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smithsonian american art museum
location
washington, d.c.
date
december 18, 2023
i'm so glad i got to see the newly renovated permanent modern and contemporary art galleries, which reopened on the third floor in september. the museum has redesigned and reorganized its permanent collection in an effort to highlight marginalized artists and to provide a more expansive and inclusive view of american art.
Miguel Luciano - Palante, 2017
Puerto Rican conceptual artist Miguel Luciano represents the position that Puerto Rico finds itself, in relation to the US. The Spanish word "pa'lante," meaning "forward," originates as the name of a civil rights newspaper in Puerto Rico in the 1960s. In recent years, it has developed into a motto for Puerto Rican independence from the United States, vying for statehood, as well as fighting through other hardships that come with being unrepresented by your own country. The two shiny, red bikes attached facing opposite directions perfectly symbolizes the inability to progress, or in other words, go forward. One bike is adorned with small American flags, while the other has Puerto Rican flags, pointing in different directions.
Barbara Kruger - Untitled Portfolio, 1985
Barbara Kruger is known for her photographic text collages, usually taken from magazine clippings. If this font looks familiar, that's probably because it was co-opted by the creators of Supreme, using Kruger's design without any permission. Kruger has embraced this ironically hilarious feat, as her art clearly and openly speaks against rampant consumerism and the dominating forces of capitalism. In many recent exhibits, Kruger has seemed to hit back by mocking Supreme's use of the font. I highly recommend reading more about this great exchange with Kruger.
Mel Bochner - Money, 2005
Bochner's fascination with language inspires him to fill notebooks with synonyms that he collects for months or even years before executing paintings based on particular "key" words. In Money, the varied colors Bochner chose for each word or phrase subvert a linear reading of the regimented lines. Slang terms like "cheddar" and juxtaposed with biblical phrases like "root of all evil" to highlight the rich vocabulary people use to describe the ubiquitous reality of currency.
Tseng Kwong Chi - Disneyland, California, from the series East Meets West, 1979 (printed 2013)
In his signature series East Meets West, Tseng Kwong Chi inhabited a persona he called the "Ambiguous Ambassador." Wearing a Mao suit (the gray uniform associated with the Chinese Communist Party) and mirrored sunglasses, he posed next to landmarks and monuments, many of them emblems of American national identity.
Tseng highlighted the signifying power of dress, gesture, and posture. As an immigrant and person of Chinese descent, he was also conscious of how Asians are stereotyped in the West. His donning of the Mao suit in public was a tongue-in-cheek performance of "Chineseness" that both played to and subverted assumptions about race, culture, and nationality.
Tseng Kwong Chi - New York, New York, from the series East Meets West, 1979 (printed 2020)
Sam Gilliam - Swing, 1969
Known for inviting chance and change into his process, Sam Gilliam created Swing by folding and crumpling canvas that he had soaked in paint. Once dry, the bundled fabric was opened and hung to reveal dazzling fields of spontaneous color and pattern.
The title Swing reflects the swagged shape of the painting, hanging free of stretcher bars. The word also evokes Gilliam's desire to "just work and let things go," like the bebop and jazz musicians he liked to listen to while painting.
Nam June Paik - Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Hawaii, Alaska, 1995
Electronic Superhighway is a monumental, era-defining work by Korean-American artist Nam June Paik. At over 15 feet tall and 40 feet wide, this neon map of the United States is connected via a 51-channel video installation, playing on over 300 screens. Each state has its own video montage, some of my favorites being the movie musical "Oklahoma!" playing in my home state, "The Wizard of Oz" in Kansas, and the other classic Judy Garland movie, "Meet Me in St. Louis," playing on a loop in Missouri. Paik represents his own understanding of each state, associating pieces of borrowed and original visual media to each state. On the neon map, the small screen where Washington, D.C. is located, displays a live closed circuit camera where gallery visitors can see themselves in real time.
Paik's work has been housed at the SAAM since 2002, making it an icon of contemporary American art and culture. Electronic Superhighway wholly embodies the rising electronic culture of the 1990s: an obsession with information overload, a shortening of attention spans, and ultimately, a desire for wider connection.
Martha Rosler - Semiotics of the Kitchen, 1975
In her single-channel, 6 minute video, Martha Rosler delivers a deadpan performance of a perfect housewife, demonstrating her kitchen knowledge. Rosler's gestures are blatantly violent, using steak knives and rolling pins to bang and stab at the cutting board, or towards the camera. Her refusal to adhere to traditional female roles and cultural expectations is lined with controlled aggression towards the patriarchy.
