Uyiosa Osayande on Chakaia Booker

Born in 1953 at Newark, New Jersey, Chakaia Booker received her Baccalaureate degree from Rutgers University and then her Masters in Fine Arts from the City College of New York. Over the years, Chakaia Booker has studied a variety of different subjects such as African dance, ceramics, weaving and basketry.
Booker's work is loaded with sentiment of social concern. She made sculptures created from tires which she used to address African American identity. She used black tires to symbolize the stregth of the African American identity while little color differences are used to show the differences in hue of black people. The varying pigments in her art show the range of African American skin tones and their survival in the modern world.

https://www.rogallery.com/Booker_C/Booker-bio.htm

The Wounded Table

Biki Aly

Professor Cacoilo

Frida Kahlo, The Wounded Table, 1940

Frida Kahlo was born on July 6th, 1907 in Coyoacan, Mexico City, Mexico. Frida is known for her self portraits. Overall, she had a tough life growing up. Her work brings light to Mexican culture and power to the idea of feminism. Frida had polio as a child. In her teenage years, she was in a deadly bus accident and was in the hospital for an immense length of time. She fractured and broke many parts of her body. This led her to be very depressed and this darkness showed in her art.

In the painting, The Wounded Table, took place around 1940 of December when Frida officially divorced the love of her life, Diego Rivera. This painting illustrates Frida sitting at a wooden table with devious figures around her like the skeleton, a white monster like figure, and blood everywhere. Looking closer, one of Fridas arms are attached to an aluminum scary figure. This indicates that she is not herself and that she is broken. This breakup ruined her and she is not able to take control of her own life. This illuminates the societal issue of patriarchy which is the idea of having men being more respected and more powerful over a woman. The fact that this painting is showing Frida losing herself over a guy crushes the idea of feminism and feeds to patriarchy because it's showing how powerful a man is over a woman's life.

https://www.fridakahlo.org/the-wounded-table.jsp

https://img.thedailybeast.com/image/upload/c_crop,d_placeholder_euli9k,h_1439,w_2560,x_0,y_0/dpr_2.0/c_limit,w_740/fl_lossy,q_auto/v1491847213/articles/2017/03/25/what-happened-to-frida-kahlo-s-missing-adultery-painting/170324-mcnearney-kahlo-tease_ig7awp

Mini Post: Amy Sherald

  Amy Sherald is a Maryland based artist born on August 30, 1973 who is known for her portrayal of first lady, Michelle Obama.  Sherald challenges the perception of race, particularly that of African Americans, by painting them with an absence of color to challenge perceptions of black identity.  The majority of her paintings consist of people she finds on the street whom stand out to her.  She paints
her subjects in grayscale in order to remove the "color from their race" and she aims to highlight the individuality of these people.
   Sherald was commissioned a portrait of Michelle Obama and became the first African American woman to create a presidential portrait.  She also became the first woman to win the Outwin Boochever prize.  Through these many accomplishments she is deconstructing the limitation set unto her by society in her personal life and through her paintings.

https://www.hauserwirth.com/stories/18258-amy-sherald-contemporary-art-museum-st-louis

Paula Rego

Paula Rego (aka Dame Paula Rego) was born in Portugal on January 26,  1935. When she first started painting she would use oils and and acrylics but she has favored using pastels most of her adult life. A lot of her work is usually approached by an feminist viewpoint and is influenced by her Portuguese culture. She also includes components in her artwork that resemble toys, animals, and children that help her portray normal world things as a storybook. Rego moved to London in 1976 and still lives there. 


