The document discusses various contemporary artists and their approaches to identity, culture, and representation through diverse mediums such as photography, performance, and painting. Key artists highlighted include Janine Antoni, Cindy Sherman, Kehinde Wiley, and Marina Abramović, each exploring themes of beauty, social issues, and personal connection in their work. The document provides an overview of their notable projects and the impact they have on contemporary art.

1. ARTISTS DISCUSSED IN
ARTS 102 – FALL 2013
Dr. Stephanie Danker

2. Janine Antoni
Creates performance art, sculpture, and
photography, often using the whole body
or different parts of it, such as the
mouth, hair, eyelashes, and brain as
tools. Works focus mostly on process and
the transitions between the making and
finished product.
Two examples of works are Lick and
Lather (1993) (top left, made from
chocolate and lard); and Touch (2002)
(bottom left, video installation)

3. Cindy Sherman
Widely recognized as one of the
most influential contemporary
artists, this art explores
construction of identity and nature
of representation. She works as her
own model, also acting as
photographer, makeup artist,
hairdresser, stylist. The Untitled
Film Stills (1977-80) are perhaps her
best-known series.

4. Nikki S. Lee
Most noted work, Projects (19972001) depicts the artist in snapshot
photographs, posing with various
ethnic and social groups, including
drag queens, punks, swing dancers,
senior citizens, Latinos, hip-hop
musicians and fans, skateboarders;
she investigates notions of identity.

5. Kehinde Wiley
New York-based portrait painter,
who is known for highly naturalistic
paintings of contemporary urban
African, African-American, AfroBrazilian, Indian and EthiopianJewish men in heroic poses.

6. Karen Ann Myers
Charleston, SC-based portrait
painter. This artist’s ornate
paintings explore our obsession
with beauty through elaborate
renderings of patterns, textures,
and figures. “I am investigating the
psychological complexity of
women....through intimate
observations in the bedroom. The
work is inspired by the cult of
beauty in contemporary mass
media.”

7. Brian Ulrich
Contemporary photographer known
for photographic exploration of
consumer culture; seeks to reveal
social illusions through
photographic scrutiny.
Chicago, Illinois (Cell), 2003

8. JeongMee Yoon
Contemporary artist and
photographer who created The Pink
and Blue Projects, exploring
preferences among children from
diverse cultures.
Dayuen and Her Pink Things, 2007

9. Hank Willis Thomas
Contemporary African American
visual artist and photographer
whose primary interests are race,
advertising and popular culture.
Left: Branded Head (2003)

10. Carrie Mae Weems
This artist’s photographs and films
focus on serious issues that face
African-Americans today, such as
racism, gender relations, politics
and personal identity. Kitchen Table
series, Constructing History series.

11. Mel Chin
Conceptual visual artist that is
motivated largely by political,
cultural, and social circumstances.
Alchemy, botany, and ecology are a
few of the disciplines that intersect
in this work. Fundred project,
where kids create Fundred dollar
bills meant to symbolically
exchange with Congress to fund
cleaning up soil contamination /
lead poisoning in New Orleans.

12. Naomi Natale
Installation artist, photographer,
and social activist. Founder and
director of the Cradle Project, a
fundraising art installation designed
to publicize the plight of 48 million
children orphaned by disease and
poverty in sub-Saharan Africa.
Director of One Million Bones,
recognizing the millions of victims
killed or displaced by ongoing
atrocities in Burma, the Democratic
Republic of the Congo, and Sudan.

13. Alfredo Jaar
Artist, architect, and filmmaker. "A
million people were killed under
the criminal indifference of the
world.” This artist reminds us of the
importance of images and the
media in general. A decade of his
work has been dedicated to
representing the Rwandan genocide
in 1994: ways to educate, aid others
in empathizing, and criticizing the
media’s insensitive and
irresponsibility.

14. Ai Weiwei
Contemporary artist, active in
sculpture, installation, architecture,
curating, photography, film, and
social, political and cultural
criticism.
Coca Cola Vase (1997). Vase from
Neolithic Age (5000 – 3000 BCE)
and paint

15. Banksy
England-based graffiti artist,
political activist, film director and
painter. His satirical street art and
subversive epigrams combine dark
humor with graffiti done in a
distinctive stenciling technique.
Such artistic works of political and
social commentary have been
featured on streets, walls, and
bridges of cities throughout the
world.

