Time to reflect on more artists! I am currently studying for the Praxis 2 Art and Content exam, which will test my knowledge of art terms, techniques, history, and analysis. There is a writing segment and I will have to not only write about my own work, but also the work of other artists. This research journal exercise has been helping me all semester!
Richard Serra (b. 1938 in San Francisco). He studied at Berkeley, Yale, and in Florence funded by a Fulbright grant. One of my all time favorite works by him is his video art, “Television Delivers the People” (1973) which you can watch here.
Narrated by Carlota Fay Schoolman and at just under seven minutes, it was broadcasted to the public during an area when television was just starting to become mainstream and accepted enough to subliminally market and coerce the public viewers. Using the format of a television teleprompter, its scrolling critique criticizes not only television but the mass media conglomerates that seek to benefit from brainwashing and manipulating the public, say that mass media and pop culture are tactics for social control.
While we’re in the realm of art video, the next one is by DIS, a New York-based collective consisting of Lauren Boyle, Solomon Chase, Marco Roso, and David Toroa, which created a series on the wide-reaching impact of the 2008 financial crisis. The work was shown in and commissioned by the Baltimore Museum of Art and contemplates the future of money, income inequality, and the uncertain economic prospects of Millennials. It’s super sassy and informative. I couldn’t help watching all three of the videos as they are highly entertaining, creative, and eloquently deconstructs the manufactured economic crisis and its fallout.
Stepping away from propaganda – another exhibit I saw while at the BMA was Hitching Their Dreams to Untamed Stars that featured the works of Joyce J. Scott & Elizabeth Talford Scott. Their quilt work is detailed and complex, drawing upon mythology and creation stories, themes of life and death, mother and daughterhood, and liberation.
The last work is also a piece at the Baltimore Musuem of Art. Grace Haritgan was an American woman modernist painter who developed a bold, semi-abstract style to capture the garish jumble of excitement of the market district of New York’s lower East Side where she lived. I have a tendency to strive for perfection in my art – especially small details – and this is much more difficult in oil paint (in my opinion / experience / lack of experience.) Her work is currently being featured in an exhibition that specifically celebrates women modernists, and is on show until July 5, 2019.
MONICA HEISER 