{"id":3400,"date":"2026-06-17T19:26:37","date_gmt":"2026-06-17T19:26:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/arthc1200\/chapter\/later-20th-century-movements-and-contemporary-art\/"},"modified":"2026-07-07T19:03:26","modified_gmt":"2026-07-07T19:03:26","slug":"later-20th-century-movements-and-contemporary-art","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/arthc1200\/chapter\/later-20th-century-movements-and-contemporary-art\/","title":{"raw":"Later 20th Century Movements and Contemporary Art","rendered":"Later 20th Century Movements and Contemporary Art"},"content":{"raw":"<h2 id=\"chapter-overview-and-introduction-15\">Chapter Overview and Introduction<\/h2>\r\nVarious new art forms emerged in the later 20<sup>th<\/sup> century: conceptual art, performance art, environmental art, feminist art, postmodernism, etc. Many of these \u201cnew\u201d art forms have their origins in the Modern art movements of the early 20<sup>th<\/sup> century. For example, conceptual and performance art looked to ideas first begun by Dada artists, like Marcel Duchamp. In the 20<sup>th<\/sup> century, the United States remained an epicenter for artistic creation for avant-garde artists with metropolitan centers like Los Angeles expanding the discussion beyond New York. However, the global aspects of 20<sup>th<\/sup> and 21<sup>st<\/sup> century life resulted in an international contemporary art scene. Unlike previous generations where artists and patrons looked toward a specific geographic hub for artistic creativity and patronage, contemporary art flourishes across the globe. Contemporary art often refers to art produced from the 1970s through today in the 21<sup>st<\/sup> century. Although the chapter introduces the new types of art produced in the late 20<sup>th<\/sup> century and into the 21<sup>st<\/sup> century, the best way to learn about contemporary art is to explore your own community.\r\n<h3 id=\"focus-artworks-15\">Focus Artworks<\/h3>\r\n<ul>\r\n \t<li>Robert Smithson,\u00a0<em>Spiral Jetty<\/em>, 1970, Rozel Point, Great Salt Lake, Utah, 1500 (if unwound) x 15-foot spiral, basalt, sand, and soil<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Maya Lin,\u00a0<em>Vietnam Veterans Memorial,<\/em>\u00a01982, granite, 2 acres within Constitution Gardens, Washington D.C.<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Robert Venturi, John Rauch, and Denise Scott Brown, House in New Castle County, Delaware, 1978\u201383<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Jean-Michel Basquiat,\u00a0<em>Horn Players<\/em>, 1983, acrylic and oil stick on three canvas panels mounted on wood supports<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Barbara Kruger,\u00a0<em>Untitled (Your gaze hits the side of my face)<\/em>, 1981<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Ai Weiwei,\u00a0<em>Kui Hua Zi (Sunflower Seeds)<\/em>, 2010, one hundred million hand painted porcelain seeds<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Yayoi Kusama,\u00a0<em>Infinity Mirrored Room\u2014My Heart is Dancing into the Universe<\/em>, 2018, wood and glass mirror room with paper lanterns<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<h3 id=\"term-list-15\">Term List<\/h3>\r\n<ul>\r\n \t<li>Conceptual art<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Performance art<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Happenings<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Feminist art<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Earthworks<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Land art<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Multiculturism<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Postmodernism<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Identity politics<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Contemporary art<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Installation art<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Participatory art<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<h2 id=\"conceptual-art-an-introduction\">Conceptual art, an introduction<\/h2>\r\nIn 1972 the De Saisset Art Museum at Santa Clara University in the San Francisco Bay Area gave the artist Tom Marioni several hundred dollars to help cover expenses for mounting an exhibition of his work at the institution. Instead of using the money to purchase art materials, Marioni bought an older model used car, a Fiat 750, which he carefully maneuvered into the museum for the opening of his show. The vehicle, parked on top of an oriental rug, formed the centerpiece for this exhibition, titled\u00a0My First Car. Was this really art, or was it a scam to get the museum to pay for a car the artist wanted? After learning about the show, the University President concluded that it was more of the latter and ordered the show closed. Presumably he was put off by how\u00a0My First Car\u00a0profited Marioni without involving any technical skill or hard work on the part of the artist.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"1068\"]<img src=\"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/arthc1200\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/72\/2026\/06\/image479.png\" alt=\"Black and white photograph of a vintage compact car displayed inside a minimalist room with plain walls and ceiling lights. The car is positioned sideways, showing its rounded shape and small size, with a slightly grainy texture suggesting an older or retro style.\" width=\"1068\" height=\"886\" \/> Tom Marioni, <em>My First Car<\/em>, 1972, De Saisset Gallery, Santa Clara, California (photo from <a href=\"https:\/\/books.google.com\/books?id=lu7KPDCfcXMC&amp;lpg=PA83&amp;ots=Ma92nlZlTL&amp;dq=saisset%20gallery%20marioni&amp;pg=PA83#v=onepage&amp;q=saisset%20gallery%20marioni&amp;f=false\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Performance Anthology: Source Book of California Performance Art<\/em><\/a>, eds. Carl E. Loeffler and Darlene Tong)[\/caption]\r\n<h3 id=\"not-just-a-prank\">Not just a prank<\/h3>\r\nMarioni\u2019s work was in many ways typical of the late 1960s and early 1970s art practices that came to be known as Conceptual art. As the term suggests, Conceptual art placed emphasis upon the concept or idea, and deemphasized the actual physical manifestation of the work. Thus an artist did not need manual skill to produce his work, and in fact could get away with not making anything at all. Rather than being a mere prank (as many dismissed it at the time), Marioni\u2019s work was a proposal for a new kind of art that deliberately disavowed art\u2019s traditional role as a showcase for the creative genius and technical abilities of the artist.\r\n\r\nMarioni\u2019s appropriation of a car is only one example of a number of very diverse art practices that are grouped under the term Conceptual art. Refusing to work in any one medium, and especially hostile to the painting and sculptural traditions in Western art, Conceptual artists would broaden their approach to art-making to include just about any material: text, photography, found objects, and even the physical space of the gallery, as long as there was a conceptual dimension that emphasized a set of principles or process involved in producing a given artwork, rather than a finished product.