Contemporary American Artists

Review: <i>How Photography Became Contemporary Art: Inside an Artistic Revolution from Pop to the Digital Age</i>, by Andy Grundberg

Contemporary American Artists: The Prints of Yasuo Kuniyoshi

Today, alienation of the art and technology has come to an end and inevitable movement of the world toward digital culture has also affected the art. In the current study, two internet-based artworks created by Mark Napier, the contemporary American artist and one of the pioneers of Internet art in the U.S., were selected and analyzed. The main point of the study is investigating the role of audience and its interaction with his artworks, as well the effect of technology in the process of artistic creativity. By presenting his interactive art project on the Internet, Mark Napier has gone beyond the domain of exhibitions and museums and has utilized modern technology to make contact with the audience. In his artworks, audience is the inseparable component of the work and the process of creation finds more importance than the prototype and final outcome. In the creation process, the importance of active participation of the audience and artist’s consideration for cultural, political and social issues can be observed.

Contemporary American Artists: Richmond Barthe

Although the majority of middle western painting depicts life of the farm and prairie, the painting of Aaron Bohrod is largely concerned with metropolitan scenes of his native Chicago. Working seldom from a posed model and even less frequently in the academic tradition of the still life or nude, Bohrod goes directly to those parts of the city which speak most loudly of shabbiness and dinginess, finding in them a realism which is as unmistakable in its validity for him as the farm or countryside is for John Steuart Curry or Grant Wood. But his remains a realism tempered by an imaginative use of color and a vision of what lies behind drab exteriors.

e article concerns the question of the reincarnation and the development of ideas in visual arts - from form to form and from one world to another. The affirmation of the abstract idea in the contemporary American art and presumably the prototypes related to this process - the works of K. Brancusi and K. Malevich. Certain ideas characterize the creativity of these authors - Konstantin Brancusi and the folk presentation of ideas and forms, Kazimir Malevich with thematerial "Form, Color and Sensation" in "Contemporary Architecture", issue 5 of 1928. Meditation practice must be considered as reflection, concentrating attention on an object that is external to the body to help achieve the visual image and the meaning of the idea. The exhibition (in the “Arario”gallery) by the South Korean author (sculptor) Um Tai-Jung isat the core of the study, in some of his works are found prototypes or quotes from works by K. Brancusi and K. Malevich.The movements of ideas in the context of East - West, West - East and East - East, as well as the works of Um Tai-Jung "Mandala" and "Stranger Holding Two Wings" are analyzed. It might be concluded that these works as new objects themselves have been created as giving rise to meditation. Based on Malevich’sstatement that the achievement of the world is inaccessible to the artist, it can be said that just as reality cannot be achieved, the artist’s creativity is also unattainable to the viewer, except as meditation.

This article investigates experimental techniques in contemporary American art and their global impact. The research explores how contemporary American artists, particularly James Turrell, Jenny Holzer, and Bill Viola, employ experimental techniques through their aesthetic experiences, motivations, and intentions. It also examines how the international art community perceives these techniques. A phenomenological approach was employed, emphasizing subjective experience and interpretation. The findings reveal that experimental art practices in the United States are characterized by innovation and unconventional approaches, with techniques such as light and space manipulation, text-based art, and video art widely used. Additionally, bioart, interactive and participatory installations, and digital art expand the scope of experimental practices. These works reflect critical social and political issues and invite audience responses, constructing new realities through innovative materials and techniques. The study demonstrates the significant global influence of American experimental art, contributing to cross-cultural dialogue and the evolution of contemporary artistic discourse. The findings hold implications for integrating interdisciplinary, technology-oriented approaches into art education and curation, encouraging innovation and audience engagement.

