee camps and foster homes, instigating an obsession with ideas of loss, belonging and the impermanence of place. - In her Untitled (Facial Hair Transplants) performance, Ana transferred the beard hair of one of her fellow students onto her own face, defying conventional beauty standards and questioning gender roles. - THIS SERIES FROM 1973- 1980 SILUETA WORKS - SILUETAS was a long-term project with over 200 silhouettes in all. Ana Mendieta photographed her silhouettes created from the earth over time, documenting their ephemerality and presence via absence. - Mendieta's work occupies the space between land, body and performance art.

Mona Hatoum 1952 -

- Mona Hatoum was vacationing in London in 1975 when civil war broke out back home in Lebanon. With Beirut's airport closed for nine months, she found herself cut off from her family and on her own at age 23. - That's how she began her work as an artist. Since then, Hatoum has created performances, videos, installations and sculptures that deal with a variety of social contradictions, such as the hardships of displaced people, political oppression, and gender issues based on her experience of double exile as a Palestinian. - Hatoum's first works were dramatic performances that alluded to her Palestinian origins and drew instant attention from the media and international press. This piece, she was trapped inside a liquid-clay-smeared, vertical chamber in an expression of personal struggle. - Hatoum started her career making visceral video and performance work in the 1980s that focused with great intensity on the body. Eventually she came to make sculpture and installation work. - In 1982, the artist Mona Hatoum staged a performance piece at the Aspex Gallery in Portsmouth. Its title was Under Siege, and it lasted for seven hours. - Hatoum was naked, covered in clay, and trapped inside a huge transparent container, a strange mermaid without any water in which to swim. Again and again, she would try to stand up; again and again, she would fail. As the day wore on, the tank's walls grew dirty, smeared with marks left by her muddy hands and body, her cheeks, her lips. - Meanwhile, the gallery filled with the sound of revolutionary songs in Arabic, French and English, and with snatched news reports from the Middle East. - In her work she combines different cultures; she was born in one particular place, settled in another, was adopted by it, and has managed to mix everything together in her work. - Her works often convey a sense of entrapment. - Her work also conveys the sense of isolation and exile. Cages are prison imagery, stark bare light bulb, suggest a terrible place. - Remains of the Dayis the title of a show by Mona Hatoum. Hatoum works taking inspiration from everyday life situations, with a focus on the instability that characterizes the contemporary world. She usually assembles her pieces from rough materials and industrial components: the resulting objects carry a powerful emotive charge and aim to create in the viewers a sense of unease. •In Interior Landscape (2008)...Hatoum worked with a local blacksmith to transform the wire support of a bed into a grid of barbed wire. Set in an alcove, the bed, without its mattress and with its chipped paint, resembles a prison bed. A symbol of comfort and repose becomes a nightmarish object. In stark contrast to the bed's barbed wire base, Hatoum placed a soft pillow onto which she has sown a map of historic Palestine with strands of her own hair. •The bedroom we normally associate with peace and tranquility is turned into discordant space filled with tension and uncertainty. None of the objects are functional a bed without a mattress; a broken table; a cut out map; a useless hanger. Together, the objects create a disconcerting surrealist landscape. •In this piece, as in others, Hatoum creates a domestic space that "offers neither rest nor respite." - In this way, the installation serves as a metaphor for the state of being for Palestinian refugees living the longest ongoing conflict in modern history." - Perhaps the perils of domestic life are revealed in Cage-à-deux (2002), literally a "cage for two," which resembles a prison cell-sized bird cage, except that the two sinks inside suggest that this is a home for two and that the home—is a kind of prison.

Chris Ofili 1968 -

- Ofili uses sexual, cultural, historical, and religious references to create idiosyncratic, beautiful and physical works that expose the darker undercurrents of society, while celebrating contemporary black culture. Almost all of Ofili's work deals with elements of Black experience. - •THE MUSEUM PRODUCED A YELLOW STAMP, SAYING THE ARTWORKS ON SHOW "MAY CAUSE SHOCK, VOMITING, CONFUSION, PANIC, EUPHORIA AND ANXIETY."AND OFILI'S PAINTING WAS SHOWN BEHIND A PLEXIGLASS SCREEN, GUARDED BY A MUSEUM ATTENDANT AND AN ARMED POLICE OFFICER. •The large canvases are richly painted with highly saturated sometime fluorescent layers of color, using texture, with glitter, beads and photographs pasted to the surface. •All over the surface of the paintings are Loose patterning either of small dots of paint or of a looping lines, either plant-like or anatomical. Figures, especially faces, are always stylized—and yet, identifiable, as human. - Ofili enlists sexual, cultural, historical & religious references to create uniquely aesthetic & emotionally charged and physical works. - HIS EARLY WORKS WERE PREDOMINANTLY ABSTRACT, INVOLVING INTRICATE PATTERNS & COLORS, OFTEN USING SEVERAL LAYERS OF PAINT, RESIN, GLITTER, COLLAGE ELEMENTS - HE HAS DEVELOPED A SIGNATURE FIGURATIVE STYLE THAT BRIDGES THE GAP BETWEEN THE SACRED & THE PROFANE, & BY EXTENSION, BETWEEN HIGH ART & POPULAR CULTURE. - IN 1998, OFILI WAS THE FIRST BLACK ARTIST TO BE AWARDED THE TURNER PRIZE. - Ofili's work draws on a wide range of sources—from "blaxploitation" movies, the bible, jazz and hip hop music, comic books, Zimbabwean cave paintings, & the works of artist & poet William Blake—Ofili's subject matter frequently employs racial stereotypes in order to challenge and reinterpret them.

Claes Oldenburg

- Oldenburg is best known for his avant-garde sculptures as well as being a seminal figure of the Pop Art movement. - In the 1960s, Oldenburg became associated with the pop art movement and created many so-called happenings which were performance related productions of that time. The name he gave to his own productions was "Ray Gun Theater". The cast of colleagues who appeared in his Performances included artists Lucas Samaras, Tom Wessleman, Carolee Schneeman and Richard Artshwager, dealer Annina Nosei. - His first wife (1960-1970) Patty Mucha, who sewed many of his early soft sculptures, was a constant performer in his happenings. This brash, often humorous, approach to art was at great odds with the prevailing sensibility that, by its nature, art dealt with "profound" expressions or ideas. But Oldenburg's spirited art found first a niche then a great popularity that endures to this day. - Before creating the large expanded mundane objects he is known for, Claes Oldenburg worked for years collecting detritus and trash which he then would essentially then would pile into faux museum/gallery settings he had created with abandoned storefronts-- aptly named "The Store"-- alongside more traditionally-made found object trash replications of shoes, bags, and everyday objects. - Pop artists had imitated the flat language of billboards, magazines, television, etc., working in two-dimensional mediums, Oldenburg's three-dimensional papier maches, plaster models, & soft fabric forms brought Pop art into the realm of sculpture. - Oldenburg's soft sculptures, a body of work that he began developing in 1962. By translating the medium of sculpture from hard to soft, Oldenburg collapsed solid surfaces into limp, deflated objects that were subject to gravity and chance. - Noted for their exaggerated scale, bold colors, and playfulness. - Oldenburg, early 1960s made so-called "soft" sculptures of quotidian objects, such as this work. - A factory-produced toilet, rigid porcelain symbol of modern hygiene made into a hand-sewn, pliable object made of stuffed vinyl. Beginning, as he usually did, with drawings of the fixture, this is the vinyl Soft Toilet. - Limp and drooping \Soft Toilet is endowed with a personality and sense of drama all its own. - Later in their careers, Oldenburg & Van Bruggen made public art projects. Oldenburg's humor is evident in his large-scale public projects, such as LIPSTICK (ASCENDING) ON CATERPILLAR TRACKS, made for Yale University. - Oldenburg was invited to create this work by a group of graduate students from the School of Architecture who specified that they wanted a monument to the "Second American Revolution" of the late 1960s, a period marked by student demonstrations against the Vietnam War. - Oldenburg mounted a giant lipstick tube on top of steel tracks taken from a Caterpillar tractor.