\r\n\r\nTake the artist <a href=\"https:\/\/www.moma.org\/collection\/works\/79441\">Mel Bochner\u2019s\u00a0<em>Measurement Room<\/em><\/a>, for example, a work that consisted of labeling gallery walls with numbers to indicate each wall\u2019s dimensions. In the place of attractive objects and captivating imagery, Bochner presented emotionless, mechanical text overlaid onto a pre-existing space. Art\u2019s new role, as proposed by Conceptual artists, was to convey information in the most straightforward, objective manner as possible and to engage the viewer within their immediate environment (instead of presenting a transcendent and imaginary world that\u00a0accentuated the pleasures of looking).\r\n<h3 id=\"minimalism-as-precursor\">Minimalism as precursor<\/h3>\r\nConceptual art constituted a dramatic departure from traditional art-making, but it did not come out of nowhere. Minimalism, the movement that directly preceded Conceptual art and the style that dominated the 1960s, conceived of art not as something internally complete and detached from the everyday world (a view that had been strongly held by the\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/smarthistory.org\/abstract-expressionism-an-introduction\/\">Abstract Expressionists<\/a>\u00a0throughout the 1950s), but rather as something that related to both its site of display as well as the viewer\u2019s body. A Minimalist work like Carl Andre\u2019s\u00a0<em>144 Aluminum Square<\/em>, for example, offered a spare, industrially-produced, geometric installation that was radical because it made spectators think of the floor on which it was placed and how their bodies related to it (by trampling on it!).\r\n\r\nEmerging out of Minimalism, a Conceptual work like Bochner\u2019s\u00a0<em>Measurement Room<\/em>\u00a0also made viewers aware of the proportions of the physical gallery space and encouraged them to compare how they measured up to the room\u2019s dimensions. Minimalism, however, always maintained a reliance on a physical object, which was, in many cases, a highly finished and aestheticized form that lent itself to being traded on the art market and shown on gallery circuit. By contrast, Conceptual works like\u00a0<em>Measurement Room<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0<em>My First Car<\/em>\u00a0not only departed from the conventional media of painting and sculpture, but moreover, their unusual forms prevented them from being easily sold or collected.\r\n<h3 id=\"the-art-market\">The art market<\/h3>\r\nWith the explosive expansion of the contemporary art market in the 1960s that included high auction prices for living artists (previously it was only dead European masters who fetched such prices), one\u00a0of the main concerns of artists in the 1960s was that art had become increasingly\u00a0commodified,\u00a0and yet artists weren\u2019t the ones benefiting from the growing market. At the mercy of dealers, collectors, and museum trustees, artists felt they had little control over their own work and careers. So it is not entirely surprising artists in the late 1960s and early 1970s began to reject technical artistic skill and material objects altogether. To make an object the essence of the artwork was to be in thrall to the concerns of the market and art institutions.\r\n<h3 id=\"a-radical-era\">A radical era<\/h3>\r\nThe 1960s and early 1970s was tumultuous and divisive era defined by the Vietnam War, passionate social liberation movements (including the Black Power, Feminist, Chicano, and Gay Liberation Movements), as well as a massive countercultural youth rebellion. The emergence of such a radical practice as Conceptual art should be understood as part of this oppositional culture that envisioned a radically new world. To the new generation of Conceptual artists, the old rules of art making and the traditional art establishments could feel just as oppressive as the institutions of the state or police felt to the youthful protester on the streets.\r\n\r\nThe backdrop of immense social upheaval in the 1960s and early 1970s relates to another important aspect of Conceptual art: the sense that it was entangled with larger social and political realities. In a series of collages called<em> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.moma.org\/collection\/works\/150123\">House Beautiful:\u00a0Bringing the War Home<\/a><\/em>, Martha Rosler combined graphic images of the Vietnam War from the popular news journal\u00a0<em>Life<\/em>\u00a0with those of upscale interiors from the home decorating magazine\u00a0<em>House Beautiful<\/em>\u00a0to make direct reference to the Vietnam War.\r\n\r\nIn one collage, a middle-class housewife vacuums billowing drapes whose window reveals helmeted, rifle-wielding American soldiers in the trenches of war. This jarring juxtaposition not only commented on the war\u2019s insidious effects on the home front, but also signaled a sense that art should engage with and could reshape the social world. Likewise,\u00a0<em>My First Car<\/em>\u00a0employed a similar technique of inserting a temporal, everyday object into a sacred space of high art in order to highlight the connectedness of the art sphere to the social, physical, and economic world. Not afraid to embrace the mundanity of the everyday world, Conceptual artists polluted the museum space with commerce, contemporary images of war, and even leaking motor oil.\r\n<h3 id=\"conceptual-goes-mainstream\">Conceptual goes mainstream<\/h3>\r\nConceptual art had its precursors, notably early twentieth-century Dada artists like\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/smarthistory.org\/marcel-duchamp-fountain\/\">Marcel Duchamp<\/a>, whose \u201creadymades\u201d (mass-produced objects like a urinal or bicycle wheel that he designated as artworks) also questioned the tenet that art be solely a demonstration of an artist\u2019s creative and technical abilities. In the 1950s and early 1960s, movements such as\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/smarthistory.org\/nam-june-paik-electronic-superhighway-continental-u-s-alaska-hawaii\/\">Fluxus<\/a>, Happenings, Neo-Dada, and Nouveau R\u00e9alisme also employed techniques we could categorize as Conceptual art from today\u2019s vantage point. Embracing ephemeral and performative practices, and provoking viewers with sometimes aggressive assaults upon \u201cgood taste,\u201d they, too, let go of the notion of art as refined object. In the decades following, Conceptual art strategies were taken up by feminist as well as postmodern artists, and today conceptualism has become a global phenomenon, with artists from around the world deploying video, photography, text, body art, performance, and installation, often interchangeably. Ironically, the strategies of Conceptual art, once a challenge to orthodox, mainstream modern art, have now become so fundamental that they are taken to be a given of contemporary art practice.\r\n<h2 id=\"performance-art-an-introduction\">Performance art, an introduction<\/h2>\r\n<h3 id=\"when-art-intersects-with-life\">When art intersects with life<\/h3>\r\nMany people associate performance art with highly publicized controversies over government funding of the arts, censorship, and standards of public decency. Indeed, at its worst, performance art can seem gratuitous, boring, or just plain weird. But, at its best, it taps into our most basic shared instincts: our physical and psychological needs for food, shelter, sex, and human interaction; our individual fears and self-consciousness; our concerns about life, the future, and the world we live in. It often forces us to think about issues in a way that can be disturbing and uncomfortable, but it can also make us laugh by calling attention to the absurdities in life and the idiosyncrasies of human behavior.