From September 3 to 10, Liz West’s immersive rainbow artwork “Our Colour” was installed at the Bristol Biennial. The project uses light as a stunning sculptural medium. More photos here. (via Design Boom)
This week, the US flag and Black protest art, walking into a rainbow, Obama’s cold shoulder to the arts, a first look at the collection of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, and more.
On the history of the US flag in African American protest art:
Around the same time, on the opposite coast, Faith Ringgold was employing the flag in similar ways in her paintings. One of her works from this era, at first glance, presents as a painting of an ordinary American flag, if slightly off-hue — substituting a dim gray for the traditional white. But on closer examination, what appears to be some discoloration in the stars is the word “die,” in capital letters only a shade darker than the field on which it is superimposed. And what appear to be irregular stripes are actually horizontal, elongated letters, which spell “nigger.”
Made in 1969, the same year that the Apollo missions were beaming back the first images of men raising the American flag on the moon, Ringgold’s Flag for the Moon: Die Nigger bluntly confronts America with the implications of its own budget priorities. The country had decided to spend vast sums of money on a demonstration of American superiority, while its black citizens languished in poverty, in a country where the promise of the Civil Rights Movement was only fulfilled on paper. For Ringgold, every tax dollar spent in space was evidence of the relative worthlessness of black lives in the eyes of their country. Ringgold’s painting made explicit the fact that to black people, the sight of that flag erected on the moon didn’t represent the promise and possibility of their American experience — it represented a threat. You can literally leave the planet and white supremacy will be there, waiting for you.
Even though the arts community appeared to fully embrace President Obama, Washington Post writer Philip Kennicott says Obama never “truly” embraced them back:
So Obama didn’t visit the National Gallery of Art during his presidency (at least so far), and first lady Michelle Obama has been only once, and that late in the last term. The Kennedy Center reports that the first family hasn’t taken much advantage of the presidential box, and the president’s visits have been mostly limited to the annual Kennedy Center Honors. The president has also begged off attending an annual gala at Ford’s Theatre that has been a standard for his predecessors. If one adds to this the long periods that he left the chairmanships of both the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities empty, his desultory picks for other important cultural positions, his choice of a librarian of Congress who doesn’t come from the tradition of the belles-lettres or serious scholarship, his record on culture is dispiriting at best.
That has caused some significant cognitive dissonance among people in the arts world who are otherwise full-throated champions of the president. Indeed, the arts offer some of the friendliest territory for the current administration, full of mainly left-wing coastal types who cherish values they believe the president embodies: intelligence, education, tolerance, cosmopolitanism, and a welcome embrace of ambiguity and complexity when parsing political and social problems. The dinner party consensus is thus: He is one of us, so why hasn’t he done more for the arts?
Why are an increasing number of art museum people are moving into the commercial art world:
Auction house jobs are also, not surprisingly, considerably better paid than most museum posts. The median salary for museum directors in the Americas last year was around $230,000, according to an annual survey by the Association of Art Museum Directors. The median salary for chief curators was around $100,000. (Shiner made just over $200,000 in 2014 as the director of the Warhol museum, according to the institution’s tax returns.) Meanwhile, auction house rainmakers can make as much as seven figures per year.
Will New Yorkers have to wake up to a climate change reality that means their city will flood periodically? New York magazine has the scary story:
The deluge will begin slowly, and irregularly, and so it will confound human perceptions of change. Areas that never had flash floods will start to experience them, in part because global warming will also increase precipitation. High tides will spill over old bulkheads when there is a full moon. People will start carrying galoshes to work. All the commercial skyscrapers, housing, cultural institutions that currently sit near the waterline will be forced to contend with routine inundation. And cataclysmic floods will become more common, because, to put it simply, if the baseline water level is higher, every storm surge will be that much stronger. Now, a surge of six feet has a one percent chance of happening each year — it’s what climatologists call a “100 year” storm. By 2050, if sea-level rise happens as rapidly as many scientists think it will, today’s hundred-year floods will become five times more likely, making mass destruction a once-a-generation occurrence. Like a stumbling boxer, the city will try to keep its guard up, but the sea will only gain strength.
10 words Andrea Liu is sick of seeing in artists’ statements:
- liminal space
- “in its final iteration”
- itinerant practice
- “rupture” or “suture”
Norway’s largest newspaper published a front-page letter to the Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg criticizing the company’s decision to censor an iconic image of the Vietnam War:
Espen Egil Hansen, the editor-in-chief and CEO of Aftenposten, accused Zuckerberg of thoughtlessly “abusing your power” over the social media site that has become a lynchpin of the distribution of news and information around the world, writing, “I am upset, disappointed – well, in fact even afraid – of what you are about to do to a mainstay of our democratic society.”
The podcast Team Human, with Douglas Rushkoff, spoke to Micah White, of Occupy fame, about the present state of “Permanent Revolution.” Please listen, as White talks about the parting of ways of revolution and protest, how the only way to defeat one social movement is by creating another social movement that challenges it, and the “death of the left”:
The San Francisco Chronicle has an exclusive first look at the collection of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, and, well, it’s what you might expect:
The Lucas Museum collection is a study in contrasts. The society that embraced the Saturday Evening Post illustrator’s moralism emerged, confoundingly, from an age that loved Maxfield Parrish’s worldly, even libertine portrayal of the way things are, or might be. Parrish is represented by 41 original works.
There are, of course, many works by artists embraced by mainstream institutions. A series of 23 drawings by Jacob Lawrence related to “Aesop’s Fables” (1969) is a case in point. The museum is actively collecting, its perspective broadened by Hobson, who, even before she joined the board, was building a personal collection of contemporary art with an emphasis on African American artists. Recently added are prints by Kara Walker and an important painting by Keith Haring, two artists whose narrative acuity is indisputable. They join works by a broad range of artists from Ingres to Frida Kahlo to Rirkrit Tiravanija.
The boy in me has a nostalgic connection to the paintings (by at least six different illustrators) for Mad magazine covers, and the drawings for comic characters like Uncle Scrooge by Carl Barks (1901-2000), Little Lulu by Marge Buell (1904-1993) and, best of all, Al Capp’s (1909-1979) Li’l Abner. There are superheroes, from Captain America to Batman, not to mention newspaper strip mockups for Little Orphan Annie, Dick Tracy, Pogo, Peanuts, Doonesbury and many others. And drawings for animated film: “Dumbo,” “Sleeping Beauty,” “Bambi,” “Cinderella,” “Peter Pan,” “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”
Last year, the Minneapolis Institute of Art hosted a roundtable for Native women artists and scholars to “meet and plan for the first comprehensive exhibition exclusively devoted to Native women artists from prehistory to the present, in all media, and from the entire United States and parts of Canada.” This is a short summary of that important event:
Can’t wait to see the show.
This video by the Mercy Corps humanitarian nonprofit tells the story of Hammoudi and his family, who fled their home in the suburbs of Aleppo four years ago. You can hear Hammoudi’s story:
Required Reading is published every Sunday morning ET, and is comprised of a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts, or photo essays worth a second look.
