art history

Kui Hua Zi (Sunflower Seeds). Ai Weiwei. 2010–2011 C.E. Sculpted and painted porcelain consists of more than 100 million tiny, handmade porcelain sunflower seeds They filled the enormous Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, an industrial building-turned-contemporary art space. Sunflower seeds evokes a warm personal memory for the artist, who recalls that while he was growing up, even the poorest in China would share sunflower seeds as a treat among friends.  Communist propaganda optimistically depicted leader Mao Zedong as the sun and the citizens of the People’s Republic of China as sunflowers, turning toward their chairman. Ai Weiwei reasserts the sunflower seed as a symbol of camaraderie during difficult times. Though each of the 100 million carefully crafted individual seeds can draw the viewer's attention, once arranged together in a neat rectangle, or covering the floor of an entire room, the hyper-realistic seeds create a sense of vastness. The individual seed is lost among t...

MAXXI National Museum of XXI Century Arts. Rome, Italy. Zaha Hadid (architect). 2009 C.E. Glass, steel, and cement. Center of Rome Devoted to 21st century art Modern building surrounded by older ones Concrete, reminiscent of the International style Translucency, transparency  Inspired by geometric lines, clean, ribbon for people to walk up; this is present in the museum Sharp angles, rectilinear; moves eternally Rushing from one space to another; other times slowing down 

Shibboleth. Doris Salcedo. 2007–2008 C.E. Installation. In the eighth iteration, the Colombian artist Doris Salcedo produced Shibboleth, a deep meandering crack in the floor. Despite the unassuming nature of this work, it defies neat description and exists in a limbo between sculpture and installation Salcedo’s installation requires attentive viewing. The rupture measures 548 feet in length but its width and depth vary The viewer’s perception into the crevice alters, as he or she walks and shifts to better glimpse inside the cracks and appreciate the interior space Change in perspective is one of Salcedo’s goals. “Shibboleth,” a codeword that distinguishes people who belong from those who do not. Salcedo’s experience as a Colombian artist working abroad has made her especially sympathetic to the plight of marginalized people. Salcedo’s act remains transgressive: the act of deliberately breaking one’s media (in this case a concrete floor) is an act of rebellion. Is this paintin...

Preying Mantra. Wangechi Mutu. 2006 C.E. Mixed media on Mylar. Using the medium of collage, the artist Wangechi Mutu creates new worlds that re-imagine culture through the realm of fantasy. Mutu was born in Nairobi, Kenya and educated in Europe and the United States. Her art is global in nature and she clearly relishes complicating both Western and non-Western cultural norms; questioning how we see gender, sexuality, and even cultural identity. Wangechi Mutu’s artistic practice includes video, installation, sculpture, and mixed-media collage. One of her recurrent themes concerns the violence of colonial domination in Africa (particularly in her native Kenya). Her images incorporate the female body subjected to sexism and racism on a global scale. Sources for Mutu’s collages include fragments from fashion magazines, pornography, medical literature or even popular magazines such as National Geographic. Inspiration for her collages can be traced to the early photomontages of the Ger...

Stadia II. Julie Mehretu. 2004 C.E. Ink and acrylic on canvas. The built environment, for Mehretu, provides a setting in which people can gather, protest, pray, and riot in mass numbers. In her monumental paintings, murals, and works on paper, Julie Mehretu overlays architectural plans, diagrams, and maps of the urban environment with abstract forms and personal notations. The resulting compositions convey the energy and chaos of today’s globalized world. explores themes such as nationalism and revolution as they occur in the worlds of art, sports, and contemporary politics. Gaze back into the painting and observe the various shards of color floating over the work’s architectural skeleton. The scene, however abstract, could easily represent our visualization of the sports arena. Small circles, dots, and hash marks float through the open space at the center of the composition, resembling the eruption of confetti that announces a winning team’s victory he cluster of red and blue str...

Old Man’s Cloth. El Anatsui. 2003 C.E. Aluminum and copper wire. Arranged within a shifting grid of stripes and blocks of color, the components form their own internal maps across the surface, melding into vertical gold bands, interlocking black and silver rows, or a deviant red piece floating in a field of black. While Old Man’s Cloth would have been laid flat during its construction, it is contorted and manipulated during installation, so that the individual metal pieces can catch the light from every angle. This brilliant visual effect makes its humble origins all the more impressive. Old Man’s Cloth has been constructed from flattened liquor bottle labels that the artist collects near his home in Southern Nigeria.  Anatsui’s practice emerges from a more expanded understanding of what art can be that stems from both the radical practices of the late-1960s, and from a vantage point outside of the Western tradition completely The bottle caps, for Anatsui, signify a fraught hi...