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"1429\"]<img src=\"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/arthc1200\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/72\/2026\/06\/image482.jpeg\" alt=\"Photograph of a group of people observing a large wall covered in densely packed handwritten names and dates in black ink, arranged to create a perspective effect that draws the eye toward a vanishing point. The artwork emphasizes human presence and passage of time through the extensive list of names, with the crowd adding scale and engagement to the installation.\" width=\"1429\" height=\"1072\" \/> Roman Ond\u00e1k, <em>Measuring the Universe<\/em>, 2007, shown enacted at MoMA, 2009 (photo: <a href=\"https:\/\/flic.kr\/p\/6HEdPn\">Steven Zucker<\/a>,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-sa\/2.0\/deed.en\">CC BY-NC-SA 2.0<\/a>)[\/caption]\r\n\r\nPerformance art differs from traditional theater in its rejection of a clear narrative, use of random or chance-based structures, and direct appeal to the audience. The art historian RoseLee Goldberg writes:\r\n\r\n\u201cHistorically, performance art has been a medium that challenges and violates borders between disciplines and genders, between private and public, and between everyday life and art, and that follows no rules.\u201d[footnote]RoseLee Goldberg,\u00a0<em>Performance: Live art since the 60s<\/em>\u00a0(New York: Thames &amp; Hudson, 1998), p. 20.[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nAlthough the term encompasses a broad range of artistic practices that involve bodily experience and live action, its radical connotations derive from this challenge to conventional social mores and artistic values of the past.\r\n<h3 id=\"historical-sources\">Historical sources<\/h3>\r\nWhile performance art is a relatively new area of art history, it has roots in experimental art of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Echoing utopian ideas of the period\u2019s avant-garde, these earliest examples found influences in theatrical and music performance, art, poetry, burlesque, and other popular entertainment. Modern artists used live events to promote extremist beliefs, often through deliberate provocation and attempts to offend bourgeois tastes or expectations. In Italy, the anarchist group of\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/italian-futurism-an-introduction\/\">Futurist artists<\/a>\u00a0insulted and hurled profanity at their middle-class audiences in hopes of inciting political action.\r\n\r\nFollowing World War II, performance emerged as a useful way for artists to explore philosophical and psychological questions about human existence. For this generation, who had witnessed destruction caused by the Holocaust and atomic bomb, the body offered a powerful medium to communicate shared physical and emotional experience. Whereas painting and sculpture relied on expressive form and content to convey meaning, performance art forced viewers to engage with a real person who could feel cold and hunger, fear and pain, excitement and embarrassment\u2014just like them.\r\n<h3 id=\"action-and-contingency\">Action and contingency<\/h3>\r\nSome artists, inspired largely by\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/abstract-expressionism-an-introduction\/\">Abstract Expressionism<\/a>, used performance to emphasize the body\u2019s role in artistic production. Working before a live audience,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/shiraga-kazuo-challenging-mud\/\">Kazuo Shiraga<\/a> of the Japanese\u00a0Gutai Group\u00a0made <a href=\"https:\/\/www.tate.org.uk\/art\/artworks\/otsuji-shiraga-kazuo-demonstrating-his-signature-painting-style-2nd-gutai-exhibition-p82280\">sculpture by crawling<\/a> through a pile of mud. Georges Mathieu staged similar performances in Paris where he violently threw paint at his canvas. These performative approaches to making art built on philosophical interpretations of Abstract Expressionism, which held the gestural markings of action painters as visible evidence of the artist\u2019s own existence. Bolstered by\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/06\/PollockKrasner.jpg\">Hans Namuth\u2019s photographs<\/a>\u00a0of Jackson Pollock in his studio, moving dance-like around a canvas on the floor, artists like Shiraga and Mathieu began to see the artist\u2019s creative act as equally important, if not more so, to the artwork produced. In this light, Pollock\u2019s distinctive drips, spills, and splatters appeared as a mere remnant, a visible trace left over from the moment of creation.\r\n\r\nShifting attention from the art object to the artist\u2019s action further suggested that art existed in real space and real time. In New York, visual artists combined their interest in action painting with ideas of the avant-garde composer John Cage to blur the line between art and life. Cage employed chance procedures to create musical compositions such as 4\u201933\u201d. In this (in)famous piece, Cage used the time frame specified in the title to bracket ambient noises that occurred randomly during the performance. By effectively calling attention to the hum of fluorescent lights, people moving in their seats, coughs, whispers, and other ordinary sounds, Cage transformed them into a unique musical composition.\r\n<h3 id=\"the-private-made-political\">The private made political<\/h3>\r\nDrawing on these influences, new artistic formats emerged in the late 1950s. Environments and\u00a0Happenings\u00a0physically placed viewers in commonplace surroundings, often forcing them to participate in a series of loosely structured actions.\u00a0Fluxus\u00a0artists, poets, and musicians likewise challenged viewers by presenting the most mundane events\u2014brushing teeth, making a salad, exiting the theater\u2014as forms of art. A well-known example is the \u201cbed-in\u201d that Fluxus artist\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/case-for-yoko-ono\/\">Yoko Ono<\/a>\u00a0staged in 1969 in Amsterdam with her husband John Lennon. Typical of much performance art, Ono and Lennon made ordinary human activity a public spectacle, which demanded personal interaction and raised popular awareness of their pacifist beliefs.\r\n\r\nIn the politicized environment of the 1960s, many artists employed performance to address emerging social concerns. For feminist artists in particular, using their body in live performance proved effective in challenging historical representations of women, made mostly by male artists for male patrons. In keeping with past tradition, artists such as Carolee Schneemann, Hannah Wilke, and Valie Export displayed their nude bodies for the viewer\u2019s gaze; but, they resisted the idealized notion of women as passive objects of beauty and desire. Through their words and actions, they confronted their audiences and raised issues about the relationship of female experience to cultural beliefs and institutions, physical appearance, and bodily functions including menstruation and childbearing. Their ground-breaking work paved the way for male and female artists in the 1980s and 1990s, who similarly used body and performance art to explore issues of gender, race, and sexual identity.