This artwork is called War 2003. This is a rather large pastel work made on paper that was then mounted on aluminum. Rego saw a photo in the Guardian newspaper at the beginning of the Iraq war and she wanted to recreate it. She wanted to recreate it as it was but yet she found it hard to draw the faces of those people in the photo. So, she decided to replace the people's heads with bunny heads because it brought some light heartedness onto what was a terrifying photograph. I think this piece of artwork really helps the viewer understand how terrifying it must have been living in Iraq at the time of the war.
Bunnies are usually scared of most things and run away when they do not feel safe, so I think that this specific animal was great to help portray her message. Also no matter what animal she could've chosen, they were still  animals. This is very powerful because usually citizens are not taken care for or protected during war. Citizens can be as meaningless as a small little bunny. The main bunny (inferred to be the mother), is surrounded by three other bunnies. They have a young feel to them and cling to their mother. The mother is doing all she can to protect her children from the penguin in the back. The penguin in the back seems to be trying to throw something past their direction but the mother is blocking it. Overall, I think this piece was great to resemble the pain that Rego must have felt when seeing the horrific photograph. 

Mini Blog ; Kara Walker

I actually took this picture in the newark public library. To see the drawing , “The moral arc of history ideally bends towards justice but just as soon as not curves back around toward barbarism, sadism, and unrestrained chaos” I couldn’t even understand how it was hanging in a public library. The picture was one of the most disturbing things I have seen in my 20 years of living. Upon my initial look at the photo the only thing i could make out was a black women performing oral sex on a white man while holding another black woman's hand. People may question what is so bad about that, but by observing the rest of the picture one can only conclude that the women was a slave.

A visual portrayal of the feelings and contemplations we can't or won't articulated. along these lines, it is likewise a cutting edge type of resistance. Very frequently, dark individuals are advised to forgive and never look back. We are persuaded that subjection and its belongings - prejudice, Jim Crow, and the other systemic dehumanizing arrangements that molded the American past are dead and gone. We are made to feel disgrace for the repulsive barbarities executed against us when it is we who have been wronged. Thus I value the intense style in which Kara Walker displays this work. Rather than a work portraying the misery of dark individuals, I see a work delineating our incalculable quality and strength, and our proceeded with refusal to just quiets down and take what we are "given".

No matter how hard it may be to look at , or how many times they try to censor the photo , one can’t help but notice its significant meaning . The painting has been considered controversial and has even offended some African American workers. Yet as an African American female i don't get offended looking at the drawing , rather I see the drawing as a depiction of what my ancestors or others ancestors had to endure. It is a reminder, but also a call to white people for what we will no longer put up with . Slavery is dead, racism is dead.

Louise Bourgeois

Louise Bourgeois, New York, 1996

Louise Bourgeois, Femme Maison, 1946-47

Louise Bourgeois was born in Paris in 1911. Bourgeois’ parents ran a tapestry restoration shop, where Bourgeois helped her parents by drawing the missing pictures on the tapestry. Growing up, she experienced her father having an affair with the English tutor, Sadie Gordan. Her father’s betrayal traumatized her, but also inspired her to make her art. Later in life, she met her husband, Robert Goldwater in Paris who was an American art historian, and they raised three sons together. At the beginning of her artist career, she did painting and printmaking and then later shifted to making sculptures. Bourgeois then passed away at age 98 in New York in 2010.

Femme Maison in French means “house woman” or “woman house” and it was created from 1946 to 1947. Femme Maison is a series of paintings by Louise Bourgeois of nude female figures whose heads have been replaced with buildings. Her artwork represents her being trapped into domestic responsibilities that she needs to fulfill for her family and her husband. Her wife and mother duties took over her life and make it difficult for her to find her artistic voice. Her head and mind were “boxed” into her house and the household responsibilities, so she did not have a lot of time to think about her career. Bourgeois must have struggled with her female identity and gender roles as an artist and caretaker.

Links: https://www.moma.org/artists/710

https://www.theartstory.org/artist-bourgeois-louise.htm

In Flight: Paula Nicho Cúmez

Paula Nicho Cúmez (born January 15, 1955) is a Mayan-Guatemalan artist from San Juan Comalapa, Chimaltenango, Guatemala. Her painting career began at age 30, though her artistic roots lie in the weaving her mother taught her as a child. In 1985, she began painting under Salvador Cúmez Curruchich, a master painter and her soon-to-be husband. Though no longer a weaver, Nicho Cúmez drew from her vast knowledge of the art in her new medium.