The Swing (after Fragonard). Yinka Shonibare. 2001 C.E. Mixed-media installation The Swing (After Fragonard) is a three-dimensional recreation of the Rococo painting after which it was titled, which itself offers testimony to the opulence and frivolity of pre-Revolutionary France Shonibare’s quotations of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century style and sensibility are visually captivating; at the same time, tableaux such as The Swing contain some dark undertones.  To begin with, the beautiful young protagonist of Fragonard’s painting has somehow become headless. This is likely a reference to the use of the guillotine during the Reign of Terror in the 1790s, when members of the French aristocracy were publicly beheaded.   Shonibare invites us to also consider the increasing disparity between economic classes today, especially alongside the growing culture of paranoia, terror and xenophobia in global politics since 9/11. honibare is especially perceptive to the ways in...

Darkytown Rebellion. Kara Walker. 2001 C.E. Cut paper and projection on wall. tests the participant’s tolerance for imagery that occupies the nebulous space between racism and race affirmation. Here, a brilliant pattern of colors washes over a wall full of silhouettes enacting a dramatic rebellion, giving the viewer the unforgettable experience of stepping into a work of art. Walker’s talent is not about creating controversy for its own sake, but building a world that unleashes horrors even as it seduces viewers. This ensemble, made up of over a dozen characters, plays out a nightmarish scene on a single plane: one figure stands upright over his severed limb, despite his bleeding leg stump, with bones protruding from his hips; another figure, also exhibiting a severed limb, rolls on his back; a woman with a bonnet and voluminous hoop skirt may be attacking a smaller figure on its back, perhaps a crying baby, with a long, plunger-like instrument. What is most remarkable about these ...

Lying with the Wolf. Kiki Smith. 2001 C.E. Ink and pencil on paper. This delicate but large-scale work on paper, which depicts a female nude reclining intimately alongside a wolf, represents the assimilation of several themes that Kiki Smith has explored throughout her decades-long career. Featuring an act of bonding between human and animal, the piece speaks not only to Smith’s fascination with and reverence for the natural world, but also her noted interests in religious narratives and mythology, the history of figuration in western art, and contemporary notions of feminine domesticity, spiritual yearning, and sexual identity. Lying with the Wolf is one in a short series of works executed between 2000 and 2002 that illustrates women’s relationships with animals, drawing from representations found in visual, literary, and oral histories. The pair as depicted in Lying with the Wolf, however, seems locked in a more intimate embrace, as the wolf nuzzles affectionately into the nude wo...

Pure Land. Mariko Mori. 1998 C.E. Color photograph on glass. Set within a golden landscape, a female figure serenely floats above a lotus blossom while six alien musicians whirl by on bubbly clouds. Her pink robes mirror the predominantly pale orange, yellow and pink of the water, land and sky—firmly embedding her within the tranquil scene. Pure Land captures a moment of this experience, enabling the viewer a longer, perhaps more meditative, relationship with the work. Every element we see here has significance that may not be apparent at first glance—the serene landscape, with its golden sky, smooth pink land masses, and perfectly still water, is rich with symbolism. Pure Land is set during sunrise in the landscape of the Dead Sea, the lowest point on earth, called “dead” because the high salinity of its water does not support fish or plant life. In Shinto tradition, salt is used as an agent of purification. Floating in the water is a lotus blossom—symbol of purity and rebirth in...

Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. Spain. Frank Gehry (architect). 1997 C.E. Titanium, glass, and limestone. Prior to the mid-20th century, art museums in Europe and the United States were mostly designed in variants of the neo-classical style. From the Louvre in Paris to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., large and small cultural institutions commissioned stately stone structures, distinguished by pedimented fronts, long colonnades, and lofty rotundas. The 1959 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (originally the Museum of Non-Objective Art), with its spiraling concrete ramps, was one of the first museums to challenge this tradition. Not only did it provide the Guggenheim with a large exhibition venue for 20th century and contemporary art but it shifted the direction of museum design. An aging port and industrial center, the city had entered a period of significant economic decline during the 1980s. Various well-known architects were invited to design new structures, including Santia...