\r\n<h3 id=\"where-is-it\">Where is it?<\/h3>\r\nThroughout the mid-20th century, performance has been closely tied to the search for alternatives to established art forms, which many artists felt had become fetishized as objects of economic and cultural value. Because performance art emphasized the artist\u2019s action and the viewer\u2019s experience in real space and time, it rarely yielded a final object to be sold, collected, or exhibited. Artists of the 1960 and 70s also experimented with other \u201cdematerialized\u201d formats including\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/the-case-for-land-art\/\">Earthworks<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/conceptual-art-introduction\/\">Conceptual<\/a>\u00a0art that resisted commodification and traditional modes of museum display. The simultaneous rise of photography and video, however, offered artists a viable way to document and widely distribute this new work.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"2048\"]<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/05\/Abramovic_ArtistIsPresent.jpg\"><img src=\"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/arthc1200\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/72\/2026\/06\/Abramovic_ArtistIsPresent.jpg\" alt=\"Photograph showing two women seated on wooden chairs facing each other, engaged in conversation or interview. A photographer with a camera on a tripod and a woman walking in the background are also visible, indicating a staged setting.\" width=\"2048\" height=\"1289\" \/><\/a> Marina Abramovi\u0107, <em>The Artist is Present<\/em>, performed at the Museum of Modern Art, 2010 (photo: <a href=\"https:\/\/flic.kr\/p\/7Nq526\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Alejandro Mallea<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/2.0\/deed.en\">CC BY 2.0<\/a>)[\/caption]\r\n\r\nPerformance art\u2019s acceptance into the mainstream over the past 30 years has led to new trends in its practice and understanding. Ironically, the need to position performance within art\u2019s history has led museums and scholars to focus heavily on photographs and videos that were intended only as documents of live events. In this context, such archival materials assume the art status of the original performance. This practice runs counter to the goal of many artists, who first turned to performance as an alternative to object-based forms of art. Alternatively, some artists and institutions now stage re-enactments of earlier performances in order to recapture the experience of a live event. In a 2010 retrospective exhibition at New York\u2019s Museum of Modern Art, for example, performers in the galleries staged live reenactments of works by the pioneering performance artist\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/marina-abramovic-the-artist-is-present\/\">Marina Abramovi\u0107<\/a>, alongside photographs and video documentation of the original performances.\r\n<h3 id=\"dont-try-this-at-home\">Don\u2019t try this at home<\/h3>\r\nNew strategies, variously described as situations,\u00a0relational aesthetics, and interventionist\u00a0art, have recently begun to appear. Interested in the social role of the artist, Rirkrit Tiravanija stages performances that encourage interpersonal exchange and shared conversation among individuals who might not otherwise meet. His performances have included cooking traditional Thai dinners in museums for viewers to share and relocating the entire contents of a gallery\u2019s offices and storage rooms, including the director at his desk, into public areas used to exhibit art. Similar to performance art of the past, such approaches engage the viewer and encourage their active participation in artistic production; however, they also speak to a cultural shift toward interactive modes of communication and social exchange that characterize the 21st century.\r\n<h2 id=\"land-art-robert-smithson-spiral-jetty\">Land Art: Robert Smithson,\u00a0<em>Spiral Jetty<\/em><\/h2>\r\nAn American sculptor, painter, and writer, Robert Smithson was a pioneer of earthworks sculpture, creating gallery works as well as land art. Earthworks are artworks that manipulate natural earth and stone, altering the terrain of the land itself for artistic purposes.\r\n\r\nhttps:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=vrbNsHs7ptE\r\n<h2 id=\"now-in-the-united-states-an-introduction\">1980\u2013now in the United States, an introduction<\/h2>\r\n[caption id=\"\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"515\"]<img src=\"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/arthc1200\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/72\/2026\/06\/image485.jpeg\" alt=\"Photograph of an astronaut standing on a lunar surface next to a flag featuring the MTV logo in yellow and green on a purple background. The scene combines iconic moon landing imagery with MTV branding.\" width=\"515\" height=\"380\" \/> MTV\u2019s moonman, first broadcast in 1981 (<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/1980-now-in-the-united-states-an-introduction\/\">Smarthistory<\/a>)[\/caption]\r\n\r\nOn August 1, 1981, television viewers tuned in to video footage of a rocket launch and still photographs of an astronaut near a flag emblazoned with the letters MTV. \u201cLadies and gentlemen,\u201d a crackly voice announced, \u201crock and roll.\u201d Using authentic NASA images, Music Television announced its presence in unsubtle terms. This was a new era of home entertainment.\r\n\r\nMTV charted new territory by breaking with narrative forms of programming and by targeting a growing youth market. Over the next decades, music videos and the channel that spread them would shape tastes, reflect cultural moments, and provide round-the-clock entertainment for Americans at home as well as expanding markets abroad as one of America\u2019s globalized purveyors of culture.\r\n\r\nThis period saw revolutionary changes in mass media and information technologies that spread countless ideas, images, and products around the world. The dozens of channels introduced by cable television in the 1980s was eclipsed in the 2000s by seemingly unlimited content available streaming from apps. The internet made content choice and on-demand viewing at the touch of a button a basic expectation.\r\n\r\nAmericans connected wirelessly 24-hours a day to news, information, entertainment \u2014 and to each other \u2014 through computers, cellphones, tablets, and smart watches that fulfilled an early nineteenth-century call to \u201cconquer space\u201d\u2014to connect the nation by roads and canals.\r\n\r\nThis\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/nam-june-paik-electronic-superhighway-continental-u-s-alaska-hawaii\/\">spirit of interconnectivity<\/a>\u00a0transformed culture and society, with many Americans embracing diversity and equal opportunity for all. However, growing economic inequality between rich and poor led others to blame advances in civil rights. Multiculturalism was undercut by economic stagnation. Conservatism became an increasingly powerful political movement that, in conflict with progressive forces, polarized the nation into the twenty-first century.