Martha Rosler - from the series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home, 1967-1972
Martha Rosler - Beauty Rest, from the series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home, 1967-1972
Judy Baca - Las Tres Marias, 1976
Mexican-American L.A. artist Judy Baca created Las Tres Marìas in 1976, initially as a performance artwork, depicting a “Pachuca” and a “Chola” on either side of a mirror placed in the center, with red velvet upholstery in the back, resembling a low rider. Both Pachucos and Cholos are subcultures and aesthetics within Chicano culture. On one hand, Pachucos were a subculture mostly present between the 1930s and 1950s in East L.A., characterized by their interest in fashion, particularly wearing of zoot suits, as part of this subculture, Pachucas were known for breaking down stereotypes and the role of the “good wife,” and all of this together was a way to protest forced assimilation into white, hegemonic, American culture. On the other hand, Cholos are considered to be “the children of Pachucos,” being a new generation of Chicanos who protest forced assimilation, emerging around the 1950s and still present to this day. Cholos are often related to gang and jail culture, and similarly to Pachucos, as said by journalist Ted West, Cholos “express the refusal of a young Chicano American to be anglicized.” However, when looking at this artwork, it is important to bear in mind that the term Cholo tends to be used in a derogatory way, even if it has been reclaimed by the movement. Through Las Tres Marías, Baca creates a new take on religious art, inviting the viewer to become part of the artwork, seeing themselves in relation to two rebellious figures, while also trapping them within these tropes just like Chicanas and Latinas are often caged within these representations.
Carlos Villa - During, 1982
Paintings show the physical touch of their makers, usually using a brush or other tool. Here we see the literal imprint of the artist's body--where he pressed his chest, thighs, hands, and feet, wet with paint, against the canvas. The resulting imagery suggests a ritual or a dance.
Carlos Villa's face-print can also be seen, emerging from and disappearing into the background. Including his face was, for Villa, a way to affirm his identity as a Filipino American artist. As a student in the 1950s, Villa had been stung when a teacher told him, "Filipino art history doesn't exist." He went on to uncover--and create--this art himself.?Recognizing Filipino culture as a mix of Indigenous, Asian, and Western influences, Villa developed a personal aesthetic that drew form and iconography from a wide array of cultural sources.
Willem de Kooning - The Wave, ca. 1942
Willem de Kooning's work is based in improvisation and free gesture. Here, an elegant line defines what could be read as a landscape, a figure, or simply a series of looping forms. Throughout his career, the artist shifted between representational and abstract modes of expression. "Art should not have to be a certain way," he once said. "It is no use worrying about being related to something it is impossible not to be related to."
Born in the Netherlands, de Kooning came to the United States in 1926 without a passport or visa. Arriving as an academically trained commercial artist, he went on to become a defining figure of abstract painting in New York.
Joan Mitchell - Marlin, 1960
Paintings are static objects, yet they contain dynamism and movement. Imagine the speed and force with which Joan Mitchell applied paint to this canvas and the rhythm of her physical actions.
The brushstrokes in Marlin may seem explosive, even violent, evoking, as the painting's title suggests, the movements of a powerful game fish. Inspired by nature, people, and places, Mitchell sought to capture in her work the feeling or experience of a thing rather than its appearance.
Diane Arbus - photograph collection, 1962-1970
Diane Arbus once said, "A photograph has to be of something and what it's of is always more remarkable than the photograph. And more complicated." Her photographs of couples, children, cross-dressers, nudists, pedestrians, families, and circus performers, among others, make up a diverse and compelling portrait of humanity.
IMG_6186
Grace Hartigan - Modern Cycle, 1967
My male students at the time were obsessed with motorcycles--one even kept his in his studio--and out of sheer self-preservation I bought a poster of Brando on a bike and [of] Peter Fonda, some cycle magazines, pinned them on my painting wall and Modern Cycle was the result. It is, incidentally, one of my favorite paintings.
--Grace Hartigan
Grace Hartigan's work often combines the spontaneity and large scale of abstract painting with images drawn from popular culture or everyday experience. In Modern Cycle, we see fragments of people and motorbikes--a dynamic mix of human and mechanical, masculine and feminine.
Morris Louis - Beta Upsilon, 1960
Morris Louis created this majestically scaled work has not been seen in public for more than thirty years. Morris Louis created it by directing streams of paint down the sides of the canvas, allowing the color to soak into the fibers. He left the central expanse blank, a bold choice that creates much of the composition's visual tension.
Louis produced all of his most influential paintings in the last five years of his life. He worked in the dining room of his house in Northwest DC, a space so small he could only unroll a single canvas, or part of a canvas, at a time.
Kay WalkingStick - Two Women II, 1973
How easily can you find the two women of the title? The painting's eye-popping hues and lack of volumetric detail create playful confusion between the figures and the background.
A Cherokee woman, Kay WalkingStick has been a double trailblazer in American art. She describes this painting as a joyful expression of female self-determination and sensuality. Produced amid the women's movement and the sexual revolution of the 1970s, it offers a rejoinder to the long history of male artists depicting the female nude.
