Photo By Gail
While working in commercial design for the H-E-B supermarket chain, artist Chuck Ramirez (1962 – 2010) began making photographs of familiar, every day objects – shrink-wrapped foods, jampacked trash bags, hospital flower arrangements – which he captured in great detail against a white void and at life-size.
Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Chuck Ramirez, Candy Tray Godiva 3
Photos By Gail
Lucas Samaras has never been one to serve a straightforward meal — and with Dinner #15 (1965), he transforms the act of dining into something deeply psychological, uncomfortably tactile, and undeniably unforgettable. This sculptural work from his Dinner Series isn’t just a visual feast — it’s a surreal course in tension and temptation.
Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Lucas Samaras, Dinner #15
Photo By Gail
In her most recent paintings, Amy Sherald has responded directly to the increasing threats, violence, and legislation against gay, transgender, and gender-nonconforming people across the United States. This work, Trans Forming Liberty (2024) recasts the Statue of Liberty as a non-binary trans-femme person, radically redefining this iconic symbol of American freedom, and suggesting that the ideal of acceptance inscribed on the sculpture – “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” from Emma Lazarus’s poem The New Colossus (1883) – be applied unequivocally to all citizens, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, or other identifiers.
Photographed in the Whitney Museum in New York.
Indian Madonna Enthroned, 1974 (All Photos By Gail)
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, a pioneering Native American artist and activist, passed away on January 24, 2025, after a prolonged battle with pancreatic cancer. She had just celebrated her 85th birthday.
An enrolled member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, Smith was renowned for her dynamic artworks that intricately mapped the Native American experience, blending abstraction, collage, and mixed media to address themes of identity, oppression, and environmental issues.
McFlag, 1996
Continue reading Remembering Native American Artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith
Photo By Gail
Katherine Dunham: Revelation (2024), a newly created work by Mickalene Thomas, is an homage to Katherine Dunham, a choreographer who held a doctorate in anthropology, known to Alvin Ailey and many others as the matriarch of Black dance.
Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Mickalene Thomas, Katherine Dunham, Revelation