\r\n<h3 id=\"multiculturalism\">Multiculturalism<\/h3>\r\nIn the 1980s and 1990s, the U.S. attracted numerous immigrant groups including Koreans, Vietnamese, South Asians, and from Latin America, Dominicans, Cubans, Mexicans, and Central Americans. At the same time, many already in the United States embraced and revived the traditions of their own heritages. While opportunities improved for people of various races, ethnicities, and genders, the fight for equal rights was\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/seeing-america-2\/nari-ward-people\/\">not complete<\/a>.\r\n\r\nThe African American middle-class grew with more seeking college education and benefiting from affirmative action programs. Backlash against these programs resonated throughout the 1980s. But the decade also saw the first serious bid of an African American for president when Rev. Jesse Jackson ran with a campaign meant to unite people across racial and ethnic lines.\r\n\r\nThe first black president, Barack Obama, was elected more than two decades later.\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/seeing-america-2\/saar-topsy-sa\/\">Reacting to stereotypes<\/a>\u00a0that not only influence public opinion, but led to life and death situations, the Black Lives Matter movement spoke out against police violence.\r\n\r\nNative Americans opened their own museums, and older museums of natural history, history, and art questioned the moral underpinnings of their collections, many of them stolen and sacred to people of other cultures. In 1990, the\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/mesa-verde-cliff-dwellings-2\/\">Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act<\/a>\u00a0established the right of tribes to ask for the return of museum objects. At the same time, residents of reservations reinvested in\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/seeing-america-2\/resilience-robe\/\">learning, preserving, and reviving<\/a>\u00a0native arts and languages.\r\n\r\nBut the 1990s also pushed the nation into \u201cculture wars.\u201d Conservatives reacted to the liberal advances of earlier decades, debating issues of race, homosexuality, abortion, gun control, and censorship. These debates played out in the media and politics, characterized by conservative Pat Buchanan as a war for the \u201csoul of America.\u201d At their core, the culture wars revisited long-held American debates about the role of government in controlling and legislating perceived immoral activities within the nation.\r\n\r\n<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/seeing-america-2\/teraoka-american-kabuki\/\">The AIDS pandemic<\/a>, first identified in the U.S. in 1981, quickly became a polarizing political issue. Fear and ignorance stigmatized those with the deadly disease. Gay activists fought for government action, and for education to prevent the spread of the disease, but the Federal response lagged for years because of the association of the disease with the gay community. By the end of the 1980s, federal funding for research brought advances in treatment that began to save lives.\r\n<h3 id=\"environment\">Environment<\/h3>\r\nEnvironmental activism grew as the deforestation of rainforests and rapidly expanding industrial and consumer activity continued largely unchecked, and as the scientific community better understood the connection between human activity and global warming. Agricultural chemicals continued to impact land and\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/seeing-america-2\/work-exchange-tech\/teaching-guide-work-exchange-and-technology-thiebaud-%e2%80%8bponds-and-streams\/\">water quality<\/a>, and the naturally-arid western region of the United States struggled to meet the water needs of its\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/seeing-america-2\/couturier-eastlake-greens-sa\/\">growing population<\/a>.\r\n\r\nIn 1989, an oil tanker dumped 11 million gallons of crude oil into Alaska\u2019s Prince William Sound with devastating consequences to area wildlife. The Exxon Valdez spill was at the time the worst environmental disaster Americans had witnessed (since surpassed by the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill) and raised awareness of the harm done by fossil fuels. In 1990, the Oil Pollution Act changed regulations for tankers and increased penalties for accidents.\r\n\r\nUnder President Reagan (and more recently under President Trump), environmental regulations on businesses were loosened, including the Paris Agreement on climate change in 2016, where President Obama committed the nation, along with 190 others, to reducing reliance on fossil fuels and to make efforts to change behaviors that contribute to global warming. Changing weather patterns, increasing hurricanes and forest fires, as well as regular tidal flooding in coastal cities began pushing Americans to rethink harmful behaviors.\r\n<h3 id=\"america-and-the-world\">America and the world<\/h3>\r\nBy the 1990s, American culture had reached around the globe. American businesses, restaurants, movies, and music extolled American values and lifestyles. With the opening of the U.S.S.R. to western culture and business (a policy Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union called \u201cglasnost\u201d), the barriers of the Cold War began to come down, including, in 1989, the\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/the-berlin-wall\/\">Berlin Wall<\/a>. Globalization brought people around the world closer together through technologies and through shared consumer culture, much of it originating in the U.S.\r\n\r\nBut many nations resented American cultural imperialism as well as its military power. Tensions in the Middle East, in particular, intensified. When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, President George H.W. Bush moved to deploy U.S. forces to stop dictator Saddam Hussein \u2014 and to protect U.S. oil interests. He then organized U.N. nations to liberate Kuwait. Though the Gulf War was successful, Hussein was not ousted as the leader of Iraq and conflicts in the region multiplied.\r\n\r\nOn September 11, 2011, hijacked commercial airliners flew into the towers of the World Trade Center in New York. Another hit the Pentagon and a fourth went down in Pennsylvania, missing its intended target. The hijackers were members of the terrorist group, al-Qaeda which had a distinct disdain for the spread of western culture, and which the nations of Afghanistan and Iraq had protected within their borders. The American War on Terror was launched to root out the organization.\r\n\r\nThe War on Terror brought with it suspicions about loyalties within the United States. In 2001, the USA Patriot Act enabled the government to establish surveillance of all Americans, including cell phone data. Issues regarding digital privacy remain unresolved, as does the regulation of social media platforms. Americans broadly embraced the new technologies of the century\u2019s end, but remain uncertain about their impact on individual lives, on national politics, and on world affairs.