Patty Chang 1972, San Francisco

- PATTY CHANG - CANDIES 1998 Trained as a painter, she is primarily known for her short films and videos and her performance art. She often plays a central role in her own work, plays with her experiences as a stereotyped-Asian woman. - PATTY CHANG - MELONS or AT A LOSS 1999. The artist is speaking about the death of her aunt as she eats a melon lodged in a brassiere she cuts open so that it resemble her eating her breast. Staring fiercely into the camera she is stoic, she scoops herself out with a spoon, raises a bit of melon to her mouth, and interrupts her speech just long enough to swallow. she seems defiant in the face of injustice at her loss.

ROA

- Paints native birds of wherever they are doing their work

Robert Montgomery

- Poetic phrases where advertisements would be

Minimalism

- Reject reliance on the self-referential - Artwork free from emotional charge - Free from gesture free from process •Minimalism describes an approach to various forms of art making, including sculpture & painting, music and design.....where work is set to expose the essence & only the essentials or solely identifying aspects by eliminating all non- essential form - features or ideas. - Minimalist sculpture broke with illusionistic conventions by translating formal compositional concerns into three dimensions, rendering the work a product of the exchange between the object, the viewer, and the environment. - Minimalists distanced themselves from the Abstract Expressionists by removing suggestions of biography from their art or, indeed, metaphors of any kind. - This denial of expression coupled with an interest in making objects that avoided the appearance of fine art led to the creation of sleek, geometric works that purposefully & radically abandon conventional aesthetic appeal.

Roy Lichenstein 1923 - 1997

- Roy Lichtenstein is identified with Pop Art, a movement he helped originate, and his first fully achieved paintings were based on imagery from comic strips and advertisements and rendered in a style mimicking the crude printing processes of newspaper reproduction. - In early works Lichtenstein was embedding comic-book characters figures such as Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck and the appropriates these cartoon characters in comic style with Beday dots, the minute mechanical patterning used in commercial printing, to convey texture & gradations of color—a stylistic language synonymous with his subject matter. The dots became a trademark device forever identified with Lichtenstein & Pop Art. - When Lichtenstein painted Look Mickey in 1961, it set the trajectory for his career. This primary-color - red, yellow - blue - portrait of the Mickey Mouse introduced Lichtenstein's detached and deadpan humor at a time when introspective Abstract Expressionism reigned. - With this piece he solidifies his commitment to break with prevailing tastes in art. - Lichtenstein would copy the source image by hand, adjusting its composition to suit his narrative or formal aims, and then trace this altered sketch onto the canvas with a slide projector. - Roy Lichtenstein begins to paint the dot patterns and speech balloons from comic books and newspaper reproductions, in large, meticulously rendered frames. He also introduced humor, making fun of himself and the art world. - Lichtenstein brought what was then a great taboo—commercial art—and humor -into the gallery. - Lichtenstein's use of appropriated imagery has influenced artists such as Richard Prince, Jeff Koons & Raymond Pettibon. - He stressed the artificiality of his images by painting them as though they'd come from a commercial press, with the flat, single-color Ben-Day dots of the newspaper meticulously rendered by hand using paint and stencils. - He uses oil paint making pixels, used to appear like the work is commercially printed with thick black outlines & saturated color - Lichtenstein's works based on enlarged panels from comic books engendered a widespread debate about their merits as art, the subject matter & the source considered base & common. - Although Lichtenstein's comic-based work gained acceptance, critics say Lichtenstein did not credit, pay any royalties to, or seek permission from the original artists or copyright holders under copyright laws. - Not only is Lichtenstein making a document of the times, he's also poking fun at painting, critics, other artists at the art world

Harriet Powers 1837 - 1910

- SHE USED TRADITIONAL APPLIQUE TECHNIQUES TO RECORD LOCAL EVENTS, BIBLE STORIES, AND ASTRONOMICAL EVENTS ON HER QUILTS. ONLY TWO OF HER QUILTS HAVE SURVIVED. -•The only two surviving quilts by Powers—a formerly enslaved woman from Athens, Georgia—sheds light on her extraordinary artistic and storytelling talents. •The works are among the highlights of Fabric of a Nation, which explores how the quilt, which is often seen today as a timeless, quintessentially "American" art form, has in fact continuously evolved alongside the U.S., shaped by a broadly underrecognized diversity of artistic hands and minds. -pictoral quilts

Richard Serra 1938 -

- Serra's early work lies at the intersection of performance, sculpture, and installation and sets the stage for Serra's ongoing engagement with the spatial and temporal properties of sculpture. - Richard Serra, a young, relatively unknown artist at the time, began to create works from unconventional materials that emphasized gravity and process. Serra, who would become best known for his colossal steel sculptures, began his career making less monumental, though no less significant, process-oriented works. - An iconic work from this time period is Serra's Verb List (1967), in which the artist cataloged the infinitives of 84 verbs: to roll, to crease, to fold, to lift, to gather, etc. - A register of potential artistic activity, Verb List became something of an instruction manual for Serra's early art making, as demonstrated by his To Lift, an elegant work consisting of a rectangular piece of vulcanized rubber that Serra sourced from a warehouse. - For To Lift, Serra lifted the thick rubber slab from one side, gathering the material into a conical shape like pinched fabric. The result is a freestanding sculptural form that is the concise summary of its titular act: a result from the process and activity of lifting. Although a disarmingly simple work, To Liftis a compendium of 1960s art concerns: it streamlines the role and definition of the artist; it elevates the idea and artistic act onto equal footing with the end result, and the work's potential for collapse introduces gravity and instability into the visual and conceptual core of the work. - With To Lift, the gap between how art appears and how it was made, which by 1967 was already rapidly shrinking, got a bit smaller. - These splash pieces can be named as 'process art', as what they are is a result of their formation. (From the Verb List). - Molten lead was splashed or actually cast into the the space where the wall meets the floor. When cool & solid & unmolded, or simply tuned over and lined up. - Gutter Corner Splash demonstrates Serra's experimenting with the various properties of the medium. Partly inspired by the example of Jackson Pollock and Action Painting, Serra has explained that the Splash series grew out of his interest in an implied, reciprocal relationship between the artist, the work of art, and the subsequent viewer. - As though Serra were pouring liquid pigments or drawing, Gutter suggests multiple traditions of sculpture, from ancient bronze casting methods to Minimalism. The series also demonstrates Serra's evolving interest in site-specificity, as well as his preoccupation with the natural force of gravity, both of which have retained their importance in most of Serra's subsequent work. - One Ton Prop suggests various properties of gravity, weight, counterforce, sinuous movement & other physical & visual properties are embodied by steel, a material commonly used in architecture. Arising out of the recent, humorless history of Minimalism, One Ton Prop reintroduces to sculpture a sense of bodily pleasure, each plate of lead leaning gently against the other in a visual riddle, where it is impossible to ascertain beginning or ending, origin or destination. - Around 1970, Serra began focusing on large-scale site-specific sculpture, often on a scale that dwarfs the observer & highlighting a viewer's relationships to interior spaces & landscapes experienced by viewers in both physical and visual terms.His work is site specific meaning he makes a specific