Marcos Ramirez-Erre and David Taylor - DeLIMITations Portfolio, 2016
In this photographic series the artists document their epic effort to mark and photograph the never-before-surveved 1821 border between the United States and Mexico. It presents the beautiful diversity of landscape and settlement in the American West while drawing our attention to the constructed and fluid nature of man-made borders. "Before this was Mexico or the U.S.," Ramírez points out, "this whole land was
Native American."
In the 1819 Adams-Onís Treaty between the United States and Spain, which was ratified by the newly independent Mexico in 1821, the United States renounced "forever all their rights, claims, and pretensions" to the lands south of the treaty line. Yet, today those lands are known as the U.S. states of Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Texas, Colorado, Kansas, Wyoming, and Oklahoma. The artists offer the treaty text to visitors to underscore the fallibility of promises and the force of U.S. westward expansion.
Marcos Ramirez-Erre and David Taylor - DeLIMITations Portfolio, 2016
Neal Ambrose-Smith - Now That's a Coyote Story, from the series Native Perspectives on the Trail, 2004
In "Now That's a Coyote Story / sey tu pn sqwllu," Ambrose-Smith relates the traditional Native American character to modern "trickery." Indian teaching stories often feature Coyote, a trickster who can change shape and form to teach a lesson. In this print, alongside images of corn and a food nutrition label, we see Coyote wearing a winking mask. Ambrose-Smith weaves a traditional warning into his visual story. "Coyote knows the importance of corn for the people.
He sees that GMO corn can be trickery, but how is it that the people come to accept it? He sees that someone else is also crafty in his or her ways. Coyote sees all."
Jacob Lawrence - The Builders, 1980
Patrick Nagatani - from the series Nuclear Enchantment, 1988-1993
As a Japanese American born just thirteen days after the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima, Nagatani was fascinated with New Mexico's nuclear weapons industry. As he studied the contaminated sites of uranium mines, he also learned about the oldest continuous culture in North America, the Pueblo Indians, whose land and people were disproportionately impacted by
U.S. atomic ambitions.
The surreal scenes of Nagatani's Nuclear
Enchantment series use elaborate sets, hand coloring, and printing techniques to weave together images of toxic test sites, schools, atomic monuments, radioactive waste dumps, and sovereign Native lands. The artist exposes the abuses of the New Mexican landscape and its inhabitants perpetrated by the mining industry and the military in answering the government's thirst for atomic power.
Roger Shimomura - American Infamy, 2006
During World War II, the United States government placed into incarceration camps some 110,000 Japanese Americans living along the West Coast. Among them was the Seattle-born Roger Shimomura, whose earliest childhood memories were formed in the Minidoka concentration camp in southern Idaho, where he was sent with his family. Since the late 1970s Shimomura has made hundreds of paintings and prints reflecting on his experience of incarceration, working in a flat, cool style influenced by both American pop art and Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints. American Infamy, from Shimomura’s Minidoka on My Mind series, presents a wide-angle view of the incarceration camp, spread across four vertical panels like a Japanese folding screen and viewed from a traditional Japanese bird’s-eye perspective, as if to emphasize the government’s conception of the incarcerees as essentially Japanese despite their American ways and citizenship. The composition offers numerous colorful glimpses of daily life in the camp, including women doing laundry, a girl jumping rope and people lined up outside the bathroom. These are overshadowed, however, by the ominous black silhouette of an armed guard wielding binoculars at the left, and by the dark clouds that obscure the composition’s base and several parts of the scene above, clearly signaling Shimomura’s critical view of this unjust incarceration.
Al Rendòn - Charreada Warm Up, 1981 (printed 2015)
In the 1980s, Al Rendón began documenting the elaborate performances and dress of the San Antonio Charro Association in Texas (est. 1947), which was the first established organization of competitive Mexican American horsemen and women in the United States. He captures the traditions of charros and charras, whose equestrian feats are rooted in Spanish and Mexican ranch culture, which emerged in the sixteenth century when the Spanish introduced horses and cattle to the Americas. U.S. cowboy culture is an outgrowth of this history. Hints of our contemporary world creep into Rendón's photographs, suggesting how these traditions live in the present. Some photographs undermine Mexican "bandito" stereotypes common in racist "cowboy and Indian" films. His photographs assert charro customs as fixtures in the U.S.--Mexico borderlands.
Christina Fernandez - from Maria's Great Expedition, 1995-1996
Fernandez’s installation mimics a museum display that recounts the story of early explorers of the Southwest. Fernandez photographed herself in the guise of her great-grandmother María González, the first member of her family to migrate to the United States from Mexico. The accompanying narrative details how González and other Mexican Americans settled in places such as Arizona, Texas, and California. The artist’s fictive photographs, which reflect the shifting conventions of early to mid-twentieth-century photography, highlight the constructed nature of all historical accounts.
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