\r\n\r\nGreater mobility in combination with war, increasing concentrations of wealth, and the impact of climate change have dramatically increased migration around the world. This movement of people, often fleeing desperate circumstances such as civil war in Syria or violence in Central America, has raised the specter of Nationalism around the world and in the United States. Just 30 years after the Berlin wall came down, many American conservatives have backed President Donald Trump\u2019s call for a wall on the southern border of the United States (on land that the United States took from Mexico in the aftermath of the Mexican American War). The United States helped create technologies that have made the world more mobile; now we have to decide if we like the result.\r\n<h2 id=\"maya-lin-vietnam-veterans-memorial\">Maya Lin, Vietnam Veterans Memorial<\/h2>\r\nAn American sculptor and architect, Maya Lin\u2019s mature work has focused on earthworks, sculptures, and other works that explore environmental issues. An early work of Lin\u2019s, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is a powerful accumulation of names inscribed on slabs of reflective stone that cuts into the earth on the National Mall.\r\n\r\nhttps:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=wuxjTxxQUTs\r\n<h2 id=\"postmodernism\">Postmodernism<\/h2>\r\nArtists directly engaged with appropriation in the 1970s were doing so under the influence of postmodernism. In previous generations, artists were praised for their ability to create new ideas and objects. Originality was the hallmark of modernism, and artists were presumed to be independent creators of objects and their meaning. However, by the late 1960s such ideas were beginning to break down. New theories about the impossibility of originality developed in the field of literary theory began to permeate the art world. A key text of this period was a 1968 essay by French philosopher Roland Barthes entitled \u201cDeath of the Author.\u201d Barthes realigned the focus of literary theory from the creation of language to its enunciation. This meant that the act of interpretation was more important than the act of creation. Artists were suddenly freed from the burden and the expectations of complete originality; what mattered now was how artists could interpret, reconfigure, and reposition already extant works and ideas to create other meanings.\r\n<h2 id=\"postmodern-architecture-robert-venturi-house-in-new-castle-county-delaware\">Postmodern Architecture: <a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/venturi-house-in-new-castle-county-delaware\/\">Robert Venturi, House in New Castle County, Delaware<\/a><\/h2>\r\n<h3 id=\"that-postmodern-moment\">That postmodern moment<\/h3>\r\nRobert Venturi\u2019s New Castle County House offers a modest but instructive example of the\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/postmodernism\/\">postmodern<\/a>\u00a0style set in rural north Delaware. An influential teacher and theorist, Venturi studied architecture at Princeton University and attended the American Academy in Rome during the mid-1950s, where he developed a \u201cpartiality\u201d towards post-Renaissance architecture, particularly works built during the\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/europe-1300-1800\/italy-16th-century\/mannerism-introduction\/\">Mannerist<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/a-beginners-guide-to-baroque-art\/\">Baroque<\/a>\u00a0periods in Italy.\r\n\r\nIn 1966, The Museum of Modern Art in New York published his first book\u00a0<em>Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture<\/em>. Written while he was teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, it contains dozens of small black-and-white photographs of\u00a0Western\u00a0architecture from ancient times to the present day, as well as examples of the architect\u2019s early work.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"2560\"]<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/Venturi-pages-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/arthc1200\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/72\/2026\/06\/Venturi-pages-scaled-1.jpg\" alt=\"A black and white photograph collage and architectural text page showcasing classical building facades, detailed ceiling designs, and structural plans. The layout includes labeled images of columns, arches, and ornamental ceilings.\" width=\"2560\" height=\"959\" \/><\/a> Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 2nd edition, T<em>he Museum of Modern Art<\/em>, 1966, pp. 26\u201327[\/caption]\r\n<h3 id=\"a-gentle-manifesto\">A gentle manifesto<\/h3>\r\nVenturi used the first chapter, sub-titled \u201cA Gentle Manifesto,\u201d to express his strongly held belief that orthodox\u00a0modern architecture\u00a0and city planning had run its course. Rather\u00a0than continue in the disciplined, austere footsteps of European architects\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/le-corbusier-villa-savoye\/\">Le Corbusier<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/smarthistory.org\/ludwig-mies-van-der-rohe-seagram-building-new-york-city\/\">Mies van der Rohe<\/a>, he highlighted historic structures that exhibit a \u201cmessy vitality over obvious unity\u201d\u2014seen, for example, in his inclusion of a \u201ccontradictory\u201d Byzantine capital from\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/hagia-sophia-istanbul\/\">Hagia Sophia<\/a>\u00a0in Istanbul.\r\n\r\n<em>Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture<\/em>\u00a0was well-received by contemporary critics, particularly Yale University professor Vincent Scully, who wrote in the introduction that Venturi presented a fresh approach to looking at architecture, preferring complexity and contradiction over abstraction and what Venturi called the \u201cfairy stories\u201d of modernist purity. His follow-up, the\u00a0marvelously-titled\u00a0<em>Learning From Las Vegas<\/em>, co-authored in 1972 with his wife and partner Denise Scott Brown and partner Steven Izenour, highlighted the way buildings are experienced from a distance while traveling along the gaudy Sunset Strip. For Venturi, how buildings look, and are perceived, was far more important than the techniques, systems, and theories used to plan and construct them.\r\n<h3 id=\"vanna-venturi-house\">Vanna Venturi House<\/h3>\r\nThe New Castle County House dates to an important period in Venturi\u2019s career and postmodernism. Though some of his peers designed buildings that respectfully imitate the past, he was no\u00a0mere\u00a0revivalist.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"2560\"]<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/Vanna-Venturi-house-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/arthc1200\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/72\/2026\/06\/Vanna-Venturi-house-scaled-1.jpg\" alt=\"Photograph of a modern, symmetrical house with a flat roof and two large triangular walls painted gray, surrounded by green grass and trees. The house features a central entrance with a small overhang, multiple rectangular windows, and a prominent chimney-like structure at the top center.