Barbara Kruger's Untitled (No Radio)

Postmodern American artist’s Cindy Sherman and Kara Walker critique and question grand narratives of gender, race and class through their work and art practice. Cindy Sherman, born 1954, is well renowned for her conceptual portraits of female characters and personas that question the representation of women, gender identity and the true (or untrue) nature of photography (Hattenstone 2011). Kara Walker, born 1969, is known for her black silhouettes that dance across gallery walls and most recently her sugar sphinx, A Subtlety, address America’s racist slavery past (Berry 2003). These practitioners differ in their practical application of different mediums, Sherman constructs characters and scenes of stereotypical female personas in her photographs where she operates as the actress, director, wardrobe assistant, set designer and cameraman (Machester 2001). Simone Hatenstone, writer for The Guardian, states “She 's a Hitchcock heroine, a busty Monroe, an abuse victim, a terrified centrefold, a corpse, a Caravaggio, a Botticelli, a mutilated hermaphrodite sex doll, a man in a balaclava, a surgically-enhanced Hamptons type, a cowgirl, a desperate clown, and we 've barely started.” (Hattenstone 2011).Whereas, Walker creates paper silhouettes that are installed into a gallery space, as writer Ian Berry describes,

Artists use their artworks to communicate different meanings and transfer specific messages to the audience. Their artworks can be presented in different forms like architecture, drawing, painting, sculpture, pottery and many other forms. Each artwork contains a specific meaning which is usually based on the artist 's beliefs, culture, identity and the nature surrounding us. Rona Rubuntja from the Hermannsburg Potters, Bronwyn Oliver, Christo and Jeanne Claude each presented their art in different forms but they all communicate meanings and ideas to the audience. Rona Rubuntja who is a senior member of the Hermannsburg Potters and her famous pottery work ‘I 'm Black’ for the exhibition ‘Our Land is Alive’ at the National Gallery of

“Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.” -Oscar Wilde. Women are wild, sensitive, magnificent, mysterious, and above all: individual. Art’s many different medias allowed artist throughout the ages to capture women at both their strongest and most vulnerable points. It has the power to capture a woman: as a naïve, young girl clutching her brother as they are painted into a lasting portrait, a golden statue of an angel sent down to Earth to help a saved man take his first steps into an eternal life with God, to the powerful goddess, Artemis, transforming a hunter into a deer and having his hunting dogs tragically attack him. The six pieces of art chosen express the individuality of each women who has walked, walks, and will walk the earth.

This Summer, I had the opportunity to spend my entire break attending conferences and interning at a lab at UCSD so I thought to myself I would never have the time to visit any art museum or do my summer assignments for that matter. That was until I realized I was living at a campus who had an art piece practically on every corner of their six colleges. I then began my journey, on scooter, to discover the hidden and the not so hidden gems The Stuart Collection at UCSD had to offer. It was then that I fell in love with 2 specific art pieces throughout the campus, those being Do Ho Suh’s Fallen Star, which depicts an immigrant’s transition into American culture, and Kiki Smith’s Standing, which depicts a seemingly tortured woman.

Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Artists Rights Society (ARS). (2017). Collection. Retrieved from MOMA Museum of Modern Art, US: Museum of Modern Art [US]/https://www.moma.org/collection/works/78699

Killing us Softly 4 sends out a very strong message that could potentially send wrong signals to some. Jean Kilbourne did a fantastic job at making sure the message properly shown to the audience. After all she does have the experience and has been able to polish her work after killing us softly one, two, and three. She speaks very strong about sex trafficking, Objectification of women, gender violence, and global impact of oppression. But what I felt she spoke most passionately about is about how women are portrayed as flawless just as art from Florence, Rome, Venice, and others during, after and before the Renaissance. Although their perception of perfection was different as ours they often showed what was wanted not what was. Now with the use of photoshop we end up making a woman look impossibly beautiful. Women having to live up to that and men expecting the same thing hurts everyone, except people making money off it of course. All of this has been seen through history in a different way using art.

Douglas’s piece Afro-American Solidarity with the Oppressed is currently at the Oakland Museum of California, a gift of the Rossman family. The piece is from offset lithograph, which is a method of mass-production. This piece is a colorful representation of the fact that the BPP promoted gender equality and that women were a vital part of the movement. Douglas makes use of depth perception to give the illusion that the art is three-dimensional. He also uses linear perspective which are the parallel lines in the background. These lines also seem to portray the woman as some type of heroine. Douglas also makes use of colors in this piece to add meaning to it.