Chiharu Shiota 1972 -

- Shiota's work is performances and installation, in which she uses various everyday objects such as beds, windows, dresses, shoes and suitcases. Her work is about the relationships between past and present, living and dying, and memories of people through they objects they own, or use. And as a performance artist her work makes reference to Butoh. - Chiharu Shiota was born in Osaka, Japan in 1972. She studied art in Germany and the work is reminiscent of early installation artwork, in the 1970s, because of it's immediacy of invention, when something is new, there is unpretentious freshness about it - her work captures that sensibility. - Her work invites the viewer in and restricts physical access at the same time. Using thread, she creates a language of memory, loss - you are removed through distance, even though you can be quite close and engaged. Through the manual labor of knotting and tying, the installations can be scene as performance, and the installation - the remains. - Thinking about the traces that people leave behind, Shiota collected discarded shoes represent memories of lost individuals and past moments.

Sophie Calle

- Sophie Calle is a French writer, photographer, installation artist, and conceptual artist. Calle's work is distinguished by its use of arbitrary sets of constraints, and evokes the French literary movement of the 1960s known as Oulipo. - Her work is about human vulnerability & examines identity & intimacy. She is recognized for her detective-like ability to follow strangers & investigate their private lives. Her photographic work often includes panels of text of her own writing. - Calle began her artistic projects in 1979 on returning to Paris after seven years' travel abroad. Disorientated, she felt like a stranger in her own city, not knowing how to occupy her time. She started to follow random passers-by & spend her days as they did. Eventually she picked up the camera she had been experimenting with during her time abroad and photographed the strangers, writing diaristic notes of their movements. - From this she has developed a particular way of working, collecting information about people who are absent and investigating her subjects like a detective. - For her first project, The Sleepers(1979), Calle invited strangers into her home to spend eight hours in her bed, while she documented their stay with notes and photographs. At the 1980 Bienal des Jeunes in Paris, she presented the photographs & notes in an installation that contrasted the intimacy of the photographs with the banality of textual descriptions written with cool anthropological detachment. - The combination of portraiture, Conceptual art & the public exposure of private experiences have driven Calle's subsequent work. - For one experiment, The Detective in 1980, Calle hired a private detective to follow her & noted how that day she visited all the places in Paris which held some emotional significance for her. Leading him through the Luxembourg Gardens, Calle remembers her first kiss which took place there, though the detective's report simply states, "The subject crosses the Jardin de Luxembourg". It is this disparity between personal and objective realities she explores throughout her work. - Alongside the photographs, Calle documents her surveillance, noting and evaluating her emotions as she trails the mystery figure, reminding herself that though she feels like she's in love with him, it is his very elusiveness she is drawn to. She describes the wide gap between her own thoughts and his, which she cannot know. And there is one meeting between the artist and her subject - Henri B. confronts her after she has strayed too close. - Sophie Calle The Hotel 1981I was hired as a temporary chambermaid for three weeks in a Venetian hotel. I was assigned twelve bedrooms on the fourth floor. In the course of my cleaning duties, I examined the personal belongings of the hotel guests and observed through details lives which remained unknown to me. Calle's descriptions of the hotel rooms & their contents combine factual documentation along with her personal response to the people whose lives she glimpsed by examining their belongings.A list of objects usually follows, as the artist transcribes her activities in the room. Calle is voyeuristic, reading diaries, letters, postcards, notes written or kept by the unknown guests, rummaging in suitcases, and looking into wardrobes & drawers. She sprays herself with their perfume, makes herself up using the contents of a vanity case, eats food left behind, salvages a pair of women's shoes left in the bin. Outside the room, she listens at doors, recording the occupants' conversations or any other sounds she may overhear, even peers into a room when the floor-waiter opens the door to catch a glimpse of the unknown guests. - Take Care of Yourself opens up ideas about love and heartache, gender and intimacy, labor & identity. 107 women (including a parrot) from the realms of anthropology, criminology, philosophy, psychiatry, theater, opera, soap opera and beyond each take on this letter, reading and re-reading it, performing it, transforming it, and pursuing the emotions it contains & elicits.

Mona Hatoum Quotes

- The basis of it is a feeling of wanting to be free of all those restrictions, whether it's social or political, that are always put on people," she said, "so I can be whatever i want to be."

Tony Oursler - 1957

- Tony Oursler makes videos of himself and other speaking, reading poetry and in conversation, that are projected on fabricated heads - sometimes focusing on parts of the body, often they are floating in a room, suspended. - THE pieces are scripted and have elaborate soundtracks that are orchestrated, they draw on anime, the inner self. - He assumes other identities to speak freely, to instill a highly charged atmosphere, fear or sadness, or a primal response to be human. •As a pioneer of video art in early 1980s New York, Oursler specialized in hallucinogenic story telling and radical experimentation, using animation, montage and live action: •From performance and low-fi beginnings, Oursler has developed multimedia and audio-visual work, utilizing projections, video screens, sculptures and optical devices, which might take form as figurative puppets, ethereal talking automatons or immersive, cacophonous environments. •He is interested in the conjunction between the diametrically opposed worlds of science and spiritualism and explores all kinds of mystical phenomena.

Mathieu Tremblin

- Turns graffiti into standardized/deciphered text - Does the graffiti art in france

