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...