Tag Archive "activist-art"
Edgar Heap of Birds’ signs and a lecture at Temple Contemporary
This past Thursday, Tyler School of Art alum, Edgar Heap of Birds (b.1954) presented a fascinating lecture about art and life to a huge crowd in Temple Contemporary Gallery. An internationally recognized artist, Heap of Birds’ conceptual art employs text, abstraction, and installation to reference his Native American identity and culture, or other global indigenous cultures. Heap of Birds is a professor of art and Native American Studies at the University of Oklahoma. He has travelled widely to teach, live, and make work about the stories and lives of people whose cultures have been forcibly erased. Part of his practice ... More » »
Nato Thompson at Temple – How can art compete with corporate image making?
In his wide-ranging talk at Temple Gallery Feb 23, Nato Thompson threw down the gauntlet: Make the arts relevant or they will be pathetic and irrelevant. He asked rhetorically, how can art be relevant when it has to compete daily with the 3000 advertising and other corporate images we are bombarded with. All those ads, logos, and stuff in our visual field, he said, — they have taken over. They own the cultural discussion. “I love Karl Marx,” Thompson threw out there while pacing back and forth in front of his projected slides. While his talk, titled Seeing Power: Art ... More » »
Two Recent Books on Socially-Engaged Art
A number of books and catalogs have come out which concern art with a social and/or political focus. This post looks at two which were recently published in Berlin: Art and Agenda; Political Art and Activism, Robert Klanten et al, eds. ( Berlin: Gestalten, 2011) ISBN 978-3-89955-342-0 visible; where art leaves its own field and becomes visible as part of something else, a project by Cittadellarte-Fondazione Pistoletto and Fondazione Zegna (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010) ISBN 978–1-934105-0
Monographs on Birgit Jürgenssen, Nancy Spero and Hannah Wilke
It’s welcome to see increasing numbers of serious books on women artists, even if all three discussed here are posthumous. The volumes on Spero and Wilke pay sustained attention to two Americans who are well-known and widely reproduced; the book on the Austrian, Birgit Jürgenssen (1949-2003), is an introduction to a fascinating artist whose work is all but unknown in the U.S. Gabriele Schor and Abigail Solomon-Godeau Birgit Jürgenssen (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz and Vienna: Sammlung Verbund, 2009) ISBN 978-3-7757–2461-6 (English edition) Birgit Jürgenssen’s education, teaching career and exhibitions took place primarily in the very small and in-bred art community of ... More » »