Andy Warhol 1928 - 1987

- Warhol created an immense body of work between 1960 and his death in 1987, including prints, paintings, and sculptures, and films - Born Andrew Warhola the son of Polish immigrants in Pittsburgh. - After getting his degree in illustration he begins working as a graphic artist in New York, later shifts to painting - Upon graduating from college in 1949, Warhol's early career was dedicated to commercial & advertising art, where his first commission had been to draw shoes for Glamour magazine in the late 1940s.In the 1950s, Warhol worked as a designer for shoe manufacturer Israel Miller. - From the commercial design work he learned & adopted techniques for making multiples like tracing or silk screen. - He designed book covers &also worked for the music industry designing album covers. - Consumer goods & ad images were flooding the lives of Americans with the prosperity of that age and Warhol set out to recreate that abundance & commercialism. - Andy Warhol famously appropriated familiar images from consumer culture and mass media, among them celebrity & tabloid news photographs, comic strips, and the widely consumed canned soup made by the Campbell's Soup Company. - When he first exhibited Campbell's Soup Cans in 1962, the canvases were displayed together on shelves, like products in a grocery aisle. At the time, Campbell's sold 32 soup varieties; each one of Warhol's 32 canvases corresponds to a different flavor. - Though Campbell's Soup Cans resembles the mass-produced, printed advertisements by which Warhol was inspired, its canvases are hand-painted, and the fleur de lyspattern ringing each can's bottom edge is hand-stamped. Warhol mimicked the repetition & uniformity of advertising by carefully reproducing the same image across each individual canvas. He varied only the label on the front of each can, distinguishing them by their variety.Warhol said of Campbell's soup - After her sudden death from an overdose of sleeping pills in August 1962, superstar Marilyn Monroe's life, career, and tragedy became a worldwide obsession. Warhol, being infatuated with fame & pop culture, and Marilyn Monroe was a legend. After her death, Warhol based many works on the same photograph of her, a publicity still for the 1953 movie Niagara. - A common idea to all the Marilyn works was that her image was reproduced over & over again as one would find it reprinted in newspapers and magazines at the time. Warhol's idea was after viewing dozens, or hundreds of such images, a viewer stops seeing a person depicted, but is left with an icon of popular, consumer culture. The image (and the person) become another cereal box on the supermarket shelf, one of hundreds of boxes -which are all exactly the same. - The suite also marked a turning point in Warhol's career as he embraced silkscreen printing—a technique that allowed him to mass-produce images of his muses, erasing the imperfections that made them human in the process. - As a symbol surrounding her face, the golden field in Gold Marilyn Monroe recalls the religious icons of Christian art history. - The subject matter of Pop Art, far from traditional "high art" themes of morality, mythology, and classic history; rather, Pop artists celebrated commonplace objects and people of everyday life, in this way seeking to elevate popular culture to the level of fine art. Owing to the incorporation of commercial images, Pop art has become one of the most recognizable styles of modern art. - Warhol created a strobe effect by overlapping images of the singer from a publicity still for the Western film Flaming Star (1960). The silver ground is luxe & glamourous, & practical as the opacity of the spray paint allowed for easily masking & to screen multiple images on top of each other. This long, continuous canvas of Elvises was later cut and stretched into multiple paintings. - Warhol's Brillo Box sculptures are life-size replicas of real shipping cartons by Brillo, a popular brand of soap. At 17 x 17 x 14 inches in size, each authentic, cardboard Brillo box would have held 24 individual soup pads. Warhol's Brillo Box, were constructed with plywood. - Like Campbell's Soup Cans , Brillo Boxes was an example of Warhol's fascination with mass-produced images, packaging & items, blurring the line between art & everyday commodities.

Rachel Whiteread 1963 -

- Whiteread is a sculptor, whose work takes the form of casts. She was the first woman to win the annual Turner Prize in 1993. She is renowned for large scale sculptural casts of negative spaces. Among her most well known work is ghost house, a large concrete cast of the inside of an entire Victorian house. Whiteread'sinterests are rooted in monumentality, the material, form and memory. •The early 1990s were a time of upheaval for the predominantly working class neighborhoods of the east end of London. the same thing was happening in NY and in all metropolitan centers in all cities around the world. Neighborhoods were being gentrified. •Renovations and revitalization was moving in on her low cost, working class neighborhood. large-scale demolition had left only one house standing. •Its occupier, Sydney Gale, was determined to hold out against the local council, but it was only a matter of time before it too was flattened. But before it was demolished, Whiteread cast the interior of the house in concrete. - Whiteread and a team of workers used a meticulous process that involved pumping - 193 grove road - full of liquid concrete and stripping off the exterior of the house itself - so that only the impression of its inside remained. - The result was an extraordinary work of art, an impenetrable inversion of domesticity. Almost as soon as its shell was peeled off, housestood at the center of a national debate; whether it was praised it as 'one of the most extraordinary and imaginative public sculptures created by an English artist -or other condemned it as 'meritless gigantism' and a waste of resources. - A house is a resonant monument both to the individuals who once occupied this room, and to our collective memories of home. - She filled them with plaster, peeled away the exteriors and was left with perfect casts, each recording and preserving all the bumps and indentations on the inside. - Whiteread wanted to retain their quality as containers, so she had them re-fabricated in a translucent polyethylene which reveals a sense of an interior. And rather than make precious objects of them, she constructed thousands. - Whiteread has created two haunting, derelict white structures made from found wood and metal. - Over the past four decades, she has used the method of casting on both "low" materials such as concrete, resin, rubber, and plaster, as well as more traditional sculptural materials, such as bronze.

Yang Fudong 1971, Beijing

- Yang's visual language has always been dreamy and mysterious. His characters, often silent and disembodied, usually move according to choreographed gestures and transport the viewer into an aesthetically perfect environment. His work deliberately suspends and confuses time. •The artist is exposing all the un-exposed elements of movie-making, but is laying bare more than just cinema. He's showing how narratives are constructed, and how identities are built out of that faked authenticity. •If your vision of the glorious past of your nation comes from books or movies, this shows how easy it is to fake all of that, and how easy we are to manipulate as a result. •This piece acts as a critique of authenticity, of identity and belief. - After every day of filming, the recorded material was edited into what Yang calls Dynasty Diaries: short extracts of raw footage showing how the shooting process looks and works. These were then made available for the following day's gallery intake.

Niki de Saint Phalle

- a French-American sculptor, painter, filmmaker, and author of colorful hand-illustrated books. Widely noted as one of the few female monumental sculptors, Saint Phalle was also known for her social commitment and work. 1930- 2002 - Early on, Saint Phalle pushed against accepted artistic norms, creating artworks that used assemblage and performance—such as shooting at her canvases-as well as large-scale sculptures like her Nanas. From the late 1960s onwards, Saint Phalleexpanded her practice to include architectural projects, sculpture gardens, books, prints, films, theater sets, clothing, jewelry, and, famously, her own perfume. The artist's conducts multiple interdisciplinary endeavours, focusing on the visionary architecture & utopian sculpture environments that formed the core of her later work. - Saint Phalle produced fantastical and figurative houses, parks, and playgrounds. These structures were charged spaces of imagination from which she envisioned experimental societies emerging, places "where you could have a new kind of life, to just be free." Central to this vision was Tarot Garden, a massive sculptural installation outside of Rome, open to the public since 1998. The intricate detailing and organic shapes of the garden's structures, based on the 22 Major Arcana of the tarot deck, underscore Saint Phalle's belief that art can alter perception and shift reality. - From the very outset of her career in the 1950s, Niki de Saint Phalle (American and French, 1930‒2002) defied artistic conventions, creating works that were overtly feminist, performative, collaborative, and monumental. Saint Phalle's interdisciplinary approach and engagement with pressing social issues. Innovation was key to Saint Phalle'sprocess: she envisioned new ways of inhabiting the world. - These large, faceless figures, called Nanas, with spherical breasts and broad hips and hot-colored patterning, may now look like benign '60s artifacts. But for Saint Phallethe Nanas were fierce things, threatening the patriarchy, with the potential to become what she saw deep inside herself: une terroriste, with the feminine article. - A Nana on her back, Hon, contained a cinema, a milk bar, and a goldfish pond among its amenities. With the entrance to this fun palace located between the female giant's legs, the viewers streaming into her, could not help but be implicated in the artists' garish, carnivalesque take on the reclining nude—at once divinely abundant and carelessly despoiled, both devouring and giving birth to eager crowds. - In addition to Saint Phalle's forthright strategies of confrontation, there is a subtler sardonic vulgarity or perversity in many of these projects that provides vital context for the later Nanas, priming viewers to perceive the unsettling qualities of what might otherwise seem to be unthreatening or kitsch celebrations of goddess femininity. Beneath their gaiety lies a strange grotesqueness; they are still vulnerable to exploitation and violence. - Tirs (Shooting) Picture 1961: These paintings were made by fixing plastic bags of paint to a board, and covering them with a thick plaster surface. Viewers were then invited to shoot a rifle at the surface, popping the bags and causing the paint to run down the textured white surface. This particular work was shot at by a number of notable artists, including Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. - The process of creating the work became a live performative event done in the public eye and with the public's participation, challenging traditional perceptions of the artist as a solitary, hermetic figure. Shooting Paintingsinvolve the viewer directly & physically in the creation of work, & leave the resulting image to chance. - The element of spectacle, with the arresting image of a young woman wielding a gun for making art, was a crucial aspect of these performance-paintings. The Tirsevents drew artists & actors, Jane Fonda, whose image as a young political dissident of the state was also a media spectacle in the 1960s.

