Vanessa Spadotto

Martha Rosler
Martha Rosler is an american artist from Brooklyn, New York born on July 29, 1943. She is widely known for capturing the lives of women as portrayed by media in comparison to wars being fought abroad. She uses many different mediums, however she is known for her many photo-collages, many of which have even been displayed in the Museum of Modern Art. Not only is she known for photo-collages but she also has many video artworks which she has collaborated with many other people including some homeless people. Rosler has spoken and taught in schools, she even taught at Rutgers University for thirty years. Rosler's most controversial topics included her artwork "Body Beautiful" which became the cover for Wack! art magazine in which she collages photographs of women found in Playboy magazine. Many criticized her artwork in Wack! magazine for going against the magazines feminist ideals. However, Rosler's use of collage distracts the male gaze and shifts the attention from submissive women to a "wave of naked female defiance."

http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/feminist/Martha-Rosler.html

http://awomanlikethatfilm.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/gallery_full/gallery/jael-and-sisera-web.gif

Medika Edwards

Art History

Professor Dorris Cacoilo

Mini Blog:  Artemisia Gentileschi

            Artemisia was born in Rome Italy 1593 and died 1653, she was the daughter of Orozio Gentileschi and Prudentia Montone. Artemisia grew up a neighborhood where she was surrounded by different artist both local and foreign. Artemisia was one of the first female artist to be recognized in the male dominated world of post-Renaissance art. She was also the first woman to paint major historical and religious characters.

Artemisia received her early training from her father and despite her ability she was rejected by the art academies. The Madonna and child is considered to be one of her early painting although it is said to be the work of her father. She however continue to study under her father friend Tassia. During the time of Artemisia study with Tassia, her father accused and file a suit against Tassia for raping her. The publicity and trauma influence her painting and changes her theme to graphic and symbolic works which were attempts to deal with her physical and psychological pain. The second painting shows the Bible heroine Jael who delivered the enemy of Israel into the hand of Gideon, this painting depicting a strong woman who took matters into her own hands. 

After Artemisia death her work went into obscurity, however in 1989 she was rediscovered by Mary D. Garrard and her first exhibition was held in Florence in 1991. She has been brought to light since and a film has brought her visibility as an important artist.          

Frida Kahlo

“I don't paint dreams or nightmares, I paint my own reality.”

― Frida Kahlo

FRIDA KAHLO (1907-1954)
'The Broken Column', 1944 (oil on board)

 

 

Self Portrait Artist      Frida Kahlo  

July 6, 1907 - July 13, 1934

Mexican Artist Frida Khalo paintings are demonstrative of the suffering she endured throughout her lifetime.  Kahlo suffered from polio, as a child.  Later as a teenager, a bus accident left her incapacitated with fractures to her spine, pelvic and most  of her body.  Frida's suffering and pain enabled her to draw attention to the reality of patriarchy and the objectification of women  during the 19th century.
Kahlo, lived and died a martyr and an object of the era in which woman were oppressed. 

Ghada Amer

Ghada Amer is an Egyptian painter, sculptor, and performance artist. A major theme in her work is equality for women and female sexuality. She is also known for combining paintings with needlework. Her art questions the traditional gender roles placed on women. The submissions to domestic life, female sexuality and pleasure, love, war and violence, and the search for beauty are all expressed through her art. Ghada left Egypt when she was about 11 years old and has lived both in France and the United States. The influence of Islamic and western cultures are also seen in her work.   She addresses postcolonial identities and Islamic cultures. Ghada is influenced by the idea of shifting meanings she's seen during her travels.

Faith Ringgold

Faith is an African American artist, activist, and author. Her art ranges from paintings to sculptures to children's books. A lot of her early paintings made people uncomfortable because they portrayed the underlying racism in everyday life. In 1963 she created a group of paintings called "American People", which told the story of the civil rights movement from a female perspective. In the 1970s she created African influenced masks and sought to racially integrate the NYC art world. Ringgold also worked on a collection of paintings called "America Black". With this collection she experimented with darker colors. She realized that white western art was focused on the color white and that African cultures generally used darker colors to focus on color and create a contrast. Faith currently lives in Englewood, New Jersey and owns her own practice.

Everyday Series by Shadi Ghadirian (Ayo Haruna)

Shadi Ghadirian was born in 1974 in Tehran, Iran. She is a photographer who continues to live and work in Iran. Ghadirian studied photography at Azad University (in Tehran). After finishing her B. A., Ghadirian began her professional career as a photographer. Her work is intimately linked to her identity as a Muslim woman living in Iran. Her art also deals with issues relevant to women living in other parts of the world. She questions the role of women in society and explores ideas of censorship, religion, modernity, and the status of women. She seems to mock the typical stereotypes that is associated with women in her pictures. Her work has been exhibited in museums and galleries across Europe, and the U.S.A although some of her work is censored in her birth country, Iran. 