Since its founding, the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) has been exhibiting and collecting works by contemporary artists. They have an ever-expanding collection of 20th- and 21st-century art that I had the pleasure of viewing, following its remodel in 2012. In addition to the permanent collection, a new innovative experience called the Black Box gallery introduces a new way of viewing the works of contemporary artists. The Black Box allows the viewer not only to see the work in a new way, playing with light but also hear and experience images in motion. The exhibit I went to see was curated by Kristen Hileman, the senior curator of contemporary art, and it features two screen-based works as opposed to displaying one as it usually does. The two artists featured were Kara Walker and Hank Willis Thomas.Within their works, both artists discuss the feeling and experiences associated with being black in America, specifically the historical significance of the legacy of slavery.

Also, in my discussion I reflected on how, “this image is culturally important because it represents that females can be strong and powerful.” I never realized how much art can reflect upon the society and how important the media is when it. There are a lot of politics in art, but not all art forms can be pleasing to the viewers, it’s about doing what you like and there is no need to adjust your point of view. There are so many different types of art forms, and I’m glad we experienced and learned about them in this class. I have ultimately formed a love for different art forms, and can’t wait to experience them in the future.

I fell in love with methodologies of art history. I felt empowered in that, through my own interpretations, I could attach words and meaning to objects. My study of art history reached a turning point when, in 2012, I took a class entitled Identity in a Post-Identity Art World: Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Trans/Nationality, 1990 to the Present. The course endowed me with another lens with which to examine works and, more importantly, shed light on representations of marginalized identities. As a result, I was introduced to the writings of Judith Butler and Simone de Beauvoir, both seminal theorists who inspired my own analyses. I enjoyed every minute of conducting research and forming arguments to support my claims. Ultimately I was interested in developing my understanding of issues in contemporary art further and sought to accomplish this by engaging with a larger

We have all experienced it. Whether it be a birthday party or a baby shower, we have all been exposed to it, even if we have not realized it. The next time you attend a baby shower, pay close attention to the decorations, specifically the balloons. Universally, a balloon stamped “It's a Boy!” will be blue, and correspondingly, a pink balloon will be labeled “It's a Girl!” This observation might seem trivial at first, but a close look shows that this pattern haunts every baby event.

This piece was created during a time of political and social change. Increased political awareness and a focus on celebrity demanded art that was more

The work can be a great choice for the selection as it highlights the significance of art in a very holistic manner. The inclusion of African American women and blue as well as white collar workers depict a realistic picture of the society. As is true about any form of art, a great piece of work is always rooted in the culture of the artist; the scene in the painting is localized by an inclusion of the local landmarks and

The two works of art that I have chosen to analyze are 1) Jordan Casteel. Miles and JoJo. 2014. Oil on canvas, 54” x 72” and 2) Aaron Fowler. He Was. 2015. Mixed media, 134” x 165” x 108”. The themes that these works of art represent in regards to the exhibit are love, family, and pain. However, they also fall into other thematic categories. The main theme that seems to apply to both “Miles and JoJo” and “He Was” is Human Experience. Additionally, these arts differ in some ways.

I went to The Art Institute of Chicago on a Thursday when it was free for Illinois resident and when there were different exhibitions going on. There was long line at the entrance near the museum at 6pm in the evening. I went alone because I thought I can have better focus on picking a good art work. I was ready to go through all the magnificent paintings for my art museum paper. As I walked through the museum, there were colorful Indian Modern art exhibited for the occasion. They were big and vibrant. The was also a special exhibition of Tarsila Do Amaral, one of the leading Latin American Modernist artist who paint like Cubism, Futurism and expressionism. Her artworks were childlike in terms of the painting style of objects and people. I was most fond of the modernist and contemporary part of the gallery with painters like Salvador Dali and Francis Bacon. I was fascinated with Salvador Dali’s Venus de Milo with Drawers. The drawers unnaturalistically located on a human body was intriguing. The depth of the human mind and subconsciousness are creatively represented by these drawers on Venus de Milo. Francis bacon’s work Figure with meat was not bad either. Figure with Meat is a disturbing depiction of Pope Innocent X sat in front of a cow carcass cut lengthways in half. (Gould) Like his other painting, the theme is dark and twisted. The carcass is included serve as a direct reminder that death will be at the end await