Examples of conceptual solutions to exhibitions devoted to racial identity in contemporary American art are investigated. The modern multicultural environment of the United States appreciates and explores various manifestations of identity. Trying to overcome stereotypes and myths are tied to her. Therefore, museums and departments in museums representing different cultural regions, and of course, artistic works, are so popular because in them the identity is manifested with the most significant force and with the most vivid colors. For analysis, contemporary African-American and Asian-American art presented in the framework of individual projects devoted to thematic and curatorial design is precisely racial identity in contemporary art: «30 Americans» and «Portraiture Now: Asian American Portraits of Encounter» As part of the analysis, individual artists are mentioned, and their works of art, filled with stereotypical images associated with identity, and their artistic searches for the identity of the personal. An exposition project on the socio-historical direction «Beyond Bollywood: Indian Americans Shape the Nation» is also being studied, designed to demonstrate influences Indian culture to contemporary American culture. The strategy offered by foreign curators cannot be fully incorporated into the realm of Ukrainian art, in the absence of racial issues as such. However, at the same time studying foreign experience can serve as an excellent example for defining national identity and a better understanding of narrow identities, which in the future can transform into exciting and meaningful art projects.

From one of the most original voices in contemporary American art, more than 20 years of work culminating in grand, abstract ensembles of cedar beams enriched with graphite.

The “Intercultural” Work of Lee Breuer 1 Iris L. Smith (bio) The American theater has never found a way to integrate its avant-garde artists into the larger world of theater the way Europe did, by giving them a place in their major institutions after they’ve proved their worth, nor even the way that the film, literary, and art establishments/industries have done here. In theater, the avant-garde spirit is made perpetual outcast. — Bonnie Marranca French cultural theorists and American theatre critics may rarely agree, but on the cultural position of the avant-garde, editor and critic Bonnie Marranca might be paraphrasing Pierre Bourdieu. Marranca sees contemporary American avant-garde theatre as economically dominated (“made perpetual outcast”) but symbolically dominant (“they’ve proved their worth”), a distinction Bourdieu draws for the nineteenth-century avant-garde in his essay “The Field of Cultural Production.” In the United States, the contemporary “avant-garde” includes artists who came to maturity in the 1960s and 1970s, often working in theatre collectives or in collaboration with artists from diverse media; familiar names include Richard Foreman, Maria Irene Fornes, Philip Glass, Megan Terry, Meredith Monk, Jean-Claude van Itallie, The Wooster Group, Elizabeth Swados, Yvonne Rainer, and Mabou Mines. This avant-garde is largely white, often but not always straight, female as often as male, and mature, both in age and artistic experience. Now part of an established avant-garde, if such an oxymoron can be entertained, the group continues to struggle financially, despite recognition as artists who have long since arrived. Had they come to maturity in Europe rather than the US, as Marranca notes, they might have been running major theatres, as Heiner Müller did the Berliner Ensemble. Some of these artists, not comfortable being considered avant-garde, have tried to dispense with the ghettoizing label. Others would argue that the term has not applied since the 1950s, when accommodation with mass culture began to mark the work of avant-garde artists, and public response to the work shifted from anger to acceptance. In other words, the artist cannot be avant-garde when the public refuses to be shocked by what s/he produces. While artists like Sam Shepard, Spalding Gray, and Philip Glass have embraced (not without irony) their acceptance in the mainstream—on Broadway, at Lincoln Center, or in Hollywood—for most of them a confrontational stance toward the status quo in theatre, dance, and music remains characteristic of their work. [End Page 37] A number of artists, among them playwright and director Lee Breuer, have turned to interculturalism to redefine “American theatre,” modifying avant-garde strategies of confrontation to address their own continuing marginality in the United States. Despite widespread recognition for productions with Mabou Mines, of which he is a founding member, and for independent work as varied as Lulu and Gospel at Colonus, Lee Breuer remains unaffiliated with any regional or commercial theatre. His outsider position, added to his knowledge of the theatre and funding worlds, makes him a useful commentator on the current status of the so-called “established” avant-garde. While theorists of intercultural performance have written off these artists as cultural imperialists, Breuer uses his position to stage genealogies of cultural stereotype. Unable to reverse or erase these stereotypes, Breuer plays them to the hilt. As his work has evolved, its tendency to allow stereotype to stifle the experience of cultural difference has been replaced with a reading of social and ethnic difference through discourses that have informed interculturalism, most prominently discourses of gender. In his 1991 article “The Two-Handed Gun: Reflections on Power, Culture, Lambs, Hyenas, and Government Support for the Arts,” Breuer outlines the situation of the contemporary American artist. As a young writer, Breuer felt that the artist was solely defined by his aesthetics—“Give me a metaphor or give me death” (89)—but he now sees the cultural context shaping that attitude as American, Calvinist, capitalist. While art was removed to an elitist, privileged realm, the artist was situated as capitalist. If not as useful a commodity as a toaster, the product could at least be assigned to “high” culture, a safe realm in the doxology of bourgeois...