Mary Cassatt was an american painter. She was porn in Pennsylvania but lived much of her adult life in France. She grew up in an environment that viewed travel as integral to education. While abroad she learned German and French and had her first lessons in drawing and music. In 1877, both her entries were rejected, and for the first time in seven years she had no work, at this low point in her career she was invited by Edgar Degas to show her works with the impressionists. The 1890s were Cassatt's busiest and most creative time. She had matured considerably and became more diplomatic and less blunt in her opinions. Cassatt often created images of the social and private lives of women, with particular emphasis on the intimate bonds between mothers and children. In her interpretation, she used primarily light, delicate pastel colors and avoided black. A trip to Egypt in 1910 impressed Cassatt with the beauty of its ancient art, but was followed by a crisis of creativity; not only had the trip exhausted her, but she declared herself "crushed by the strength of this Art”.  

https://www.google.com/#q=mary+cassatt

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Noman Sheikh: Dorothea Lange (1895-1965)

 Dorothea Lange is a American photojournalist known for her work during the Great Depression. She started as an independent photographer in San Francisco. Her studio catered to the social elites as such once the stock market fell, her studio also started to fail. In 1935 she joined the Farm Security Administration to document on the living conditions in rural areas. Her photographs portray the struggles rather the ubiquitous despair experienced by the Americans in the Mid-west during this troubling time. An important thing to note is that she would not take photos unless if the subject were unaware of the camera or had grown to used to her.

 Within the black and white specs of her photographs, viewers see a glimpse of the desolation in all necessities including food and shelter, where individuals worried whether or not their families may live to see another day. Individuals whom scramble just to eat. 

Dorothea Lange

Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California

1936

Miss Lange account when she took this photograph is as follows: I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean- to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it. (From: Popular Photography, Feb. 1960).

The Migrant Mother photograph in my opinion carefully shows the desperation of the mother to provide for her children. The struggle depicted by the malnourishment and the stress lines in her forehead to make ends meet. Explicit by the rumpled and torn clothing. 

Dorothea Lange

Daughter of Migrant Tennessee Coal Miner Living in American River Camp near Sacramento, California

1936

This photograph shows the poor living conditions of the miners trying to make ends meet. The individual is living out of a tent struggling to look forward to another day because she only sees a pit she and her family cannot get out of. 

Dorothea Lange

Child and Her Mother, Wapato, Yakima Valley, Washington

1939

Despite it being a picture of farmland, the lack crops and despair on both the child and the mothers face depict the loss of hope to make a recovery from the life they struggle to endure. With the child's head drooped and body against the wire could show that this family feels imprisoned by the conditions they have to endure during this period.

Laura Milad- Elizabeth Catlett (mini post)

Elizabeth Catlett was born on April 15, 1915 and passed away on April 2, 2012. Catlett is an African American graphic artist and sculptor. Most of her work is based on African American experiences during the 20th century with women being her main focus. Her work has both African American and Mexican influences. Her work depicts many social messages like race,gender and class issues. She is also the granddaughter of slaves. Some of her sculptures and prints are of famous African American figures like Harriet Tubman and Malcom X. She was also influenced by the social activism of Diego Rivera who was a Mexican muralist. She went to Mexico City in 1946 where she worked at Taller de Gráfica Popular, an artists’ collective. While she was there she was there she worked on depicting Mexican life. One of her most famous sculptures is Homage to My Young Black Sisters (1968). Her other famous works include Sharecropper (1968) and Survivor (1983) and the lithograph Negro es bello (1968; “Black Is Beautiful”). Catlett continued to work on art even in her 90s.

                                                                 Survivor (1983)

                                                   

Sharecropper (1968)

Homage to My Young Black Sisters (1968)

Giancarlo Piccinini - Critical Artist Expression

Coping Habits, 2014

 Ms. Exposed, 2015

Bubblegum, 2015   

Sammie Dube, a 20-year-old north Jersey native, has found her home town of Sandyston, NJ, a parochial, traditionalist community just minutes from the Pennsylvanian border, an archetype for all things patriarchally au courant. In her short years as an artist, Sammie has found solace in openly expressing notions of feminism that have often been silenced by her community at large. Despite ridicule or comments of vulgarity, inappropriateness, etc. Sammie finds that her art effectively transcends the boundaries put in place by an unjust, systematically dominative practice. Sammie's art, however, is not activism per se, as she uses art as a means of self-stimulation, a coping mechanism of sorts to remedy pains felt throughout her life. Although Sammie identifies her 'pains' as motivation for her works, she is constantly exploring new ways of expressing issues she feels are necessary for people to understand and openly visualize if we as a species are ever to know peace. Her objective begins with undoing the silence that surrounds areas of discourse ironically dubbed as 'rude', sexuality, gender expectations, emotion, etc., to give the people who face injustice every day a chance at upholding what humanity should be. Other than spending her time pursuing virtue as an artist, Sammie is also an amateur writer and is on track to becoming a special effects makeup technician. 