\" width=\"2560\" height=\"1500\" \/><\/a> Robert Venturi, Vanna Venturi House, 1959\u201364, Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia (Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress; photo: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.loc.gov\/pictures\/collection\/highsm\/item\/2011631329\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Carol M. Highsmith<\/a>)[\/caption]\r\n\r\nRather than copy a specific style, he borrowed freely, juxtaposing, collaging, and reinterpreting forms from distinct periods and places. This was particularly true in the Vanna Venturi House. Built in the Philadelphia suburbs, this famous house is located at the end of a driveway and resembles a child\u2019s drawing. Viewed through the lens of\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/classic-classical-and-classicism-explained-2\/\">classicism<\/a>\u00a0and 1960s\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/pop-art\/\">Pop Art<\/a>, his witty design incorporates a large\u00a0gable, recessed porch, and noticeably off-center chimney.\r\n<h3 id=\"american-vernacular\">American vernacular<\/h3>\r\nThe New Castle County House was built for a family of three and sits comfortably in nature. In contrast to Andrea Palladio\u2019s\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/smarthistory.org\/palladio-la-rotonda\/\">Villa Rotonda<\/a>\u00a0or Le Corbusier\u2019s Villa Savoye, it neither crowns a hilltop nor hovers above a well-trimmed lawn. Instead, the house sits surrounded by rolling fields, beside a thickly-wooded forest. Like many traditional farmhouses and barns in the United States, the painted siding is white and the intersecting gables are clad with unstained wood shingles.\u00a0It may look conventional and familiar but on closer inspection the exterior is enlivened by a diverse array of mischievous and sometimes perplexing architectural features.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"2000\"]<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/6310090780_5e48e01fa3_k.jpg\"><img src=\"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/arthc1200\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/72\/2026\/06\/6310090780_5e48e01fa3_k.jpg\" alt=\"Photograph of a modernist architectural building elevated on white stilts with a flat roof and horizontal windows wrapping around the upper level. Surrounded by green grass and trees, the structure features clean white walls and an open ground floor area.\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1328\" \/><\/a> Le Corbusier, Villa Savoye, 1929, Poissy, France (photo: <a href=\"https:\/\/flic.kr\/p\/aBAS9C\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Renato Saboya<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-sa\/2.0\/deed.en\">CC BY-NC-SA 2.0<\/a>)[\/caption]\r\n<h3 id=\"form-as-sign\">Form as sign<\/h3>\r\nOf particular interest is how Venturi treated the \u201cfront\u201d and \u201crear\u201d fa\u00e7ades. In\u00a0<em>Learning from Las Vegas<\/em>, the authors celebrated the concept of the \u201cdecorated shed\u201d\u2014buildings that exploit easily recognizable two-dimensional elements to generate visual interest and meaning. The \u201cfront\u201d fa\u00e7ade of the New Castle County House incorporates a floating arched screen that, like a highway billboard, rises somewhat awkwardly from the lower edge of the gable. Though Venturi claimed this curved feature had Austrian Baroque origins, like a garden gate or\u00a0eyebrow dormers\u00a0found on some Victorian houses, it functions as a sign, identifying the structure as a residence. Furthermore, since the owners enjoyed bird watching it may also have doubled as a blind, camouflaging the large windows behind it.\r\n\r\nThe \u201crear\u201d fa\u00e7ade is even more curious and complex. While it, too, is dominated by a prominent arched screen, this screen is framed by the edges of the gabled roof. Supported by what appears to be a\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/greek-architectural-orders\/\">Doric colonnade<\/a>, the four stubby columns are, in fact, almost flat.\u00a0Thin as the outer walls, these cut-outs carry little weight and enclose the recessed porch. While the column on the far right grows seamlessly out of the adjoining wall, the left column appears split in half by the addition of an aluminum drain pipe. Classical in derivation yet slightly cartoonish, this somewhat awkward assemblage gives the house a simultaneously grand and whimsical appearance.\r\n<h3 id=\"playfully-challenging\">Playfully challenging<\/h3>\r\nIn photographs dating from the time of the building\u2019s completion the spacious interiors appear simple and comfortable, with wood decorations inspired by various 19th century design traditions.\u00a0The painted arches in the vaulted music room, the quirky chandeliers, and perforated wall patterns exhibit a straight-forward craftsman-like quality, as if cut by hand or jigsaw. Conspicuously two dimensional, their fanciful silhouettes evoke the\u00a0Carpenter Gothic\u00a0and\u00a0Queen Anne\u00a0styles.\r\n\r\nVenturi never liked the stylistic term postmodern, but his buildings and critical writings helped propel late 20th-century architecture in a new direction. This private residence remains a playfully challenging work expressing a refreshingly pluralistic view of architecture and design.\r\n<h2 id=\"identity-politics-from-the-margins-to-the-mainstream\">Identity politics: from the margins to the mainstream<\/h2>\r\n<h3 id=\"whose-art-history\">Whose art history?<\/h3>\r\nFor most of the twentieth century, major American museums rarely exhibited the work of artists from underrepresented groups, preferring instead to privilege the dominant narratives of a white, male, heterosexual art history. The 1984 blockbuster exhibition \u201c\u2018Primitivism\u2019 in 20th Century Art: Affinities of the Tribal and the Modern\u201d at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, for example, juxtaposed the work of recognized masters of modern art with artifacts from nonwestern (mostly African or East Asian) populations. However, the relative positioning of the nonwestern works seemed to many observers to present these objects as inferior to the works of European and American artists.\r\n\r\nCritics of the exhibition specifically took issue with MoMA\u2019s emphasis on formal comparisons of western objects by well-known modern and contemporary artists (e.g.,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/constantin-brancusi-the-kiss\/\">Constantin Brancusi<\/a>,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/gauguin-where-do-we-come-from-what-are-we-where-are-we-going\/\">Paul Gauguin<\/a>, and\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/pablo-picasso-les-demoiselles-davignon\/\">Pablo Picasso<\/a>) and nonwestern objects produced by unidentified artists and artisans. The exhibition failed to consider the significant political, ideological, and social contexts of its nonwestern objects\u2014a presentation that some critics argued positioned the works of European and American artists as more \u201cadvanced.\u201d For many artists, critics, and curators positioned outside the so-called mainstream art world it was becoming increasingly clear that nonwhite artists were only included in major museum exhibitions if they reinforced these hierarchies.