Kiki Smith is a virtually self-taught West German-born American artist who commonly uses a wide range of themes including AIDS, feminine domesticity, life, death, and human relationships to animals, and nature in her pieces. Kiki began to catch the eye of the New York public in 1988 at a gallery in New York City where she first displayed some of her well known graphic sculptures of the human body. While Smith is more well known for her graphic sculptures of the human body, she is also a highly recognized photographer, printmaker, drawer, and painter.
Kiki Smith was born on January 18, 1954, in Nuremberg Germany. However, she did not stay in Europe for long, Smith and her family moved to the United States in 1955 and settled in South Orange,
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This show helped bring the people of New York’s attention towards Kiki, but a show in 1988 at Joe Fawbush Gallery is what really caught New York’s public’s attention. The show at Joe Fawbush Gallery is where Smith first began exhibiting her artworks of the human body, including an art piece where she displayed bottles full of semen, blood, urine, and other bodily fluids; as well as establishing herself as a fearless modern artist not afraid to express what she wanted to express. However, an exhibition in 1990 she did for the Project Rooms at the Museum of Modern Art is where Kiki began receiving significant attention for her …show more content…
The director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Thomas P. Campbell himself called one of her sculptures, “Tale”, “simply disgusting”. The beeswax wax sculpture illustrates a woman crawling along the ground with a tail of feces following behind her. Kiki Smith explains that is never her intention to disgust or provoke anyone with her art, but the piece represents humiliation as well as carrying personal internal
In the great tradition of classical art, nudity and death have been two main themes of the masters. Sally Mann’s photographs twist this tradition when the nudes are her prepubescent children and the corpses are real people. The issue is that her photographs are a lens into unfiltered actuality, and consumers question the morality of the images based on the fact that children and corpses are unable to give legal consent. Her work feels too personal and too private. Mainly, people question whether or not Mann meant to cause an uproar with her work or if the results were completely unintentional. After looking through what Sally Mann herself has said, it can be determined that both options have a grain of truth. She wanted to provoke thought,
Georgia O’Keefe is a famous American painter who painted beautiful flowers and landscapes. But she painted these images in such a way that many people believed she was portraying sexual imagery. “O’Keefe’s depictions of flowers in strict frontality and enlarged to giant scale were entirely original in character . . . the view into the open blossoms evoked an image of the female psyche and invited erotic associations.” (Joachimides 47) O’Keefe denies these allegations and says that she “magnified the scale of the flower only to ensure people would notice them.” (Haskell 203) O’Keefe’s artwork was misinterpreted because of cultural prejudice, her non-traditional lifestyle, and gender bias art criticism. But despite these accusations, Georgia O’Keefe’s artwork was not based on sexuality.
Art could be displayed in many different forms; through photography, zines, poetry, or even a scrapbook. There are many inspirational women artists throughout history, including famous women artists such Artemisia Gentileschi and Georgia O’Keeffe. When searching for famous female artists that stood out to me, I found Frida Kahlo, and Barbara Kruger. Two very contrasting type of artists, though both extremely artistic. Both of these artists are known to be feminists, and displayed their issues through painting and photography. Frida Kahlo and Barbara Kruger’s social and historical significance will be discussed.
Kara Walker’s Silhouette paintings are a description of racism, sexuality, and femininity in America. The works of Kara Elizabeth Walker, an African American artist and painter, are touched with a big inner meaning. A highlight of the picture displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco will be discussed and the symbolism of the sexuality and slavery during the Atlantic slavery period will be enclosed. The modern Art Museum has works of over 29,000 paintings, photos, design and sculptures among others. The use of black Silhouette is her signature in the artistic career.
Piland, Sherry. 1994. Women artists: an historical, contemporary, and feminist bibliography. Metuchen, New Jersey: Scarecrow Press.
...rom its beginning to current time. Every time I travel to visit my mother, who lives in the same house that I grew up in, I see the statue of The Lady and no matter if I am purposely looking or not, she stands out as a part of this city. The Winds of Change has evolved for me from being just “ugly” to showing the true purpose and meaning of the piece which represents women and is a tribute to the endurance and strength they possess.