NAM JUN PAIK Quotes

-"My experimental tv is not always interesting but not always uninteresting. like nature, which is beautiful, not because it changes beautifully, but simply because it changes..." - "I want to shape the TV screen canvas as precisely as Leonardo, as freely as Picasso, as colorfully as Renoir, as profoundly as Mondrian, as violently as Pollock and as lyrically as Jasper Johns."

Pipilotti Rist

-Video artist -Studied in vienna, austria -Inspired by Viennese Artists -altered color, sound, and speed -body, human sexuality, and gender -create a sense of calm among violent chaos -poetic use of magical realism -distorts space in her work

Sylvia Palacios

-performance artist -did the piece "Passing through"

Tania Bruguera

A cuban performance artist and explores issues of power in her work.

Who Painted Self Portrait as a Fountain

Bruce Nauman

What did Lucio Fontana do to his paintings?

Burned, slashed, and painted on sand

Do Ho Suh 1962 -

DO-HO SUH'S PIECE, "348 WEST 22ND ST., APT. A, NEW YORK, NY 10011." IT WAS 2003.IT IS PART OF HIS "THE PERFECT HOME" SERIES WHERE HE CREATES FULL-SCALE REPLICAS OF HIS APARTMENTS OUT OF TRANSPARENT NYLON. THIS SERIES REFERS TO HIS TRANSIENT LIFE BETWEEN SEOUL AND NEW YORK CITY, WITH THE WORKS RESEMBLING THE SURREAL MEMORY OF SPACE AND PLACE. THE NYLON WALLS HANG WEIGHTLESSLY FROM A MINIMAL METAL FRAME. SUH RECREATES EVERY ELEMENT OF HIS CHELSEA APARTMENT, INCLUDING WINDOWS, DOORS, FIREPLACE, APPLIANCES, FAUCETS, AND ALL THE LIGHT SWITCHES. HE STITCHED A BRICK PATTERN AROUND THE FIREPLACE AND A TILE PATTERN IN THE BATHROOM. - HIS WORK DEFIES CONVENTIONAL IDEAS OF SCALE AND SITE-SPECIFICITY, SUH'S WORK DRAWS ATTENTION TO THE WAYS VIEWERS OCCUPY AND INHABIT PUBLIC SPACE OF THE GALLERY AND PRIVIATE SPACE OF HOME. HE IS INTERESTED IN THE MALLEABILITY OF SPACE IN BOTH PHYSICAL AND METAPHORICAL WAYS. THE PIECES ARE SO ETHERIAL AND SEEMING EMPHEMERAL BUT OUR REAL EXPERIENCES OF - THESE PLACES ARE DIFFERENT, AND BRING THE VIEWER BACK TO REAL EXPERIENCE AND TO MEMORY. •THE USE OF TRANSLUCENT CLOTH ADDS TO THE SENSE OF ENGAGING THE VIEWER INVITING PARTICIPATION, WELCOMING THE VIEWER INSIDE •THE WORK CARRIES THE IDEA OF OPENNESS, AS WE SEE THROUGH THESE GAUZY SCREENS THAT CONTRAST SO LIGHTLY WITH HEAVY BRICKS AND MORTAR. - THESE ARE ALL SITE-SPECIFIC INSTALLATIONS. HIS WORKS SEEMS to DECSRIBE THE BOUNDARIES OF IDENTITY, AND THE IDENTITY OF THE INDIVIDUAL IN TODAY'S INCREASINGLY TRANSNATIONAL, GLOBAL SOCIETY. - THE WORKS BRINGS ONE TO THINK ABOUT HISTORY, THE HISTORY OF CULTURE, ONE'S OWN CULTURE AND IDENTITY, FAMILY, A BLOOD LINE •NOW THE PIECES ARE SO LARGE AND COMPLEX, HE USES A 3D SCALNNER TO HELP WITH FABRICATION. •THIS PIECE IS CALLED HOME WITHIN A HOME HOME WITHIN HOME WITHIN HOME WITHIN HOME WITHIN HOME' . •IT IS A FULL-SCALE RECREATION OF THE RESIDENTIAL BUILDING IN PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND —THE ARTIST'S FIRST ADDRESS IN THE UNITED STATES —SURROUNDS 'SEOUL HOME,' A REPLICA OF A TRADITIONAL KOREAN STYLE HOUSE, WHERE HE WAS RAISED AS A CHILD. •THE STRUCTURE IS SUSPENDED FROM THE CEILING, FLOATING BETWEEN THE MULTI-LAYERED PANELS OF SEMI-OPAQUE, BLUE COLORED TEXTILE THAT ENCOMPASS IT.

Who said "Have-not-ness permeates everything I do?"

Pope L.

Tony Oursler Quotes

•"My early idea of what could be art for my generation was an exploded TV". - The work is, in part - about the idea that we live in the age of spectacle and that we we struggle to assign meaning to the glut of images the are part of our daily lives - tv, the movies, the internet, we are saturated. The fractured and disconnected but recognizable bits of what it means to be human, troublesome, disturbing, funny and sad - some time all the same time. - Here video is conflated with painting. The projections, are displayed on 3 dimensional forms. They screen images of eyes & mouths stretched digitally into amoebalike shapes. Audio accompanying several works is so low that you have to stand close to catch an occasional muttered phrase. - Ousler is a master of distortion. These are very strange yet we relate to it as human, all art that is figurative in any way, has the semblance of recognition, grotesque, funny distressing -- plays with our sense of self. Conceived as a kind of 'psycho-landscape', the work consists of monologues performed by ethereal figures which are projected onto shapes, placed all around the gallery.

Kara Walker Quotes

•"There's no diploma in the world that declares you as an artist. You can declare yourself an artist and then figure out how to be an artist."

Horace Pippin Quotes

•"When I was a boy I loved to make pictures," he once wrote, but war "brought out all the art in me. . . . I can never forget suffering and I will never forget sunsets. So I came home with all of it in my mind and I paint from it today."

