Kara Walker’s black paper silhouettes brought renown. What made her genuinely famous was her large public sculpture in New York covered in sugar. “She … knows that putting a naked representation of a black woman in a public space invites all sorts of projections, bullshit, and reverence. She likes that. [Her artist father has asked her] when are you going to get over this race thing?”
A retrospective of Californian photographer Larry Sultan opened this week. The linked piece from an earlier show profiles work that featured his parents. This work asks “what’s become of his family’s dreams of a house, a garden, and the good life out in sunny California. Home may be the place by which everywhere else is measured, but it’s more of a tracking point or idea than a possible destination.” More images are here.
Image: SFMOMA
Rosenquist started off painting billboard ads but then brought this advertising aesthetic to fine art. Kapow!- he helped launch Pop. One critic noted that, unlike Warhol, Rosenquist “rendered his blue-collar view of American things without mockery”. “He extended art into the hyperspace of culture and brought more of the culture into art; [creating] what amounted to a buzzing optically alive American Cubism”
Image: MoMA
How should we regard images taken in a WW2 Jewish ghetto? Their survival is miraculous and they are a valuable historical record. Another review digs deeper. “Did [the photographer] have much of an artistic vision? Is it even fair to ask that, given the circumstances…? [If this] is art, it’s an art that gets its undeniable power through the suffering and ultimate demise of its subjects.” An excellent video (4 min) is here.