Barbara Cantalupo's Poe and the Visual Arts is an elegant contribution to the Poe scholarship that addresses a relatively undocumented aspect of the author: his aesthetic interest in the fine arts. The book consists of five chapters that range from Poe's exposure to art in Philadelphia (1838–45) to his stint in 1846 as the editor of the Broadway Journal while he was a resident of New York, a city that was fast becoming the epicenter of the American art scene. The chapters in between examine Poe's references to artists and artworks in his creative writing, his interest in homely interiors and beautiful exteriors in his later works, and his penchant for optical illusions and visual tricks throughout his career, and in particular his fascination with the perspectival device of anamorphosis in painting and in fiction.Cantalupo's examination of “Ligeia” (1838) and “William Wilson” (1839) are especially revelatory in this last regard, as she is able to demonstrate that Poe intended both tales to be read according to their anamorphic structures. The narrator of “Ligeia” purposively constructs a bridal chamber that would contribute to creating the anamorphic illusion that Rowena, whom he callously murders, has been transformed into his phantasmagoric departed lover. Cantalupo likewise solves the riddle of “William Wilson” that, as anyone who has ever taught the tale knows, has perplexed many undergraduate students and their professors alike. As opposed to stabbing himself at the end of the tale, a common misunderstanding of Poe's story, Cantalupo convincingly argues that the narrator murders an innocent stranger upon whom he has delusively projected the image of his sworn antagonist and doppelganger. The critic's attention to Poe's graphical interests enables her to substantiate a number of novel claims throughout her study.There have been numerous studies of Poe's aesthetic principles, as expressed in “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846) and “The Poetic Principle” (1850), for instance, to name just two of his major essays. Of course, Poe's aesthetic observations are scattered throughout his critical reviews (see G. R. Thompson's excellent collection). However, to date, besides the occasional article and a few notable studies (Cantalupo draws on the pioneering work of critics like Burton Pollin, Michael Deas, and Kent Ljungquist in her book), Poe's appreciation of the fine arts has largely been left in the dark. This should come as no surprise given the disciplinary background of most Poe acolytes. While Poe's oft-expressed aesthetic views have provided ample material for critical conversation, Cantalupo's book is refreshing in that it reorients his readers toward his love of fine art and how it informed the self-described “graphicality” of his own compositional style. We thus come to discover how landscape painting and portraiture influenced Poe's descriptions of external nature and domestic spaces, and how visual tricks and optical illusions were part and parcel of his penchant for the cryptic and the allusive in his writing. As a result, readers of Cantalupo's book are as likely to learn as much about their celebrated author as they are about the fascinating world of the American art scene in the mid-nineteenth century, at the time when Poe was penning many of his most enduring fables of mind.Cantalupo's chapters, which describe the art world Poe inhabited, document his artistic acquaintances and detail the various art works he was exposed to during the last decade of his life, are beautifully accompanied by over two dozen color prints. Cantalupo revisits Poe's writings during this time and stresses how much he borrowed from painting in his fictive work. The overall impression the reader gets from reading her book is of vicariously viewing a host of paintings that distinctly influenced the author's aesthetic sensibility. We are, as it were, positioned beside the author as he visits various art collections and exhibits in Philadelphia and New York City, and Cantalupo provides intelligent assessments of the predominant features of each painting that would have appealed to him. Beyond familiarizing the reader with artworks that Poe was himself familiar with, Cantalupo adds a new element to any biographical appreciation of the author, as we are introduced to Poe the lover of fine art, a facet of his personality that has been neglected. For the non-Poe scholar, this book makes for a wonderful addition to any coffee-table collection, as it is written in fine, clear prose, is amply illustrated with high-quality prints of famous artworks, and provides an interesting introduction to the American art scene. For the novice student of American culture, Cantalupo performs an admirable service in introducing readers to the works of such masters as those of the Hudson River School. And for the Poe scholar versed in the cultural politics of the time, Cantalupo helps to expand the critic's vision, to show how writers and painters shared a common concern in giving artistic expression to America's self-definition.One of the overarching arguments that structures Poe and the Visual Arts is that Poe became increasingly interested in an aesthetics of the beautiful as opposed to the sublime as he advanced in years. Cantalupo selects “The Philosophy of Furniture” (1840), “The Landscape Garden” (1842), “The Domain of Arnheim” (1846), and “Landor's Cottage” (1849) as her principal texts in illustrating her thesis. The portrait of the artist that emerges from Cantalupo's study of his later fiction is of an author who remained as receptive of natural beauty as he was of the landscape paintings that idealized and improved on the handiwork of creation. A second major observation made by the critic is that Poe insisted that art was humanity's best method of making manifest the beauty of nature and thus deifying the creation, which was always inherently flawed in some aspect or another. Finally, Cantalupo points out that Poe, while immersed in American art culture, preferred to cite European painters over their American counterparts, which of course fits in with the author's predilection for the foreign (and the universal) and his rejection of the narrow-minded patriotism that subsumed so many of his compatriots during the heyday of Young America. Cantalupo closes her study by speculating that had Poe vsurvived his fortieth year he may have left an entirely different legacy, one that transcended the sublime and sensationalistic earlier years and that advanced into an equally brilliant but yet more beautiful maturity.