16. JR
Photographer and street artist who
posts large black-and-white
photographic images in public
locations. His work combines art
and action and deals with
commitment, freedom, identity and
limits.

17. Moose
One of the first street artists to
make an art piece using the reverse
graffiti technique. The mural he
created by power washing stenciled
areas in a San Francisco tunnel
showed indigenous trees that
would have been living in the area
before the tunnel was built.

18. Scott Wade
Creates amazingly detailed and
shaded subtractive drawings using
car windows coated with dirt. His
works are realistic in nature and are
often inspired by pictures, images
from pop culture or recreations of
famous artworks from history. He
travels to different places making
his images and has been referred to
as the Dirty Car Artist and the
DaVinci of Dust.

19. Jason deCaires Taylor
Sculptor specializing in the creation
of contemporary underwater
sculptures which over time develop
into artificial coral reefs.

20. Adrienne Salinger
This photographer is fascinated
with the spaces in which people
live, including a series of work
entitled, Teenagers in Their
Bedrooms. The photographs are
paired with interviews of the
subjects, showing the disparity
between what people say about
themselves and what the
photograph seems to reveal. The
artist thus questions the axiom that
a picture tells a thousand words.

21. Sally Mann
Photographer, best known for large
black-and-white photographs—at
first of her young children, then
later of landscapes suggesting
decay and death.

22. Tilda Swinton
Academy Award-winning actress
who also moonlights as a
performance artist, including The
Maybe at MoMA, where she sleeps
in the middle of the museum in a
glass box.

23. Tom Marioni
This artist has been experimenting
at the boundaries of art for forty
years. Free beer salons are part of
an ongoing gathering and "social
sculpture" series that has been a
fixture in the Bay Area art scene
since 1970. The title of this
conceptual work (pictured at left) is
The Act of Drinking Beer with
Friends is the Highest Form of Art.

24. Marina Abramović
Artist who works in sound pieces,
video works, installations,
photographs, solo performances,
and collaborative performances;
she is referred to as the
“Grandmother of performance art.”
The work discussed in class was a
736-hour performance called The
Artist is Present, where she sat
across from individuals and stared
at them without speaking.

25. Jeff Koons
Blends concerns and methods of
Pop, Conceptual, and appropriation
art with craft-making and popular
culture to create his own unique
iconography, often controversial.
Some themes he explores in his
work are contemporary obsessions
with sex and desire; race and
gender; and celebrity, media,
commerce, and fame. He hires
artisans and technicians to make
the actual works.

26. Damien Hirst
English assemblage, painter, and
conceptual artist whose
deliberately provocative art
addresses vanity and beauty, death
and rebirth, and medicine,
technology, and mortality. Also
known for Spot paintings (19862011); sees art as the conception of
the idea, not the execution of the
work.

27. Félix González-Torres
Combining forms of Minimal art
with strategies of Conceptual art,
this artist employs materials as
disparate as stacks of paper, strings
of light, piles of candy, and lines of
text, believing that “meaning is
created once something can be
related to personal experience.”
Many of his works address themes
of loss and renewal.

28. Robin Rhode
Working predominantly with
everyday material like charcoal,
chalk and paint, this artist started
out creating performances that are
based on his own drawings of
objects that he interacts with. He
expanded and refined this practice
into creating photography
sequences and digital animations.
These works have an
interdisciplinary approach and bring
together performance, film,
drawing and photography.

29. Dawoud Bey
Photographer renowned for his
large-scale color portraits of
adolescents and other often
marginalized subjects. The work we
looked at in class was from The
Chicago Project, where he took
portraits of urban students and
recorded their stories on audio,
which could be played while looking
at their portraits.

30. Brian Jungen
Canadian artist from British
Columbia with Swiss and Dunne-za
First Nations ancestry. He uses
mass-produced goods to make
sculptures that are simultaneously
fake and authentic, playful and
political, common and
extraordinary. He charges ordinary,
useful objects with layers of
meaning, exploring and
transgressing the boundaries of
what they had been and what
they’ve become, riffing on Indian
imagery, pop culture, consumerism,
and obsession in the process.

31. Edgar Heap of Birds
Native American artist whose work
includes multi-disciplinary forms of
public art messages, large scale
drawings, acrylic paintings, prints,
and monumental porcelain enamel
on steel outdoor sculpture. In class
we looked at Most Serene
Republics, an installation of signs
(part of the Venice Biennale 2007)
honoring Native Americans who
died in Europe.