Cindy Sherman Research Paper

You are to choose 2 artists that inspire you. You are to fill in information under the following headings: (needs to be straight to the point)-

Artist 1: Jean Michel Basquiat

Artist 2: Cindy Sherman

Subject matter:

1) jean-Michel Basquiat emerged from the "Punk" scene in New York as a gritty, street-smart graffiti artist who successfully crossed over from his "downtown" origins to the international art gallery circuit. In a few fast-paced years, Basquiat swiftly rose to become one of the most celebrated, and possibly most commercially exploited American "naif" painters of the widely celebrated Neo-Expressionism art movement.

2)Cindy Sherman is a contemporary master of socially critical photography. She is a key figure of the "Pictures

Generation," a loose circle of American artists who came to artistic maturity and critical recognition during the early 1980s, a period notable for the rapid and widespread proliferation of mass media imagery.

challenged cultural stereotypes supported by the media.
self-portraits offer critiques of gender and identity.
use of her own body in roles or personas in her work,

Influences:
Basquiat's work is an example of how American artists of the 1980s could reintroduce the human figure in their works, after the wide success of Conceptualism and Minimalism, establishing an agreement with the more vast tradition of 1950s Abstract Expressionism. The gift of the book Gray's Anatomy after suffering injuries in an accident was a significant influence in his artistic outlook from that point in his life. Fundamentally, Basquiat's work surrounds solely on graffiti, text, black America, and social comment in his works an example of his use of these subject matters in which he expressing not just his style but his every centre influence in her work surround his troubled thoughts.

2. Recalling a long tradition of self-portraiture and theatrical role-playing in art, Sherman utilizes the camera and the various tools of the everyday cinema, such as makeup, costumes, and stage scenery, to recreate common illusions, or iconic "snapshots," that signify various concepts of public celebrity, self confidence, sexual adventure, entertainment, and other socially sanctioned, existential conditions. As though they constituted only a first premise, however, these images promptly begin to unravel in various ways that suggest how self identity is often an unstable compromise between social dictates and personal intention.

manipulates themes of identity

Cultural Contexts:
1)Jean-Michel Basquiat, is a african American who surfaced during the late 1970s where the hip hop, punk, and street art movements had coalesced. Jean-Michel grew up in the Lower East Side, a neighborhood in the southeastern part of the New York City borough of Manhattan. As a growing young boy and man this areas was traditionally an immigrant, working class neighborhood, it began rapid gentrification in the mid-2000s, long after the impacts of poverty and had on Jean-Michel. Basquiat used social commentary in his paintings as a "springboard to deeper truths about the individual".

2)Cynthia Morris Sherman is an America who was born into privileged white America. Her father and engineer and her mother was a teacher of children with learning difficulties. Sherman was the youngest of five children. Later in her adolescent years Sherman enrolled in the visual arts department at Buffalo State College, where she began painting. During this time, she began to explore the ideas which became a hallmark of her work. Frustrated with what she saw as the limitations of painting as a medium of art, she abandoned it and took up photography, were she examines and distorts femininity as a social construct.

Materials and techniques (processes):
1)His use of graffiti during adolescence marked his later artistic interest in uniting text and image in his compositions.

He never considered himself a graffiti artist, but he used words to establish a connection with who he was and what he wanted to indicate. Basquiat employed words as if they were brushstrokes. The words, lists, or phrases that formed part of his compositions constituted a fundamental aspect of his art.

Besides painting on paper or stretched canvas, Basquiat often painted on materials he found in the streets, such as windows, doors, or scraps of foam rubber, which he joined together with wooden bars and hinges. He covered the surfaces with paint and pieces of torn and crumpled paper superimposed on top of one another.By experimenting with new artistic techniques and mixing different methods of expression, Basquiat managed to capture the mix of high and popular culture, giving his works a poetic focus similar to the contemporary spirit of hip

hop.

2)Cindy Sherman questions reality in her staged photographs. Her photographs are neither portraits nor self portraits. While the viewer understands that Cindy Sherman acts as both model and photographer in ‘Untitled #112 1982’, the character depicted is neither about Sherman or any real character Sherman saw. Sherman’s produced artworks, using a variety of media/materials and traditional and emerging technologies, tools, and techniques, and demonstrate an understanding of a variety of ways of presenting their works and the works of others. with increasing skill she shows a wide variety of media, including alternative media, and current technologies to create two- and three-dimensional art works for a variety of purposes (e.g., extend their skills in the manipulation of a variety of media and technologies to create a sculpture for an outdoor space, a mixed-media work for display on the Internet, an installation evoking their cultural heritage), she also uses a variety of traditional and current materials, technologies, techniques, and tools to create original art works for a variety of purposes and audiences

is a photographer who incorporates aspects of feminism, performance art, cultural criticism, and the body and identity politics into her provocative work.

Aesthetic qualities/distinctive styles:
1. SAMO, Basquiat first achieved fame as part of SAMO, an informal graffiti duo who wrote enigmatic epigrams. By the 1980s, he was exhibiting his neo-expressionist paintings in galleries and museums internationally. The Whitney Museum of American Art held a retrospective of his art in 1992.
2.

Her unique techniques, which are shown through parody, provide different aesthetic values to contemporary artistic designs. mainly four expressive techniques used to create Cindy Sherman's art; female viewed from a male's perspective, pornography and sexual satire, narrative and realistic reproductions, and foreignness and harmony in conflict. In her arts it is discovered that based on these four expressive techniques, contemporary photography works can produce the following four results according to their production styles, clothing, and colors, the beauty of the retro pinup girl style, and the beauty of eroticism and sexual satire, the beauty of history through reinterpretation of the past, and the beauty of compromise through

conflict.

Communication of ideas and meaning:
1. Basquiat's art focused on "suggestive dichotomies", such as wealth versus poverty, exploring integration versusing the segregation, and inner versus outer experience. As well as attacks on power structures and systems of racism, criticism of colonialism and support for class struggle.

2. Sherman's photographic portraiture is both intensely grounded in the present while it extends long traditions in art that force the audience to reconsider common stereotypes and cultural assumptions, among the latter political satire, caricature, the graphic novel, pulp fiction, stand-up comedy (some of her characters are indeed uncomfortably "funny"), and other socially critical disciplines.