Dictionary of Contemporary American Artists. Paul Cummings

The article focuses on a comprehensive study of Alexander Melamid’s portraiture included in his first independent project after thirty years of collaborative creativity with Vitaly Komar. Throughout the entire thirty-year period of cooperation, the painters signed their works with the Komar and Melamid trademark making it difficult to determine the artists’ individual characters. A detailed analysis of the solo works of the 60-70s, before the beginning of collaborative creativity, is presented; it helps us to detect individual traits in the works of the duet and to better identify the artists’ personalities, to reconstruct the technical features of each artist’s painting style. In 2007, Alexander Melamid began creating a large-scale series of paintings which would become his new conceptual line of creative work; later, in 2009, the artist developed and supplemented the series with portraits of Italian clergy and Russian oligarchs. Characteristic features of the Holy Hip Hop! portrait series, exhibited at the Detroit Museum of Modern Art in 2008, are studied in the article. The artist paid special attention to the psychological characters of the portrayed, the entire series is painted in one color scheme, within one scale. The pictorial series is an integral conceptual statement. The purely plastic qualities of the paintings fade into the background. They are not so important for Alexander Melamid - he uses academic painting as a tool to convey more accurately the psychology of the portrayed whom he treats with ironic interest. It is important to note that Alexander Melamid erases the line between the classical and the marginal art, just as Francois Millet did in his time. The article succeeded in updating sociocultural issues with the help of contextual comparison with portraiture by Diego Velazquez and contemporary American artist Kehinde Wiley whose creative life has deeply integrated into the socio-political realities of the United States of the beginning of the 21st century and the African-American cultural tradition. Kehinde Wiley is known for his realistic large-scale portrayals of African-Americans in poses borrowed from works of classical European painting of the 17-19th centuries. The artist openly propagandizes, deliberately emphasizing the didactic function of his paintings. It is in the context of contemporaries’ works and the political situation in the USA of the 2000-2010s that Alexander Melamid’s work should be considered.

This article begins with the contention that 'American art' is a powerful retrospective construction, rooted in the institutional practices of art history and museology. Through a focus on the experiences of expatriate American artists (John Singleton Copley and Benjamin West) in London at the start of the nineteenth century, and the genre or landscape painting in transatlantic art (including the work of the British artist Thomas Cole), this essay exposes the complex and dynamic cultural interrelationship that existed between the United States and Europe in the period. It extends Paul Gilroy's and Joseph Roach's recent concept of the 'Black Atlantic', in which they argue that a single cultural zone brought together London and New Orleans, Kingston, Jamaica and the ports of the Ivory coast, to analyse the cultural and performative exchanges that were also taking place between America and Europe (particularly Great Britain), and that have hitherto been neglected in dominant art history narratives.

Records from Delaware Water Gap, N. J.