Untitled (We don't need another hero)
1987
Photographic silkscreen/vinyl
90" x 117"
Courtesy: Mary Boone Gallery, New York

In your sketchbook, document this Artist Spotlight entry as usual. THEN, as you did for Jaune Quick-to-see-Smith, attach the Scholastic magazine reading/assignment to complete your entry. There will be no additional questions. 

Please keep those notes for reference and review throughout the PLANNING process for your painting/mixed media project. THINK: How you might you use TEXT in your work...what could the addition of TEXT (one word, many words, numbers, etc.) do to clarify your intentions?

​If you are still curious about Barbara Kruger's work, here is some information about the installation at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., which many of you have seen!!!

Modern Times
1993
Lithograph 30" x 22"






















"Modern Times tells a story about the complexity of Indian life today with the medicine plant and pictograph which can be important to a modern Indian even [though] dressed in a suit with a briefcase-he may wear a headdress to dance on the weekend . . . . 'Apples' also means to Indian people that some have turned against the old ways and are white on the inside and red on the outside."

Smith calls herself a cultural art worker.  Elaborating on her Native American worldview, Smith's work addresses today's tribal politics, human rights, and environmental issues with a keen sense of humor.

LOOK AT THIS IMAGE CAREFULLY and make note of its content and specific qualities.

WATCH THIS and take notes:

Jolie Madame, 1972
National Gallery Australia, Canberra
​Courtesy Louis K. Meisel Gallery/New York, © Audrey Flack 

STILL CURIOUS? You can see many more of her paintings HERE

a3 blackface #59 
2003
acrylic on paper
Unframed: 49 3/4 × 38 in. (126.37 × 96.52 cm)
VMFA, Richmond, VA              

From Artspace @ https://www.artspace.com/artist/iona_rozeal_brown

The artist Iona Rozeal Brown uses her large-scale acrylic paintings to wryly comment on the ductile and ever-changing essence of cultural identity, most often by creating visual mash-ups of two disparate but in fact subtly harmonious subcultures: the samurai and geishas depicted in traditional Japanese ukiyo-e printmaking and the contemporary world of hip-hop. Trained in the art of ukiyo-e herself, Brown pursues a transcultural aesthetic in both her imagery and her technique, mixing the racial, gender, and class issues in her subject matter with the deftness of a DJ.

A recurring character in Brown's work is Yoshi, a wise female war hero—sporting an afro and classical Japanese garb—whose enlightened state allows her to exist as a communicant between divinities and mortals, guiding those still on earth. The artist's paintings have been widely exhibited, and she received a solo show at Cleveland's Museum of Contemporary Art in 2010. In 2011 she was commissioned to create a performance for the Performa biennial.                         

From VMFA @ https://www.vmfa.museum/piction/6027262-53207104/

Brown—who styles her name in all lowercase letters— uses a3 as an abbreviation for “Afro-Asiatic allegory,” her series of prints and paintings based on the style of the Japanese ganguro (literally “blackface”) girls. These young women reject Japanese conventions of beauty— dark, straight hair and pale skin—by lightening and perming their hair and darkening their skin. a3 blackface #59 borrows stylistically from Japanese woodblock prints of the Edo period (1615–1868). Known as ukiyo-e prints, these popular, middle-class images depicted the shifting fashions and chaotic lives of the Tokyo amusement district. Brown, who is also a disc jockey, found resonances between the transience of the contemporary entertainment industry and the “floating world” of Edo Japan.