Her art is informed by her Mayan culture; frequent subjects include native women, her town, and the sacred Maya book Popol Vuh. Dreams are often the source of her ideas, especially those related to flying. That her paintings are categorized as surreal or magic realist then makes sense. Maya women are at the forefront of her work because she championed equality among male and female painters, native and otherwise.

During her expansive career, Nicho Cúmez has been awarded the National Order of Guatemala's Cultural Patrimony, among other honors, inspired the short film Del Azul del Cielo, and was the only Maya woman invited to the opening of the National Museum of the American Indian at the Smithsonian Institute.

To learn more, visit https://www.novica.com/artistdetail/?faid=7332

Cruzando Fronteras (Crossing Borders), 2007, 24" x 32"

Q'a B'anobal (Nuestro Identidad), 2008, 25" x 33"

Ruk'ux Je'el (Heart of the Corn), 2002, 18" x 24"

Mini Post Artemisia Gentileschi

Artemisia Gentileschi was born in Rome in 1593. Artemisia was the talented daughter of a Tuscan painter, Orazio Gentileschi.   She was the eldest and most talented of all his children.  By the time she was 19, her father had considered her an extremely talented painter in her time.  As an accomplished Italian Baroque painter, Artemisia was the first woman to become a Member of the Accademia di Arte del Disegno.

Artemisia often chose to paint pictures of women who were strong, yet pained.   She chose her subjects from stories and myths from the Bible and other mythological and allegorical sources. Many of Artemisia’s works portray strong women, who oftentimes lack traditional feminine qualities. Her heroines are often time rebellious and antagonistic.  

Her painting Susanna and the Elders, was taken from a biblical story in the Book of Daniel.   In this particular painting, Artemisia focused more on the dramatic aspects of the story rather than female nude.  Possibly in attempt to show strength and courage in the face of her tutor and rapist, Agostino Tassi.   As an artist, her paintings were not what was expected of a female artist and portrayed women as strong protagonists and not weak objects of a man’s desire.  

http://www.artemisia-gentileschi.com/susanna.html

Mini post: Jenny Saville

Focusing her work on human perception of the body, Jenny Saville uses oil paint in heavy layers to create a representation of human flesh and the ways in which the body is effortlessly reconstructed; through surgery, in cadavers, historical sculptures, and even bodies of whom "challenge gender dichotomies."  Saville was born in 1970 in Cambridge, England and studied at the Glasgow School of Art where she was mainly interested on the imperfections of the human body. She has seen first-hand how uncomplicated it was to reassemble the human body, and the different ways in which we become vulnerable to these changes. 

Jenny Saville, Propped, 1992  

Jenny Saville combines classical figuration and modern abstraction to create her work. While she creates images that represent her perception of the human body, she challenges paintings and sculptors and how society sees the body. While she challenges these, she also has an appreciation for how the body has been represented in different eras and cultures. Her perception of the human body might not fit into society's norm, however it comes to show that her work is unlike those that came before her. She poses an important issue through her work, which is that there is no correct form of the body. Our bodies are ever changing and never constrained to one particular template that some art might repeatedly throw at us. She refuses to fit into the stereotype of how the human body is perceived, instead she "refuses to hide." 

Jenny Saville, The Mothers, 2011

Jenny Saville, Trace, 1993

(https://gagosian.com/artists/jenny-saville/)

Mini Post: Renee Cox

The Liberation of UB and Lady J

Taxi

Born in Colgate, Jamaica and later relocating to Scarsdale, New York, Renee Cox began her journey as a artist at Syracuse University majoring in photography. She later went on to pursue her master’s in visual arts. With all the credentials under her belt and a determination to make a statement about society with every piece of work she produced, she set forth addressing these social issues with religious imagery and references. As the years progressed, her artist technique and ideas also began to progress and advance. For her first show at a New York gallery in 1998, she was completely independent, putting her talents and skill to the test. This is the very first instance where Cox used herself as the subject for her artwork, creating an alter ego for herself, Raje, an African American superhero. She continued to alternate between Raje and the messages she portrayed through religious images, each piece of work being more powerful than the one before.