The Crossing. Bill Viola. 1996 C.E. Video/sound installation. Bill Viola’s The Crossing is a room-sized video installation that comprises a large two-sided screen onto which a pair of video sequences is simultaneously projected. a male figure walks slowly towards the camera; pauses near the foreground and stands still; He faces forward, staring directly into the lens, motionless. At this point the two scenes diverge; in one, a small fire alights below the figure’s feet.  It spreads over his legs and torso and eventually engulfs his whole body in flames; yet, he stands calm and completely still as his body is immolated, only moving to raise his arms slightly before his body disappears in an inferno of roaring flames.   After the flames and the torrent of water eventually retreat, the figure has vanished entirely from each scene, and the camera witnesses a silent and empty denouement. it was shot using high-speed film capable of registering 300 frames per second, thu...

Electronic Superhighway. Nam June Paik. 1995 C.E. Mixed-media installation (49-channel closed-circuit video installation, neon, steel, and electronic components). Electronic Superhighway, Nam June Paik artist Nam June Paik submitted a report to the Art Program of the Rockefeller Foundation, one of the first organizations to support artists working with new media, including television and video. media technologies would become increasingly prevalent in American society, and should be used to address pressing social problems, such as racial segregation, the modernization of the economy, and environmental pollution. Fluxus is an international art movement that emerged in the 1960s. Fluxus artists challenged the authority of museums and “high art” and wanted to bring art to the masses. Influenced by Zen Buddhism, their art often involved the viewer, used everyday objects, and contained an element of chance. As television continued to evolve from the late 1960s onward, Paik explored wa...

Pisupo Lua Afe (Corned Beef 2000). Michel Tuffery. 1994 C.E. Mixed media. Michel Tuffery is one of New Zealand’s best-known artists of Pacific descent, with links to Samoa, Rarotonga and Tahiti. Encouraged instead to express himself through drawing, he now aims artworks like Pisupo Lua Afe primarily at children, hoping to engage their curiosity and inspire them to care for both their own health and that of the environment. Pisupo Lua Afe is one of Tuffery’s most iconic works, made from hundreds of flattened corned beef tins, riveted together to form a series of life-sized bulls. Pisupo is the Samoan language version of "pea soup," which was the first canned food introduced into the Pacific Islands. Pisupo is now a generic term used to describe the many types of canned food that are eaten in the Islands—including corned beef. Not only is corned beef a favorite food source in the Islands canned corned beef is a processed food high in saturated fat, salt and cholesterol ...

En la Barberia no se Llora (No Crying Allowed in the Barbershop). Pepon Osorio. 1994 C.E. Mixed-media installation. The Puerto Rico born artist, Pepón Osorio trained as a sociologist and became a social worker in the South Bronx. His work is inspired by each of these experiences and is rooted in the spaces, experiences, and people of American Latino culture, particularly Nuyorican communities Osorio's large-scale installations are meant for a local audience, yet they have also been exhibited in mainstream cultural institutions Having lived both experiences—that of a Puerto Rican and Nuyorican—Osorio is best known for large-scale installations that address street life, cultural clashes, and the rites of passage experienced by Puerto Ricans in the United States.  Created in collaboration with local residents, Osorio engaged the public through conversation, workshops, and artistic collaborations. The art itself is visually lavish—his installations have often been dubbed “Nuyoric...

Rebellious Silence, from the Women of Allah series. Shirin Neshat (artist); photo by Cynthia Preston. 1994 C.E. Ink on photograph. In Rebellious Silence, the central figure’s portrait is bisected along a vertical seam created by the long barrel of a rifle. The woman's eyes stare intensely towards the viewer from both sides of this divide. Shirin Neshat’s photographic series "Women of Allah" examines the complexities of women’s identities in the midst of a changing cultural landscape in the Middle East—both through the lens of Western representations of Muslim women, and through the more intimate subject of personal and religious conviction. While the composition—defined by the hard edge of her black chador against the bright white background—appears sparse, measured and symmetrical, the split created by the weapon implies a more violent rupture Each contains a set of four symbols that are associated with Western representations of the Muslim world: the veil, the gun,...