A woman who has influenced my life in a positive way and who has made a difference in my life is my aunt, Kim Barkey. My aunt has always been someone I could look up too, even from a young age. I always have admired Kim as a positive woman influence in my life. Kim is my mom’s younger half-sister so I have known her my entire life and have spent as much time as possible with her talking about life’s worries, getting amazing advice, and learning how to relax, slow down, and delight in everything life has to offer. Growing up, all kids have periods of time where they are struggling and do not feel comfortable going to their parents, so fortunately I had my aunt for a shoulder to lean on and a hug to make me feel okay again. Kim’s strength,
As I stood staring at such a life-like sculpture in the confines of a briskly chilly art museum corridor, I could only imagine the amount of exhausted nights the sculptor had to endure to create his extremely exhausted masterpiece. The sculptor Duane Hanson and his piece “The Football Player” most-certainly shared the same facial expression at one point in their existence, as to describe their excessively tired states’. One might infer that Hanson’s piece was created in part to express the feeling of exhaustion that was created from his constant work.
Born in Muskogee, Oklahoma and raised in Checotah, Carrie Underwood was born on March 10, 1983 (Carrie Underwood Biography). Underwood was a normal country girl, who loved living on a farm in a one stop light town caring for animals, and being in nature. Little did she know she would steal America’s Heart (Silverman). In 2001, Carrie Marie Underwood Graduated from Checotah High School, straight out of high
Kiki Smith is a feminist artist who is known for using the human body and its substances in ways that no other artist has before. “This work displays often grotesque and uncomfortable themes that would usually only be seen in private, however socially suppressed ideas towards things such as defecation and human fragility are often purposely overlooked today.” (Feminist Blog). Some of the issues she displays through art are abortion, AIDS, gender, race and women. Smith is known for using animals, fairytale icons, and other elements of nature in her artwork.
Born in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, Cindy Sherman grew up in suburban Huntington Beach on Long Island, the youngest of five children and had a regular American childhood. She was very self-involved, found of costumes, and given to spending hours at the mirror, playing with makeup (Schjeldahl 7). Cindy Sherman attended the state University College at Buffalo, New York, where she first started to create art in the medium of painting. During her college years, she painted self-portraits and realistic copies of images that she saw in photographs and magazines. Yet, she became less, and less interested in painting and became increasingly interested in conceptual, minimal, performance, body art, and film alternatives (Sherman 5). Sherman’s very first introductory photography class in college was a complete failure for she had difficulties with the technological aspects of making a print. After her disastrous first attempt in photography, Sherman discovered Contemporary Art, which had a profound and lasting effect on the rest of her artistic career (Thames and Hudson 1). Sherman’s first assignment in her photography class was to photograph something which gave her a problem, thus, Sherman chose to photograph her self naked. While this was difficult, she learned that having an idea was the most important factor in creating her art, not so much the technique that she used.
I look to other artists for inspiration and affirmation in regards to my work. I am certainly not the first artist to portray ideas of the body and its fragility. Hannah Wilke, whose work dealt with ideas of beauty and vulnerability, is perhaps one of more influential artists for me. While her work greatly differs from mine, I believe that fundamentally she was asking similar questions of society through her work as I am. When I first saw her work, I felt f...
The Gallery as a Graveyard Throughout the film, the use of space is repeatedly utilized to generate a sense of anxiety and to restrict the agency of individuals trapped in locations dominated by art—the queer man’s antique shop, Sam’s loft-studio, and most notably, the Ranieri’s Art Gallery. In each of these locations, the film develops scenes where there is the sense of being hunted, confined, and powerless. While the scene in the antique shop speaks to anxieties over the queer in society, and the attack on Giulia in their loft addresses issues of female agency—it is the confrontations within the Ranieri’s art gallery which best articulate the crossroads of art, violence, gender, sexuality, and power explored by the film. It is here that the “imagery of [the] galley sequence disorients the viewer, setting up one set of expectations and then subverting them in a manner both unsettling and memorable” (McDonagh 49). In the space of the gallery, our perceptions about the agency of the protagonist and the gender of violence are disrupted and confused.
The piece is typical of Emin’s distinctive brand of confessional art where even the darkest and most embarrassing details of her life are used as artistic fodder for sculptures, installations and drawings.
Diarmuid Costello, Jonathan Vickery. Art: key contemporary thinkers. (UTSC library). Imprint Oxford: Berg, 2007. Print.