This semester I am in the process of developing a rite of passage program for female youth ages 7-17 living in the inner-city, transition from adolescence to adulthood. To assist me with developing the art portion of the curriculum I have decided to solicit the help of five female artists I learned about throughout the course. Adrian Piper, Marina Abromovic,
Wangechi Mutu, Faith Ringgold and Kara Walker. The post will elaborate on a topical context of how each ones uses art as a medium to share their experiences.. I selected the female artists because of the unique way in which each one uses her own aesthetic to weave art into their own personal story, and how those stories impact the art world through societal messages..
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| Adrian Piper, Vanilla Nightmares (1986) |
http://vimeo.com/10547710
Art as Consciousness. Adrian Piper. I was blown away when I saw Adrian Piper's video entitled "Cornered" Her message about her racial identity really hit home for me. In fact I was blown away. I had never heard "I am Black" articulated this way before. Adrian Piper was born in New York City and lived for many years on Cape Cod, Massachusetts before emigrating from the United States. In the late 1960's Ms. Piper aligned herself with the nascent Conceptual art movement, attracted to its intellectual rigor and speculative logic. At the same time, her political convictions were growing acute and specific. She brought these strands together (she was among the first artists to do so) in performance pieces executed in private and in public. Since 2005 she has lived and worked in Berlin, where she runs the APRA Foundation Berlin and edits
The Berlin Journal of Philosophy. A bi-cultural woman with parents who identified themselves as "colored", Adrian
Piper is a Conceptual* artist who in the late 1960s, was at the forefront of
this movement, whose focus is more directed to concept or underlying philosophy
than to creative process. Piper, whose audiences are ethnically diverse, is
dedicated to 'anti-racism' and to deliver her message, often incorporates
"politically charged" text, videos and performance in her work. Her work is about consciousness-raising. Her primary subjects are race, racism and their links to class and gender. Her forms are spare, un-sensual, but for the most part attention-holding. Her method is interrogatory: she asks unsettling questions to evoke revealing responses. Sugar-coating isn't her style.
Art as Healing. Marina Abromovic, a New York-based, born in 1946 in Belgrade,Serbian-born performance artist began her career in the early 1970s. Avoiding aligning her practices with a specific feminist agenda. She often uses her body as an artistic vehicle pushing herself beyond her physical and mental limits––and at times risking her life in the process creates performances that challenge, shock, and move us because it circumvents the conventions of both art and language. Chadwick p. 366. My most favorite piece, "The Artist is Present" took a year for Marina Abromivic to prepare for. In the above video Marina the artist said "no one could imagine in New York City, the most busiest place in the world that anybody would take time to sit and just engage in mutual conversation. It was a surprise to everyone". The Artist is Present performance was larger than art , because it dealt with healing of the culture that is so isolated from each other . When referencing art in this country Marina say's, "The United States feels the need to categorize everything. "Rather than discuss the works of art in a museum, this country will say “x number of pieces are made by women, x number are made by men and so on.” We are of the same mind when she said that the most important thing and the only thing that should be mentioned is the art itself. "Marina Abromovic"
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The Afrofuturism of Wangechi Mutu
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Art as Otherness. There is no singular question at the core of Mutu's work. The collages themselves are complex, multi-layered, explosively hued pieces in which many themes are addressed simultaneously. This work is the ultimate existential mash-up. Mutu explores the complexities of this world by asking and answering a thousand questions at once. A piece featured early in the survey is one that fully encapsulates the Mutu aesthetic. The themes with which she grapples in Riding Death in My Sleep are threaded throughout almost all of her work. A maybe-woman, alien-like in appearance, sits astride a globe. Her features are cross-racial, the skin is white. On top of her head is a winged and tailed fantastical elephant and to her side, an eagle head – the enduring symbol of the United States. The creature squats, poised as if to spring right out of the frame. At play are questions about multiculturalism, the sexualisation and objectification of the (black) female body, race, hybridity and all that it represents; conflict, isolation and "otherness". Wangechi' work is prophetic in an odd way. Her art speaks to common sense yet in a bazaar type of way, telling the future for mankind if we don't wake up.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/13/wangechi-mutu-art-afrofuturism
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Shades of Alice
1988 |
Art as Activism.
Faith Ringgold was greatly influenced by the fabric she worked with at home
with her mother, who was a fashion designer She is especially well known for
her painted story quilts, which blur the line between "high art" and
"craft" by combining painting, quilted fabric, and storytelling The
cultural conflicts that divided a generation of Americans- racism, sexism and
militarism- invaded the art world, until then secure in the belief that
aesthetic issues were unrelated to or transcended social concerns. During the
1960s, Ringgold painted flat, figural compositions that focused on the racial
conflicts; depicting everything from riots to cocktail parties, which
resulted in her "American People" series, showing the female view of
the Civil Rights Movement. The 1970s was her move into the sculptural figures
that were used for fictional slave stories as well as contemporary ones.
Ringgold began quilted artworks in 1980; her first quilt being "Echoes of
Harlem. Faith quilted her stories in order to be heard, since at the time no
one would publish her autobiography "Who's Afraid of Aunt Jemima?"
(1983) is a quilt showing the story of Aunt Jemima as a matriarch
restaurateur.Ringgold has been an activist since the 1970s, participating in
several feminist, anti-racist organizations. In 1970, Ringgold help found the
Ad Hoc Women's Art Committee and protested the Whitney Annual, a major
art exhibition held at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York Members
of the committee demanded that women artists account for fifty percent of the
exhibitors and created disturbances at the museum by leaving raw eggs and
sanitary napkins on its grounds and by gathering to sing, blow whistles, and
chant about their exclusion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faith_ringold
Art as Power. Kara
Walker is best known for her room-size tableaux of black cut-paper silhouettes
that examine the underbelly of America's racial and gender tensions. Her works
often address such highly charged themes as power, repression,
history, race, and sexuality
Born in Stockton, California, Walker moved to the South at age 13 when her
father, artist Larry Walker, accepted a position at Georgia State University
and her family relocated to Stone Mountain, a suburb of Atlanta. Focusing on painting and
printmaking in college, she received her BFA from the Atlanta College of Art in
1991 and her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1994 .Most of her pieces have to do with exchanges of power, attempts to steal power away from others. Kara Walker’s work is layered with images that reference history, literature, culture, and the darker aspects of human behavior. Connecting all of her work is an examination of power. The characters in her environments display power struggles of all kinds: physical, emotional, personal, racial, sexual, and historical. Making sense of these images requires careful looking and an understanding of the references the artist makes. To facilitate this process, this section contains information about five of the Walker's key themes: Representing Race, History: Collusion of Fact and Fiction, Narrative, Desire and Shame, and Humor. Walker was included in the 1997 exhibition at the Whitney American Art, New York. http://learn.walkerart.org/karawalker/Main/IntroductionToThemes
ReferencesChadwick pg. 342
http://www.asu.edu/cfa/wwwcourses/art/SOACore/piper-art-review.html
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