Photo By Gail
“I want to be the painter of my country,“ artist Tarsila do Amaral (1886 – 1973) declared in 1923, at a moment when Brazilian artists and writers were actively developing a new, homegrown modernism. With his undulating planes, suggesting land, water, and sky, and a human-like cactus, The Moon (1928) offers the artist’s vision of a Brazilian landscape. Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Tarsila do Amaral, The Moon
Photo By Gail
Corita Kent (1918 – 1986), also known in the Catholic Church as Sister Mary Corita, incorporated a range of refereces into her silkscreen prints, spanning pop culture imagery and song lyrics, biblical allusions and literary conceits.
Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Corita Kent I Should Be Able to Love My Country and Still Love Justice
Photos By Gail
Downtown New York has hosted generations of underground cultural communities, providing a vibrant home for drag queens, theater performers, filmmakers, and outcasts. Performance artist and queer liberation activist Agosto Machado has been a long-standing figure in these scenes. Over five decades, he has amassed a large collection of art and ephemera from the city’s counterculture, which he assembles into shrines, such as the one seen above. Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Shrine (White) By Agosto Machado
Photo By Gail
Belgian artist René Magritte (1899 – 1967) is famous for his surrealist works, which often challenge the viewer’s perception of reality and the ordinary. In The Portrait (1935), a simply laid-out meal is not as simple as it seems. Each object is rendered with equally sharp focus and pictorial realism, yet any expectation of everyday reality is overturned, above all by the unblinking eye that stares inexplicably from a slice of ham on a plate. The perspective of this still life tilts dramatically toward the surface of the picture plane, as if to confront or perhaps invite the viewer to join the table.
Photographed in the Museum of Modern Art in NYC
Photo By Gail
Artist, writer, and activist David Wonjarowicz (1954 – 1992) first gained public attention in the early 1980s on the streets of downtown New York through his handmade posters and graffiti murals. Fire (1987) is one of four paintings in a series titled The Four Elements, in which the artist aimed to complicate narratives from American culture by suffusing them with his own lived experiences. Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: David Wojnarowicz, Fire