Read the biographies below and choose ONE artist to focus on. Once you have picked your artist watch their segment on Art:21 (the blog post below this one) and then choose ONE of the assignments to complete by the end of class.
Kerry James Marshall - Segment starts at 16:09
Kerry James Marshall was born in 1955 in Birmingham, Alabama, and educated at the Otis Art Institute in California, where he received a bachelor of fine arts degree and an honorary doctorate. The subject matter of his paintings, installations and public projects is often drawn from African American popular culture and rooted in the geography of his upbringing: “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,” says Marshall. In his Mementos series of paintings and sculptures, Marshall pays tribute to the civil rights movement, with mammoth printing stamps featuring bold slogans of the era (e.g., “Black Power!”) and paintings of middle-class living rooms where ordinary black citizens tend a domestic scene populated by the ghosts of Martin Luther King J r., John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and other heroes of the 1960s. Marshall’s work evokes a broad range of art history, from the grand tradition of narrative Renaissance painting to black folk art. A striking aspect of Marshall’s work is the emphatically black skin tone of his figures that he thinks is really beautiful. Marshall lives in Illinois, where he is an instructor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
http://www.jackshainman.com/artist-images1.html
http://www.koplindelrio.com/content/kerry-james-marshall
Assignments:
-Design a postcard that sends a specific message about your nationality or ethnicity. On the back of the postcard explain what your message is and how it connects to you/your heritage.
-Marshall's Souvenir I, it includes portraits of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Bobby Kenney. Look up the painting and paste it into a word document. Then I want you to look up two of the men in the painting and explain what they did to make them worthy of being in Marshall's piece.
Maya Lin: Segment starts at 29:35
Maya Lin Born in 1959 in Athens, Ohio, Maya Lin catapulted into the public eye when, as a senior at Yale University, she submitted the winning design to a national competition for the Vi e t n a m Veterans Memorial to be built in Washington, D.C. Writing about the memorial, a black gr a n i t e wedge that emerges from and disappears into the ground, she says it “does not force or dictate how you should think. In that sense it’s very Eastern. . . . It reflects me and my parents.” Her father was the dean of fine arts at Ohio State University, and her mother, Julia Chang Lin, is a professor of literature at Ohio University. “As the child of immigrants you have that sense of ‘Where are you? Where’ s home?’” notes Lin, “and of trying to make a home.” Trained as an artist and architect, Lin’s sculptures, parks, monuments and architectural projects are linked by a common ideal of making a place for individuals within the landscape. She draws inspiration from culturally diverse sources including Japanese gardens, Hopewell Indian earthen mounds and works by American Earth - artists of the 1960s and 1970s.
http://www.mayalin.com/
Assignments:
Look up a culture that has constructed land art, for example, Egyptians (pyramids), Native Americans (burial mounds), Anglo-Saxons (Stonehenge), Japanese (rock and sand gardens). Find a picture/illustration - cut and paste it into a document- and then explain why they used them.
Choose a contemporary or historical event and design a memorial to commemorate it. Specify the materials, size and setting for your work. Write about why you chose this event and why you designed the memorial that way.
Louise Bourgeois: Segment starts at 40:19
Louise Bourgeois was born in Paris in 1911. She studied art at various schools there, including the Ecole du Louvre, Académie des Beaux-Arts, Académie Julian, and Atelier Fernand Léger. In 1938, she emigrated to the United States and continued her studies at the Art Students
League in New York. Though she began as an engraver and p a i n t e r, by the 1940s she had turned to sculptural work, for which she is now recognized as a twentieth-century leader. Greatly influenced by the influx of European Surrealist art i s t s who immigrated to the United
States after World War II , Bourgeois' early sculpture was composed of groupings of abstract and organic shapes, often carved from wood. By the 1960s she began to execute her work in rubber, bronze and stone, and the pieces themselves became larger and more referential to what has become the dominant theme of her work — her childhood. The e anthropomorphic shapes her pieces take — the female and male bodies are continually referenced and remade — are charged with sexuality and innocence and the interplay between the two. Bourgeois' work is in the collections of most major museums around the world. She lives in New York.
http://www.cheimread.com/artists/louise-bourgeois/
http://www.hauserwirth.com/exhibitions/743/louise-bourgeois-the-fabric-works/view/
Assignments:
-It is said that much of Bourgeois’s work exhibits her childhood conflicts with her father, who was at the same time loving, attentive, demanding and betraying. Based on what you have seen, do you see this conflict reflected in her work? Think about an individual who evokes strong conflicts in your life. Create a work (painting, poem, song, collage, etc) of art expressing that conflict.
- Bourgeois’s most well known piece is Maman (French for Mother) which is a 30 foot high sculpture of a spider. She Explained the piece by saying
"The Spider is an ode to my mother. She was my best friend. Like a spider, my mother was a weaver. My family was in the business of tapestry restoration, and my mother was in charge of the workshop. Like spiders, my mother was very clever. Spiders are friendly presences that eat mosquitoes. We know that mosquitoes spread diseases and are therefore unwanted. So, spiders are helpful and protective, just like my mother."