Nan Goldin- Mini Post

Nan Goldin, Jimmy Paulette + Tabboo! in the bathroom. NYC, 1991

Nan Goldin is a photographer who grew up in Boston.  When she was 18 years old she lived in downtown Boston and began spending a lot of her time with drag queens.  She lived with them and began photographing their lives.  She emerged into her art career in the 80s.  Her photographs are very intimate and represent gender and the gay and transgender community.  Her photos can be viewed as shocking and raw as they don’t appear to be posed.  This forces the viewer to deal with the topics that are being addressed in her photos.  However, they do express sexuality beautifully.  Her photos do not exploit sexuality, instead the celebrate it. These topics that she wasn't afraid of presenting in her work are what make her such an important artist.

Nan Goldin, Greer and Robert on the bed, NYC, 1982

Kara Walker (Ashley Alvarez, Mini Post)

Kara Walker is a contemporary African-American artist known for creating life sized, black-and-white silhouettes that depict themes of slavery, violence, and sexuality. Walker was born in Stockton, California in 1969 and moved to Atlanta, Georgia at the age of 13, where she began to experience forms of oppression, prejudice, and even fear from white supremacy groups. She received a Master of Fine Arts degree in painting and printmaking from Rhode Island School of Design. Her art is filled with intense subject matter that explores the controversial social issues of race, gender, and sexuality. Walker draws much of her inspiration from novels including The Clansman and Gone With The Wind that represent Southern culture during the American Civil War era. Due to her controversial work, The Newark Public Library decided to cover up one of Walker’s drawings depicting a black female slave giving oral sex to a white slave owner. Despite this unfortunate event, Walker has earned several achievements; she is the youngest recipient of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s “genius” grant, she has made it to the prestigious “TIME 100” list in 2007, and in 2014, she also made a massive sculpture for the Domino sugar factory using 30 tons of sugar. 

Kara Walker, 2001
Courtesy Walker Art Center

Kara Walker, 1995
Courtesy Walker Art Center

“I think really the whole problem with racism and its continuing legacy in this country is that we simply love it. Who would we be without the "struggle”?“–Kara Walker, United States

Kara Walker, Artist Statement (No Place (Like Home), 1997.

http://www.walkerart.org/collections/artists/kara-walker

Samella Lewis, Superwoman (Ray Habib Mini-Blog Post)

Samella Sanders Lewis is a New Orleans native. Samella Lewis is an extremely significant artist, especially being a minority in that she is both a woman and African American. She specializes in preserving African American Art, with one article claiming that she "has enhanced the cultural fabric of the Los Angeles' art scene and nationally continues to be an influential voice that is respected." Not only was what Samella Lewis did difficult in her time (she was born in 1924), but it is also difficult in today's age, wonder-some considering that our country has "progressed." Samella Lewis also helped shape references for young artists that wanted to follow in her similar footsteps. Her art is displayed in The Museum of African Art, and she is the founder of "The International Review of African American Art," which became a necessary tool for educating the population about African American contributions throughout history, especially their contributions to the visual arts. Samella Lewis received a doctorate degree in art and art history from Ohio State University in 1951, which made her the first ever recipient of a doctorate degree for both of those majors.

Samella Lewis--Field Hands


This image above embodies the essence of what Samella Sanders Lewis' artistic expressions aimed to display, from the look on the boys faces to the title of the piece: "Field Hands."

Joshua Martinez-Mini Post

Wangechi Mutu born June 22nd,1972 in Nairobi,Kenya was a scluptor and artist who is viewed to be one of the most influential and significant African-American artist of our century. Her work has been recognized and idolized all around the globe. Her work focuses mainly on racial identity as well as gender issues. In her work she often uses figures to interpret a certain vibe or story line in a personal and political aspect. The way identity may circulate around views that are representing our society is what attracts her attention. Many of her work is displayed in various locations such as Miami Art Museum, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, the Studio Museum in Harlem and plenty more.

Le Noble Savage-2006

The End of Eating Everything-2013

http://art.newcity.com/2014/10/20/review-wangechi-mutublock-museum-of-art/

Jennifer Linton Mini Post

Jennifer Linton was born in North Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada in 1968. She attended the University of Toronto and Sheridan College where she majored in graphic design and art and art history. Jennifer Linton addresses cultural, social, and political issues in her artwork. She illustrates in her artwork issues that depict gender and women experiences. Her art also depicts her personal experiences and issues that are relevant in our culture and society. Recently, Linton’s work focuses on pregnancy and motherhood. As she becomes more focus on taking care of her child, she has changed and her artwork as well. Linton illustrates issues such as body image, gender identity, and sexuality. The goal of Lincoln is to portray an honest view of motherhood, something completely different from what is actually shown in the media and from what people might believe in. This challenges some of the views and values that people may have in reality in regards to motherhood and art.

Comfort and Freedom- 1994

Nursing Ridley- 2006

http://www.lilithgallery.com/gallery/jennifer_linton.html