A well-known African-American female artist, Renee Cox uses her unique eye and skill in photography to illuminate specific issues present within society, mainly in regards to black women and the ongoing relationship they share with the beliefs of racism and sexism. She uses herself as the subject and sometimes the focal point of her pictures to get her message across, which is very far from conservative. She’s the opposite of conservative, an ideal that majority of individuals believe women should practice and be. Whether it’s with her as a person or the work she creates, Cox is always serving up “raunchy realness”, presenting social issues in a way that makes people uncomfortable, but still discussion worthy. With the tantalizing series of photos that Cox creates, she pushes the limits and uses her nude body to empower black women and normalize this idea of sexuality within black womanhood, a topic that’s also rarely discussed. In doing that, Cox also follows through the rest of her agenda, aiming to target the stereotypes that linger in the African American community, take them back , and switch up the meaning of all of them. http://www.reneecox.org

Marina Abramovic is a Serbian visual artist from Belgrade, Yugoslavia. She uses her body as a subject and medium to preform physical, mental, and emotional tests for herself. She pushes her limits in life in a quest for heightened consciousness, transcendence, and self-transformation. She is regarded as an artist who has addressed both feminist ideas and social issues.

This Balkan Baroque addresses the violent wars in Yugoslavia, Marina's home country. In this performance, Marina is sitting on top of a bunch of bloody cow bones, she is washing them one by one and singing songs from her childhood. This performance conveys violence and trauma to the former country. She scrubs the bones for 4 days and weeps as her clothes become stained. This piece of art struck me as something that was very disturbing at first until I read about the symbolism behind it. It's heartbreaking but the reality of war is truly trauma, violence, sadness, loss, etc.

Article: https://www.widewalls.ch/marina-abramovic-art/balkan-baroque/

Mini Post: Adrian Piper

Adrian Piper, “My Calling (Card) #1 (for Dinners and Cocktail Parties)”

Adrian Piper’s work is constantly questioning identity and exploring the definition of identity within race and sex.  She is a conceptual artist that focuses primarily on performances. In her fifty plus years as an artist, Piper has explored installations, video and sound recordings, photography, and drawings along with performance.  The piece “My Calling (Card) #1 (for Dinners and Cocktail Parties)” speaks to her experiences as a light-skinned biracial woman. While in white spaces her appearance generally allowed her to be taken in without much question.  After being fed up with racist remarks comfortably made in her presence due to her seemingly white appearance, she created the clever and insightful calling card. The cards solved her problem on how she should behave in such an uncomfortable situation.  

Piper's artist statement informs, "My work challenges the white viewer to transcend that deeply entrenched, carefully concealed sense of privilege, specialness, and personal superiority that comes from identifying oneself with society's most privileged group. If we are ever going to move toward a resolution of the problem of racism, not only in this country but internationally, we've got to overcome the divisive illusion of otherness, the illusion that each of us is defined not just by our individual uniqueness but by our racial uniqueness."

Piper's initial card tackles racism while her second deals with sexism. The calling card specifically addresses issues she faced being a woman in public spaces alone.  She asks the person to respect her privacy and also states she is alone because she wants to be. After feeling frustrated with getting hit on doing things on her own, she made My Calling Card #2 as a response to men exercising their male privilege.  The piece reminds me of common issues women face today including street harassment and cat-calling. It also challenges the preconceived value put on women to date and marry. Both cards were distributed materials during her performances in the late 80’s but unfortunately still ring true today.

Adrian Piper, “My Calling (Card) #2 (for Dinners and Cocktail Parties)”

For an insightful definition on identity and more information on the artist check out https://adrianpiper.weebly.com.