Earth’s Creation. Emily Kame Kngwarreye. 1994 C.E. Synthetic polymer paint on canvas. At nearly twenty feet wide and nine feet high, Emily Kwame Kngwarreye’s painting Earth’s Creation is monumental in its scale and impact, rivaling Abstract Expressionist masterpieces by Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock not only in size but also in its painterly virtuosity  Patches of bold yellows, greens, reds and blues seem to bloom like lush vegetation over the large canvas. Comprised of gestural, viscous marks, each swath of color traces the movement of the artist’s hands and body over the canvas Kngwarreye was born around 1910, and spent most of her life in an isolated Anmatyerr community in Central Australia. The area, however, was forcibly occupied by European pastoralist settlers in the 1920s, and the artist, alongside other members of her community, worked on the pastoral property Aboriginal land rights were legally granted, and she was able, finally, to live independently. Abor...

Trade (Gifts for Trading Land with White People). Jaune Quick-to-See Smith. 1992 C.E. Oil and mixed media on canvas. As a response to the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ arrival in North America in 1992, the artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, from the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Indian Nation, created a large mixed-media canvas called Trade illustrates historical and contemporary inequities between Native Americans and the United States government. The fundamental misunderstanding between the Native and non-Native worlds underlies this piece.  For Trade, Smith layered images, paint, and objects on the surface of the canvas, suggesting layers of history and complexity. Divided into three large panels, the triptych (three part) arrangement is reminiscent of a medieval altarpiece.  photos, comics, tobacco and gum wrappers, fruit carton labels, ads, and pages from comic books, all of which feature stereotypical images of Native Americans...

Dancing at the Louvre, from the series The French Collection, Part I; #1. Faith Ringgold. 1991 C.E. Acrylic on canvas, tie-dyed, pieced fabric border. Combining representational painting and African-American quilting techniques with the written word The series tells the fictional story of Willa Marie Simone, a young black woman who moves to Paris in the early 20th century. Drawing on her own struggle for recognition in an art world dominated by European traditions and male artists, Ringgold uses this narrative format to literally rewrite the past by weaving together histories of modern art, African-American culture, and personal biography. This practice reflects the shift toward postmodernism in art of the 1980s and 1990s. Characteristic is her use of appropriation, narrative, biographical references, and non-Western traditions. Through these devices, Ringgold offers an alternative to the European and masculine perspectives that are prevalent in art history. Ringgold’s story-quilting t...

Untitled (#228), from the History Portraits series. Cindy Sherman. 1990 C.E. Photograph. Judith looks boldly out at her audience and presents the head of Holofernes in her right hand, displaying the dagger she used to decapitate him in her left.  She is garbed in billowing red, blue, and green drapery and stands in front of a curtain made of pieces of brocaded and patterned fabric. Her head is tilted slightly to her left. unlike Botticelli’s pristine and idealized nudes, Judith’s makeup is heavy-handed, almost tacky. The fabrics that at first seem to glimmer are, upon closer inspection, chintzy and cheap. And Holofernes’ head, which is usually frightening and powerful, looks like a used Halloween mask. the slick surface of the picture quickly reveals that it is not even an oil painting, but actually a monumental photograph. The Contemporary Master, Cindy Sherman—known for embodying and enacting images from popular media—has imagined a Renaissance interpretation of the Old Testa...

Pink Panther. Jeff Koons. 1988 C.E. Glazed porcelain. it was an exhibition entitled “Banality” by New York artist Jeff Koons presenting some twenty sculptures in porcelain and polychromed wood.  the sculptures are highly polished and gleaming. The colors—muted pale blue, pink, lavender, green and yellowish gold—seem to belong to the 1950s and 60s. The glossy textures look garish and factory-made, surfaces one associates with inexpensive commercial art.   It depicts a smiling, bare-breasted, blond woman scantily clad in a mint-green dress, head tilted back and to the left as if addressing a crowd of onlookers. The figure is based on the 1960s B-list Hollywood star Jayne Mansfield—here she clutches a limp pink panther in her left hand, while her right hand covers an exposed breast. The colors are almost antiquated; do they harken back to the popular culture of a pre-civil rights era as a politically regressive statement of nostalgia?  the postmodern 1980s inaugu...