Choose an animal that represents you or somebody that you love. Cut and paste a picture into a word document and explain what traits this animal has that reminds you of yourself or your loved one.
Kerry James Marshall - Segment starts at 16:09
Kerry James Marshall was born in 1955 in Birmingham, Alabama, and educated at the Otis Art Institute in California, where he received a bachelor of fine arts degree and an honorary doctorate. The subject matter of his paintings, installations and public projects is often drawn from African American popular culture and rooted in the geography of his upbringing: “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,” says Marshall. In his Mementos series of paintings and sculptures, Marshall pays tribute to the civil rights movement, with mammoth printing stamps featuring bold slogans of the era (e.g., “Black Power!”) and paintings of middle-class living rooms where ordinary black citizens tend a domestic scene populated by the ghosts of Martin Luther King J r., John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and other heroes of the 1960s. Marshall’s work evokes a broad range of art history, from the grand tradition of narrative Renaissance painting to black folk art. A striking aspect of Marshall’s work is the emphatically black skin tone of his figures that he thinks is really beautiful. Marshall lives in Illinois, where he is an instructor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
http://www.jackshainman.com/artist-images1.html
http://www.koplindelrio.com/content/kerry-james-marshall
Assignments:
-Design a postcard that sends a specific message about your nationality or ethnicity. On the back of the postcard explain what your message is and how it connects to you/your heritage.
-Marshall's Souvenir I, it includes portraits of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Bobby Kenney. Look up the painting and paste it into a word document. Then I want you to look up two of the men in the painting and explain what they did to make them worthy of being in Marshall's piece.
Maya Lin: Segment starts at 29:35
Maya Lin Born in 1959 in Athens, Ohio, Maya Lin catapulted into the public eye when, as a senior at Yale University, she submitted the winning design to a national competition for the Vi e t n a m Veterans Memorial to be built in Washington, D.C. Writing about the memorial, a black gr a n i t e wedge that emerges from and disappears into the ground, she says it “does not force or dictate how you should think. In that sense it’s very Eastern. . . . It reflects me and my parents.” Her father was the dean of fine arts at Ohio State University, and her mother, Julia Chang Lin, is a professor of literature at Ohio University. “As the child of immigrants you have that sense of ‘Where are you? Where’ s home?’” notes Lin, “and of trying to make a home.” Trained as an artist and architect, Lin’s sculptures, parks, monuments and architectural projects are linked by a common ideal of making a place for individuals within the landscape. She draws inspiration from culturally diverse sources including Japanese gardens, Hopewell Indian earthen mounds and works by American Earth - artists of the 1960s and 1970s.
http://www.mayalin.com/
Assignments:
Look up a culture that has constructed land art, for example, Egyptians (pyramids), Native Americans (burial mounds), Anglo-Saxons (Stonehenge), Japanese (rock and sand gardens). Find a picture/illustration - cut and paste it into a document- and then explain why they used them.
Choose a contemporary or historical event and design a memorial to commemorate it. Specify the materials, size and setting for your work. Write about why you chose this event and why you designed the memorial that way.
Louise Bourgeois: Segment starts at 40:19
Louise Bourgeois was born in Paris in 1911. She studied art at various schools there, including the Ecole du Louvre, Académie des Beaux-Arts, Académie Julian, and Atelier Fernand Léger. In 1938, she emigrated to the United States and continued her studies at the Art Students
League in New York. Though she began as an engraver and p a i n t e r, by the 1940s she had turned to sculptural work, for which she is now recognized as a twentieth-century leader. Greatly influenced by the influx of European Surrealist art i s t s who immigrated to the United
States after World War II , Bourgeois' early sculpture was composed of groupings of abstract and organic shapes, often carved from wood. By the 1960s she began to execute her work in rubber, bronze and stone, and the pieces themselves became larger and more referential to what has become the dominant theme of her work — her childhood. The e anthropomorphic shapes her pieces take — the female and male bodies are continually referenced and remade — are charged with sexuality and innocence and the interplay between the two. Bourgeois' work is in the collections of most major museums around the world. She lives in New York.
http://www.cheimread.com/artists/louise-bourgeois/
http://www.hauserwirth.com/exhibitions/743/louise-bourgeois-the-fabric-works/view/
Assignments:
-It is said that much of Bourgeois’s work exhibits her childhood conflicts with her father, who was at the same time loving, attentive, demanding and betraying. Based on what you have seen, do you see this conflict reflected in her work? Think about an individual who evokes strong conflicts in your life. Create a work (painting, poem, song, collage, etc) of art expressing that conflict.
- Bourgeois’s most well known piece is Maman (French for Mother) which is a 30 foot high sculpture of a spider. She Explained the piece by saying
"The Spider is an ode to my mother. She was my best friend. Like a spider, my mother was a weaver. My family was in the business of tapestry restoration, and my mother was in charge of the workshop. Like spiders, my mother was very clever. Spiders are friendly presences that eat mosquitoes. We know that mosquitoes spread diseases and are therefore unwanted. So, spiders are helpful and protective, just like my mother."
Choose an animal that represents you or somebody that you love. Cut and paste a picture into a word document and explain what traits this animal has that reminds you of yourself or your loved one.