Mini Post: Jenny Saville

Mini Post: Jenny Saville 

Jenny Saville

Jenny Saville is a British contemporary artist born on May 7,1970 in Cambridge, England. Ever since Saville was young she was always fascinated with the human body and all of its imperfections. She would observe people around her and admire the human body from head to toe. Saville would look to expand upon her interest of the human body through art at Glasgow School of Art from 1988 to 1992. Saville is also part of the Young British Artist, a group of artist who became prominent in the late 1980s-1990s, Jenny Saville's art focuses heavily on the human body, particularly flesh itself and the manipulation of flesh. Saville expresses her art through oil paint to exaggerate the human body, showcasing how she views the human body in her own image.      

Jenny Saville's art redefined contemporary figurative art by addressing social issues of body perception and body image in society. Saville's artwork exaggerates the human figure to showcase the human body in what people may perceive as an imperfect or unattractive look. She paints her art in this manner to show that people should not feel constrained by their body image or ideals of a perfect body image, people should feel good how they look no matter what. Saville's art not only tackles self-perception but also the social pressures that women must deal with by feeling forced to look beautiful day in and day out in order to feel good about themselves. 

https://www.theartstory.org/artist-saville-jenny.htm
https://gagosian.com/artists/jenny-saville/
https://www.artsy.net/artist/jenny-saville

   

Marina DeBris "Trashion"

Marina DeBris is not only an artist--sculptor--but she is a social activist. Growing up and living near beaches her whole life in Los Angeles and Australia, she was able to see the true beauty of the beach and the effects that man had on it. DeBris used the trash, garbage, and random items washed up ashore in sculptures, fashion called "trashion," and decorative art to help raise funds and awareness for ocean and beach pollution.

In her efforts to cleaning up the environment, she uses her platform and works with non-profits to raise money for art education. She also sits on a panel that discusses how artists can contribute to environment public policy.


http://www.washedup.us/about.html 

The One That Got Away, Marina DeBris

Highland Fling

Mini Post - Barbara Kruger

Barbara Kruger is an American artist born in Newark, New Jersey. Her father was a chemical technician and her mother is said to have been a legal secretary at a local firm. After attending Syracuse University for only a year, her father passed away and Kruger left the University. The next year she pursued an education at Parson’s School of Design which kick started the formative years of her career. Starting off as a designer she built a reputation and moved on to other mediums like photography, crocheting, bright paintings, and finally her famous architectural stills. These massive photos and collages use modern forms of marketing and communication to address societal issues including: language, class, gender, and identity.

Most of Kruger’s more famous work seems to mimic and even poke fun at some modern pieces. In one photo, we see a young boy trying to mirror the famous Rosie the Riveter poster from the 1940’s. The girl next to the young boy appears to be pushing his arm down with a caption across the middle of the piece saying, “We don’t need another hero”. I thought to myself, “Why is this boy mimicking the Rosie the Riveter pose? She was considered a feminist icon!” Well, that’s what I believe Barbara was trying to with this art piece. There are enough men out there trying to be the face of something a woman created. Other art works like the ones pictured here are geared towards another social issue of class. Quotes like, “Money can buy you love,” over a younger girl sticking her tongue out and, “You can’t drag your money into the grave with you,” in front of what look like expensive leather shoes both tell me that Kruger isn’t very materialistic. Even with all the money in the world, you can’t buy happiness and what you can buy with that isn’t coming with you when you pass.

Mini Post: Faith Ringgold

Faith Ringgold is nothing short of golden. She is an immaculate creator and utilizes various mediums like painting, sculpture, performance art, writing and speaking. She is an accomplished artist and has over 75 awards and an honorary doctorate. Faith Ringgold grew up in Harlem, New York during the Great Depression.


 


Ringgold's early art and activism served to confront racial prejudice and often made strong political statements. Ringgold used the art of quilt making which is inextricably linked to American slavery to illuminate the stories of the black community. She played a major role in beginning an organization called Where We At, to support female  African American artist. Her later work has an absence of confrontational imagery to fight prejudice, instead she portrays young African American women as strong, successful and powerful.

Faith Ringgold b.1930, New York. Tar Beach, 1988  (Part 1 from the Woman on a Bridge series)

Sources:
http://www.faithringgold.com/
https://www.theartstory.org/artist-ringgold-faith.htm