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Post Colonial Native American art utilize modernist artistic techniques to invert the colonial gaze and repatriate native imagery to the artists within indigenous North American tribes. The works commonly are structured around themes of native identity, and challange the stereotype and historical colonial perspective of Native Americans as "extinct" or from another time. "Survivance" is a combination of survival and resistance, as well as maintaining a cultural presence.
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In a pendulum swing away from the stark minimalist aesthetics and conceptual nature of earlier 20th century art, neo-expressionism uses bold aggressive brushwork, fragmentation and exaggeration of images with a new psychological intensity to reflect complex personal mythologies criticisms partnering with identity politics of the time.
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Neo-pop reworks the common traits of 1960's pop to reflect to new capitalist and corporatist boom of 1980's global capitalism and the consumerism therein. This post-modern movement utilizes consumer images, bright saturated colors, repitition, and appropriation of lower/higher imagery. Neo-Pop took a firmer stance on its critique and/or participation in the commercial participation and aesthetic of the art world in the 1980's onward.
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David Salle
Brother Animal
1983
o/c, wood chairs
94” x 168”
MOCA LA
Salle’s Brother Animal is in heroic scale, and the use of intense contrasting colors creates a disturbing sense of disruption. Like inverted film or photography, the combination of bisected organ and ready made assemblage chairs create a juxtaposition of inner and outer worlds. -
Keith Haring
Unfinished Painting
Acrylic on canvas
39in ×39in
Private collection Haring’s Unfinished Painting comes towards the end of his career, cut short by complications due to HIV/AIDs. The epidemic was a frequent theme in Herring’s work, as well as queer liberation and celebration. This work uses negative space to show the rich potential lost along side so many incredible gay people in the 1980’s, and a major loss of arts and culture in America at such a culturally pivotal time. -
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith
I See Red: Indian Map
Mixed media on canvas
60 x 100in
The Whitney, New York Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, the first Native American artist to have a solo retrospective at the Whitney Museum, iconically utilized modified maps of the US combined with collage materials from tribal newspapers to expound both the interconnectedness beyond boarders, the rich tribal presence across the states, as well as the violence of colonial genocide against the native people of America. -
My Lonesome Cowboy
Takashi Murakami
1998
Sculpture (oil and acrylic on fiberglass and iron)
9 ft × 4 ft × 3 ft
Private Collection Murakami’s Cowboy uses his super-flat technique to juxtapose familiar anime imagery and figurine construction partnered with weaponized seminal fluid meant to comment on otaku culture in Japan. This hyper-sexualized reflection of manga also holds a historic reference to Japanese Edo period erotic art work known as Shunga. -
Wendy Red Star
Summer
print on Sunset Fiber rag
21 x 24
Austin Peay State University, Clarksville, TN
Red Star utilizes modern commercial photo. and staging techniques to offer a contemporary depiction of the simplification of Native imagery and identity as a lost culture from an ancient time. Red Star juxtaposes simplified and minimizing depictions with a JCPenny style photo shoot environment, displaying the absurdity of colonial freezing of native identity and culture strictly to a past.