Ann Hamilton 1956 -

•ANN HAMILTON IS A VISUAL ARTIST INTERNATIONALLY RECOGNIZED FOR THE SENSORY SURROUNDS OF HER LARGE-SCALE MULTI-MEDIA INSTALLATIONS. USING TIME AS PROCESS AND MATERIAL, HER METHODS OF MAKING INSTALLATIONS SERVE AS AN OF COLLECTIVE VOICE, OF COMMUNITIES PAST AND OF LABOR PRESENT. •NOTED FOR A DENSE ACCUMULATION OF MATERIALS, HER EPHEMERAL ENVIRONMENTS CREATE IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCES THAT POETICALLY RESPOND TO THE ARCHITECTURAL PRESENCE AND SOCIAL HISTORY OF THEIR SITES. •HER ATTENTION TO SOUND OR THE SHAPING OF A WORD I IN HER WORK, PLACES LANGUAGE AND TEXT AT THE TANGIBLE AND CENTER OF HER INSTALLATIONS. HER WORK IS MADE UP OF THE THOUGHTS AND FEELINGS THAT CONSTRUCT MEMORY, REASON AND IMAGINATION. - IN A TIME WHEN GENERATIONS OF TECHNOLOGY AMPLIFY HUMAN PRESENCE AT DISTANCES FOR GREATER THAN THE REACH OF THE HAND, WHAT BECOMES THE PLACE AND FORM OF MAKING AT THE SCALE AND PACE OF THE INDIVIDUAL BODY? - Ann Hamilton began habitus by exploring Philadelphia's textile collections and visiting some of its generations-old textile producers. Seeing looms that have been in operation for decades and watching raw material become a single thread, then a warp, and then a weft of a cloth: these experiences inspired the making of habitus. - Cloth and the history of textile production in the city form the foundation of Hamilton's project. At Pier 9, the former industrial space is filled with 12 spinning curtains that hang from the steel beams and girders that crisscross the ceiling. Next to each curtain are two thick ropes that are attached to a pulley system. These ropes activate the curtains when the visitor pulls them: the fabric forms begin to spin, slowly, emitting a wheeze of an accordion or bells ringing.

Leonardo Drew 1961 -

•Although often mistaken for accumulations of found objects, Leonardo Drew's sculptures are instead made of "brand new stuff"—materials such as wood, rusted iron, cotton, paper, and mud—that he intentionally subjects to processes of weathering, burning, oxidation, and decay. •Whether jutting out from a wall or traversing rooms as freestanding installations, his pieces challenge the architecture of the space in which they're shown. •Never content with work that comes easily, Drew constantly reaches beyond "what's comfortable" and charts a course of daily investigation, never knowing what the work will be about but letting it find its way, and asking, "What if...." •Included a multi-room piece, constructed from thousands of pieces wood -- thin strips, slivers, blocks, some charred and painted. •The individual pieces of wood were stacked against each other, suspended from the ceiling, strewn on the floor, tightly wedged together, elegantly pieced in layers, and, in some sculptures, combined with other materials such as metal and graphite. •To create the installation, #80 - at the Fabric Workshop & Museum in Philadelphia, in 2002 Drew and the workshop fabricators, collected over four hundred common objects—toys, furniture, appliances, and household wares—from thrift stores, junkyards, and off the street. •They cast each object in paper, removing the original object once the paper cast was complete. These paper shells are hollow, nearly weightless forms that echo the original objects from which they were made more than they replicate them. They act as ghost objects, almost weightless, just referring to the form of function of what came before. - Leonardo Drew's work has been described as "somber and full of memory" and though number 80 is a departure from the darker tones of much of the artist's previous work, a contemplative mood still prevails. - Instead of presenting the ongoing and transformed life of discarded objects, the installation takes us beyond the life of the object itself and portrays the ethereal essence of things that once existed.

Robert Colescott 1925 - 2009

•COLSCOTT IS KNOWN FOR SATIRICAL GENRE, OFTEN CONVEYING HIS EXUBERANT, COMICAL, OR BITTER REFLECTIONS ON BEING AFRICAN-AMERICAN. •COLSCOTT WAS INFLUENTIAL ON MANY ARTIST WORKING TODAY, KARA WALKER, WILLIAM POPE L, ELLEN GALLAGER. - LIKE MANY ARTISTS OF HIS GENERATION, WAS BOTH AN INFLUENTIAL TEACHER & PAINTER. HE TAUGHT AT PORTLAND STATE UNIVERSITY FROM 1957 - 1966 AND THEN AT CAL STATE STANISLAUS, UC BERKELEY AND SFAI. -COLESCOTT'S WORK ACHIEVED NATIONAL ATTENTION THROUGH A SERIES OF WORKS BASED ON ICONIC PAINTINGS FROM ART HISTORY. -COLESCOTT'S WORK COMMENTS ON WHITE PERCEPTIONS OF BLACKS AND BLACK PERCEPTIONS OF WHITES AND SHOWS HOW RACISM AND DEFINE BLACK IDENTITY. -His paintings are loaded up with references to culture and the history of art itself, in homages to specific paintings, and to the traditional conventions of painting documenting history, portraiture, landscape, still life and allegory. -No American painter of the late 20th century made such telling use of painting's European past to lambaste the painful contradictions of the American present. -With his disregard for simplistic narratives regarding race and sex, he helped set the stage for transgressive work by painters like Ellen Gallagher and Kerry James Marshal. - series of appropriated art based on famous pieces of work

Conceptual Art

•Conceptual artists link their work to a tradition of Marcel Duchamp whose readymades had altered the very definition of art. Like Duchamp, they abandoned beauty, rarity, and skill as measures of art.•Conceptual artists recognize that all art is essentially conceptual. In order to emphasize this, many Conceptual artists reduced the material presence of the work to an absolute minimum - referred to as the "dematerialization" of art.•Conceptual artists were influenced by the brutal simplicity of Minimalism, but they rejected Minimalism's embrace of the conventions of sculpture & painting as mainstays of artistic production. For Conceptual artists, art need not look like a traditional work of art, or even take any physical form at all.•The analysis of art that was pursued by many Conceptual artists encouraged them to believe that if the artist began the artwork, the museum or gallery and the audience in some way completed it. This category of Conceptual art is known as 'institutional critique,' which can be understood as part of an even greater shift away from emphasizing the object-based work of art to pointedly expressing cultural values of society at large

Setting the stage for Video Art:

•DOCUMENTATION/DOCUMENTARY •TECHNOLOGY ADVANCES - cameras that recorded video tape•TELEVISION TECHNOLOGY•CINEMA AND THE MOVING IMAGE•PHOTOGRAPHY•THE TEMPORAL - IN ALL ART

Doug Aiken 1968 -

•DOUG Aitken's Migration (Empire), 2008, addresses the problematic question of what happens when human and animal worlds collide. •MIGRATION (EMPIRE) considers the effects of westward expansion and its impact on the landscape while also reflecting on popularly-held notions of what constitutes the American West. Aitken explains: "it's almost like a survey of the landscape . . . it's a cinematic portrayal of an idea that's somewhat fictional, futuristic, yet set within our current reality."