A Book from the Sky. Xu Bing. 1987–1991 C.E. Mixed-media installation. Installation Metropolitan Museum of Art Pages containing columns of Chinese Text, on walls, ceiling Historical, calligraphic Xu Bing invented over 1,000 characters; don’t actually mean anything Very early form of mass production; relates to the contemporary moment; print media played a large role in artist’s upbringing Cultural revolution; intellectuals vilified; notion of the individual was distrusted Talented in writing and calligraphy in school; identified by this Put to work; created banners; combined modern/traditional Art school; trained in propagandistic works Move from the symbolic representations of the words; characters themselves Mao’s regime; banners that would’ve surrounded him Period when China was flooded with Western literature Characters empty, meaningless Regime, propaganda  China received and translated Western works; theory, literature, art history Series of words; the sea; w...

Androgyn III. Magdalena Abakanowicz. 1985 C.E. Burlap, resin, wood, nails, string. At the beginning of World War II, Abakanowicz, then a young girl, witnessed German tanks enter her family’s estate. At one point, a drunken soldier burst into her house and, in Abakanowicz’s presence, shot off her mother’s arm. In 1944, the family was forced to flee the advance of the Soviet army and ended up in Warsaw, where the artist still lives and works. As a teenager, Abakanowicz worked as a nursing assistant in a makeshift hospital caring for the wounded while also finishing her high school education. Her family lost everything during the war and had to hide their aristocratic roots when the nobility became the enemy in postwar Communist Poland.  Social Realism demanded images of smiling workers and a perfected society  Throughout her life Abakanowicz has continued to live in Poland despite the communist government that held power there until 1989 and the hardships that she and her f...

Summer Trees. Song Su-nam. 1983 C.E. Ink on paper. In Song Su-nam's Summer Trees, broad, vertical parallel brush strokes of ink blend and bleed from one to the other in a stark palette of velvety blacks and diluted grays. The painting exudes psychological power, despite its relatively modest proportions  But in Korea during the 1980s there was a tension between the influence of Western art that used oil paint (whether traditional or contemporary in style), and traditional Korean art that used an East Asian style, the vocabulary of traditional motifs, and the medium of ink for calligraphy and painting. Song felt very strongly that the materials and styles of Western art did not express his identity as a Korean. Sumukwha provided Song and his circle with a way to express Korean identity. Since antiquity, the country had taken great pride in a political and cultural distinctiveness that was recognized throughout Asia. Yet the twentieth century had brought humiliating trauma: the e...

Horn Players. Jean-Michel Basquiat. 1983 C.E. Acrylic and oil paintstick on three canvas panels. In addition to half-length portraits on the left and right panels of this triptych (a painting consisting of three joined panels), the artist has included several drawings and words—many of which Basquiat drew and then crossed out. large swaths of white paint, which seem to simultaneously highlight the black background and obscure the drawings and/or words beneath. Most notable perhaps is the preponderance of repeated words like “DIZZY,” “ORNITHOLOGY,” “PREE” and "TEETH” that the artist has scattered across all three panels of this work. Despite the seeming disorder of the composition, however, it is clear that the main subjects of Horn Players are two famous jazz musicians—the saxophonist Charlie Parker and the trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, who Basquiat has depicted in both linguistic and visual portraits. On the left of the canvas, the artist has drawn the figure of Parker, holdin...

225. Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Washington, D.C., U.S. Maya Lin. 1982 C.E. Granite. Situated between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. Maya Lin, the architect of the memorial sought about uniting the memorial to the nation’s past Bringing together the Long series of slabs; reflective granite Names of the servicemen, 58,000 Earth reveals the names Name recalls everything about a person, permanent Public space, intimacy One of the most successful memorials in the states Reflective and peaceful; granite Creates two worlds Gives viewer the chance to see themselves with the names Personalized experience, profound impact

224. The Gates. New York City, U.S. Christo and Jeanne-Claude. 1979–2005 C.E. Mixed- media installation. this logistically complex project was finally realized over a period of two weeks in New York’s Central Park. Each gate, a rectilinear three-sided rigid vinyl frame resting on two steel footings, supported saffron-colored fabric panels that hung loosely from the top. 7,503 gates ran over 23 miles of walkways; each gate was 16 feet high, with widths varying according to the paths’ width. Despite a brief exhibition period—February 12th through 27th 2005—The Gates remains a complex testament to two controversial topics in contemporary art: how to create meaningful public art and how art responds to and impacts our relationship with the built environment. The artists complicate an environment that was, in fact, entirely invented in the mid-19th century to express the Victorian ideal of the pastoral and picturesque landscape. has successfully cultivated a dialogue between sculptures...