Takeshi Murakami 1962 -

•Following the Tōhoku earthquake of 2011 and the subsequent nuclear crisis at Fukushima, Murakami began exploring the impact of historical natural disasters on Japanese art and culture. •In his 2014 Gagosian exhibition at in New York, In the Land of the Dead, Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow, he created an immersive installation. - TAKASHI MURAKAMI HAS STATED THAT THE ARTIST IS SOMEONE WHO UNDERSTANDS THE BORDERS BETWEEN WORLDS AND WHO MAKES AN EFFORT TO KNOW THEM. - Here is a contemporary belief system, constructed in the wake of disaster, that merges faith, myth, and with the artist's imagination. - In totemic sculptures representing demons, religious sites, and self-portraits. - The work conflates classical Japanese techniques with abstract expressionism science-fiction, manga, and Buddhist and Shinto imagery, Murakami investigates the role of faith amid the inexorable transience and trauma of existence. •MURAKAMI is also a curator, a cultural entrepreneur, and a critical observer of contemporary Japanese society. In 2000, he organized a paradigmatic exhibition of Japanese art titled "superflat," which traced the origins of contemporary Japanese visual pop culture in historical Japanese art. •"Superflat" is used by Murakami to refer to various flattened forms in Japanese graphic art, animation, pop culture and fine arts, as well as the "shallow emptiness of Japanese consumer culture.

Jean-Michele Basquiat

•Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988)was an American Artist who first gained a wide audience as a graffiti artist in New York City during the rage of the punk music scene. •Basquiat grew up in Brooklyn. His first efforts at graffiti were the mark SAMO, standing in for ("SAMe Old Shit). •In 1980 he participated in his first public exhibition, the seminal Times Square Show. •After the show and his work was exposed to a wide audience, he began to be part of the growing conversation of street art. He became friends with Andy Warhol. They were collaborators for a while, making work together. •Being part of the artist who played and worked at the Factory, Warhol's famous studio building was an enormous boost for his work and career. - Basquiat is the most well known & successful dead artist of our time, one of the most anyway.Starting out as a graffiti artist he built a huge career as a wildly expressionistic painter. - Basquiat's art focused on social commentary & as a young black painter in a predominantly white artist world & the idea of personal dichotomies, such as wealth versus poverty, integration versus segregation, & the inner versus outer experience. - Basquiat appropriated poetry, drawing & painting, & married text & image, abstraction and figuration and historical information mixed with contemporary critique. And as a graffiti artist, Basquiat often incorporated words into his paintings - He would draw on random objects & surfaces, including other people's property. The conjunction of various media is an integral element of Basquiat's art. His paintings are covered with text & codes of all kinds: words, letters, numerals, pictograms, logos, map symbols, diagrams & more.... - We can read his pictures without effort—the words, the images, the colors & the construction - we are half-knowing of the mystery-within-familiarity- - We are not meant to analyze the pictures too carefully, but to feel the energy & the anger. - He was getting so famous by 1985 that on February 10, he appeared on the cover of the Sunday NY Times magazine in a feature titled "new art, new money: the marketing of an American artist".

Jessica Stockholder 1959 -

•Jessica Stockholder's site-specific interventions and autonomous floor and wall pieces have been described as "paintings in space." •Stockholder's complex installations incorporate the architecture in which they have been conceived, blanketing the floor, scaling walls and ceiling, and even spilling out of windows, through doors, and into the surrounding landscape •The work is highly improvised free-form installations incorporate a brilliant, wildly beautiful color palette and a diverse range of materials and found objects. the are references to domestic paraphernalia pots, carpets, curtains - where she is recreating the world. •They remind one familiar but unknown places. They are theatrical and sets for not theater to take place, but to experiencing the work becomes like being part of an event.

Ragnar Kjartansson - 1976, Iceland

•Kjartansson engages multiple artistic mediums, creating video installations, performances, drawings, and paintings that draw upon many different historical and cultural references. An underlying pathos and irony connect his works, with each deeply influenced by the comedy and tragedy of classical theater. •The artist blurs the distinctions between mediums, approaching his painting practice as performance, likening his films to paintings, and his performances to sculpture. Throughout, Kjartansson conveys an interest in beauty and its banality, and he uses durational, repetitive performance as a form of exploration. •Kjartansson says much of his work, with its emphasis on repetition, is ultimately about failing to reach perfection...."all the longing to make something great — but it's never great; it's always mediocre". •Desolation as Kjartansson repeatedly sings, "There are stars exploding around you, and there's nothing you can do," passing from a funerial like lamentation to gospel-like fervor.

Yayoi Kusama 1929 -

•Kusama's amalgamation of pop and minimalist art have manifested as hypnotic architectural interventions - dizzying visitors with illuminated mazes of sound, light, and color. •By the time Kusama left her native Japan for the United States in 1956, she'd already begun her practice of dot-making. Covering sheets of paper with repetitive marks not only fed her love of making art, but also helped her cope with the stress-induced hallucinations she'd experienced from a young age. •She's described difficulties as a result of her mother's violence and vehement disapproval of her artistic aspirations. •No longer wanting to be limited by painting flat surfaces, of the two-dimensional canvas as with Infinity Nets, Kusama started making sculpture and installations. •The stuffed sculpture continues Kusama's repetition of mark or objects in multiples. In her Accumulations series, using found furniture and clothing and covering them entirely in handmade phalluses. •The Accumulation series of sculptures feature this agglomeration of phallic forms. They are made by sewing a sock-like form and stuffing it with cotton. •Kusama has always made paintings. She has created an expansive series of square format paintings, this series all of them are about 6' square. They are colorful seas of oblong shapes, and figures that pattern the canvases, some of which are personified with faces and expressions. These rounded, forms suggest basic life forms, like cells and amoebas, tying back to one of Kusama's series of images of microscopic and macroscopic universes. •Kusama's work shows some attributes of feminism, minimalism, art brut, and abstract expressionism, and is infused with autobiographical, psychological, and sexual content. She is also a published novelist and poet. •Kusama talks about Dots Obsession as images that visually approximates the hallucinations she suffered as a child, in which the entirety of her surrounding space was covered with repeating patterns. The installation also reveals careful attention to the construction of space through color and form, and to the play of light and perspective accomplished by repeating a few simple devices — creating an immersive experience from red paint, white dots, giant balloons and mirrors.

Lois Mailou Jones 1905 - 1988

•MAILOU JONES WAS AN INFLUENTIAL ARTIST ON OTHERS DURING THE HARLEM RENNAISSANCE & LONG AFTER DURING HER LONG TEACHING & ARTISTIC CAREER. •JONES WAS THE ONLY AFRICAN-AMERICAN WOMAN PAINTER OF THE 1930S AND 1940S TO ACHIEVE FAME IN EUROPE. -artists and cultural ambassador -longest surviving member of the harlem renaissance -wanted to be known first and foremost as an artist

Henrique Oliveira 1973 -

•OLIVEIRA IS multi media artist who works making painting sculpture, and installation. •Oliveira's installations can be massive, often overtaking entire rooms and spaces. He first forms his shapes with PVC or wooden understructures and then wraps it in layers of plywood, stripping away layers to reveal different colors of wood. - Multimedia artist - found art materials - transarquitetonica - repurposed wooden materials - Sees every piece of wood as a brush stroke - Overwhelmig visual art

Alison Saar 1956 -

•Saar's work has often explored issues of race and gender, not only in terms of subject matter but also through the materials she uses that speak to her knowledge and appreciation of indigenous art. •Alison makes sculpture from used or found materials, old tin, such as used linens, hammered tin, as well as carved wood and plated- hammered tin, add texture and dimension to the works and by using them they add content and meaning to the work. •Her sculptures have their own personal vocabulary that speaks in a direct language about history, race, and mythology. she is influenced by the art of ancient Europe, Africa, African American Folk Art, and German Expressionism. Primarily, though, her works tell the stories of the African American experience.

Stanley Whitney 1946 -

•Stanley Whiney is an Abstract painter who has been exploring the formal possibilities of color within shifting grids of multi-hued blocks and all-over fields of gestural marks and passages, since the mid-1970s. •Taking his cues from early Minimalism, Color Field painters, jazz music and his favorite historical artists -- Whitney is part of the process-based, spatially-gridded square in art as Josef Albers, Sol LeWitt, Agnes Martin and Carl Andre. •Whitney sets colors against one another to evoke harmonious or contrasting relationships. The differing transitions and boundaries between these colored elements allows Whitney to play endlessly with an infinite number of possible configurations, while the relative density, transparency and blurring of his rectangular shapes can also make or break the final composition of each work. •Josef Albers, color theorist studies are, in part, a basis for his work. As might be the performative act of painting. •Examples of jazz and African music are often cited by Whitney as sources for his poly-rhythmatic, all-over fields of paint, •These paintings refer to the sensationally modern geometric Gees Bend quilts.

NAM JUN PAIK 1932- 2006

•THAT'S what we think of when an artist is creating a new art form, is that he's exploring, exploiting, developing, transforming the properties of the medium, just as when painters and sculptors introduce new materials into those art forms. He was here making something that was created out of the properties of the electronic medium. So, you could make apparel to the abstract expressionist painters, he was exploiting the inherent properties of his medium. -john cage influenced paik - became a founding member of fluxus - first artist to show abstract art on television

Thornton Dial 1928 - 2016

•THORNTON DIAL WAS BORN IN 1928 IN EMELLE, ALABAMA. •DIAL IS A SELF-TAUGHT, ILLITRATE, ARTIST WHO CAME TO PROMINENCE IN THE UNITED STATES IN THE LATE 1980S. •DIAL GREW UP IN POVERTY, WITHOUT A FATHER. HE LIVED PART OF HIS CHILDHOOD WITH A COUSIN WHO WAS AN ARTIST WHO MADE WORK FROM DISCARDED JUNK. •IN 1940, WHEN HE WAS 12, DIAL MOVED TO BESSEMER, ALABAMA WHERE HE LIVED HIS WHOLE LIFE. - THORTON DIAL'S PRINCIPAL PLACE OF EMPLOYMENT WAS AS A METALWORKER AT THE PULLMAN STANDARD PLANT IN BESSEMER, ALABAMA, WHICH MADE RAILROAD CARS. THE PLANT CLOSED ITS DOORS IN 1981. - AFTER THE PULLMAN FACTORY SHUT DOWN, DIAL BEGAN TO DEDICATE HIMSELF TO HIS WORK AS AN ARTIST. IN 1987, HE WAS INTRODUCED TO BILL ARNETT, A LOCAL ART COLLECTOR OF GREAT INFLUENCE WHO BROUGHT DIAL'S WORK TO PUBLIC ATTENTION. - DIAL LIVED, WORKED, AND CREATED ART IN ALABAMA FOR HIS ENTIRE LIFE. •Dial's paintings and assemblages draw inspiration from the rich aesthetic traditions of the black South. Among these is the African American yard show, a highly influential yet little-recognized genre of found-object sculptural display that employs cast-off materials, like this one that uses bones. - THERE ARE INHERENT BIASES & HYPOCRISIES OF THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE ART WORLD. - DESPITE THE ACCOMPLISHMENT OF HIS WORKS, THE CULTURAL ART CRITICS EARLY ON IN HIS CAREER WERE MORE COMFORTABLE PLACING HIM INTO CATEGORIES OF FOLK OR OUTSIDER ARTIST. - HIS IS WORK IS NOW GREATLY RECOGNISED AND VALUED. HIS WORK HAS BEEN SHOWED AT THE WHITNEY, THE MUSEUM OF FINES ARTS BOSTON, THR VIRGINA MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS ,AND THE SMITHSONIAN IN WASHINGTON D.C. -found objects were his medium -he painted with objects, so his work could almost be considered a sculpture

Teri Frame

•Terri Frame considers the ideal western paradigms such as the model of proportion as from classical Greek statuary which are youthful, healthy, whole, and symmetrical. •These ideals are gendered, classed, and racially specific. Notions of beauty have been at the forefront of philosophical inquiry for centuries. In this contemporary setting, where aesthetic surgery and genetic manipulation abound, they are particularly relevant.

Carrie Mae Weems 1943 -

•These early documentary style photographic of black stereotypes, is the kind of work works she has consistently intended, to set out to visually define the world for herself her place in the world. •These are from the series 'aint joking' 1987 and are some the first images that drew attention to her work. As she boldly depicted African American stereotypes •These images are taken in her kitchen, another early series of work from 1990. Carrie Mae Weems' work deals with the idea of power and the consequences of power; relationships are made & articulated through power. •Autobiography, is important: the role of narrative, the social levels of humor, the deconstruction of documentary, the construction of history, the use of text, storytelling, performance, and the role of memory ..... - With From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried, Carrie Mae Weems reveals how photography has played a key role throughout history in shaping and supporting racism, stereotyping and social injustice. •Carrie Mae Weems represents what art is about — exposing people to diverse situations and experiences and allowing them to form their own opinions. •Her work speaks to our humanity — the things that bring us together, like family and humor, and those that tear us apart, like sexism and racism. -appropriated art and added her own commentary - explores power and the consequences of power - narrative work of images - themes of memory and performance

Bill Viola 1951 - Present

•VIOLA'S work often exhibits a painterly quality, his use of ultra-slow motion video encouraging the viewer to sink into to the image and connect deeply to the meanings contained within it. -And his work is known for the expression of extreme opposites. For example, themes such as, light and dark, stress and calm, loud and quiet... •Viola uses of strong lighting effects to dramatically express spiritual subject matter. - Throughout his narratives, the elemental forces of fire and water which can symbolize change, redemption, transformation and renewal are common themes. He is of the conviction that technologies have the capacity to channel direct experience of spiritual phenomena - Viola aims to externalize the internal realm of the unconscious, providing space for the contemplation of what he sees as the universal, mystical truths of Eastern and Western religious traditions. - fire and water are common themes - explores the relationship between the artistic and the spiritual - human consciousness and experience

William Kentridge - 1955

•William Kentridge was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, and both of his parents were lawyers and were famous for the defense of victims of apartheid. His work is often about issues of social injustice. •Having witnessed first-hand one of the twentieth century's most contentious struggles—the dissolution of apartheid—Kentridge brings the ambiguity and subtlety of personal experience to public and political subjects. •Using film, drawing, sculpture, animation, and performance, he transmutes sobering political events into powerful poetic allegories. Kentridge photographs his charcoal drawings and paper collages over time, recording scenes as they evolve. •Working without a script or storyboard, he plots out each animated film, preserving every addition and erasure. Aware of myriad ways in which we construct the world by looking, Kentridge vision is a rare and most remarkable. - Unclassifiable artist because he did everything - Used charcoal as a way of thinking because It could easily be erased.