\r\n<h3 id=\"addressing-a-history-of-exclusion-the-decade-show\">Addressing a history of exclusion: \u201cThe Decade Show\u201d<\/h3>\r\nIn response to this history of exclusion, and to MoMA\u2019s \u201cPrimitivism\u201d show specifically, three cultural institutions in New York City collaborated on an exhibition that would recognize the perspectives of marginal groups and assign them a place in a mainstream. The landmark exhibition \u201cThe Decade Show: Frameworks of Identity in the 1980s,\u201d organized by curators from The New Museum of Contemporary Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and The Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art, opened in May 1990 and featured more than 200 objects by ninety-four artists of diverse heritage. According to the organizers, \u201cThe Decade Show\u201d artists were connected by their willingness to address the phenomenon of exclusion in their work. This exhibition worked from the idea that as the perspectives of the marginalized entered the mainstream, they would likewise receive greater political agency.\r\n\r\nJames Luna, a Pooyukitchum and Mexican-American artist included in \u201cThe Decade Show,\u201d was one of many artists working in this period to reconstruct a political position via representational visibility. For his performance <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nga.gov\/artworks\/223884-artifact-piece\"><em>Artifact Piece<\/em><\/a>,\u00a0the artist lay inside a display case at the Studio Museum in Harlem with his nude body covered only by a breechcloth. Small white cards with stories describing the origin of several body markings (scars, tan lines, etc.) and written in the third person were scattered alongside the artist\u2019s body. The perceived objectivity of the descriptive cards and Luna\u2019s own prone position in the display case, allows\u00a0<em>Artifact Piece<\/em>\u00a0to directly reference the history of ethnographic displays, which often positioned \u201cother\u201d bodies as objects to be looked at by a mainstream public.\r\n\r\nAs Luna explained in a 2008 interview: \u201cI had long looked at representation of our peoples in museums and they all dwelled in the past. They were one-sided. We were simply objects among bones, bones among objects, and then signed and sealed with a date.\u201d Luna\u2019s inclusion of his own subjective narrative radically transforms the historically marginalized body of the \u201cother\u201d in the museum from a passive object to a speaking agent.\u00a0<em>Artifact Piece<\/em>\u00a0also played an important part in inverting the power dynamics between the observed and the observer. Here, Luna placed himself on display; his presence in an art museum creates an unsettling effect for the viewer, who is forced to consider their own relationship to this history of display and exploitation.\r\n<h3 id=\"whitney-biennial\">1993 Whitney Biennial<\/h3>\r\nOn the heels of \u201cThe Decade Show,\u201d several other institutions began to reconsider their relationship to artists outside the mainstream. Perhaps the most well known of these exhibitions was the 1993 Biennial exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, which many scholars consider to be the turning point for identity-based art discourse. The main theme of this exhibition, according to David Ross, the Whitney\u2019s director at the time, was \u201cthe construction of identity.\u201d Contemporary artists, Ross claimed, \u201cinsist on reinscribing the personal, political, and social back into the practice and history of art.\u201d Reviews of the exhibition show that the effects of this reinscription were received ambivalently; many critics praised the shows risk-taking, while others questioned the aesthetic merits of the works. Nevertheless, it was impossible to ignore the emergence of an entire generation of artists, including Ren\u00e9e Green, Byron Kim, Glenn Ligon,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/osorio-en-la-barberia-no-se-llora-no-crying-allowed-in-the-barbershop\/\">Pep\u00f3n Osorio<\/a>, and\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/lorna-simpson-everything-i-do-comes-from-the-same-desire\/\">Lorna Simpson<\/a>, who were explicitly working to de-center the institutional focus on whiteness.\r\n\r\nByron Kim\u2019s contribution to the exhibition, a multi-paneled painting titled <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nga.gov\/artworks\/142289-synecdoche\"><em>Synecdoche<\/em><\/a>, 1991-present, captures both the aesthetic and political ambitions of art in this period. On first glance, Kim\u2019s monochromatic palette and his arrangement of small paintings into a grid seem to recall\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/an-introduction-to-minimalism\/\">minimalist<\/a>\u00a0work of the 1960s. However, visitors to the exhibition quickly learned that\u00a0<em>Synecdoche<\/em>\u00a0was much more than an aesthetic exercise. To construct the work, Kim asked members of his community (friends, neighbors, strangers) to let him copy the color of their skin, which the artist then reproduced in oil on a ten-by-eight-inch canvas panel.\r\n\r\nFar from an exercise in objectivity or geometry, each small painting is a portrait. The title of Kim\u2019s work refers to a figure of speech, in which a term for a part of something refers to the whole of something, or vice-versa (e.g., saying \u201call hands on deck\u201d to refer to a group of sailors). In\u00a0<em>Synecdoche<\/em>, each individual person pictured is reduced to and represented by skin color alone. But in highlighting the uniqueness and individuality of every skin tone, this painting provokes us to reconsider the ways in which skin color has been used to stereotype or otherwise marginalize individuals. In this way,\u00a0<em>Synecdoche<\/em>\u00a0set a standard for dealing with the complexity of the visual markers of identity.\r\n<h3 id=\"shifting-art-history\">Shifting art history<\/h3>\r\nAs the ideas and perspectives from non-white artists, queer artists, and those with other intersectional identities were given space in the museum throughout the 1990s, the terrain of art history began to shift as well. We are still seeing the effects of this today as more and more artists from the margins enter mainstream institutions and their histories. In the words of author and activist bell hooks, difference means not only exclusion but \u201cthe site of radical possibility, a space of resistance.\u201d\r\n<h2 id=\"jean-michel-basquiat-horn-players\">Jean-Michel Basquiat, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thebroad.org\/art\/jean-michel-basquiat\/horn-players\"><em>Horn Players<\/em><\/a><\/h2>\r\nJean-Michel Basquiat\u2019s 1983 painting\u00a0<em>Horn Players<\/em>\u00a0shows us all the main stylistic features we have come to expect from this renowned American artist. In addition to half-length portraits on the left and right panels of this triptych (a painting consisting of three joined panels), the artist has included several drawings and words\u2014many of which Basquiat drew and then crossed out. On each panel we also notice large swaths of white paint, which seem to simultaneously highlight the black background and obscure the drawings and\/or words beneath. Most notable perhaps is the preponderance of repeated words like \u201cDIZZY,\u201d \u201cORNITHOLOGY,\u201d \u201cPREE\u201d and \u201cTEETH\u201d that the artist has scattered across all three panels of this work.\r\n<h3 id=\"charlie-parker-and-dizzy-gillespie\">Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie<\/h3>\r\nDespite the seeming disorder of the composition, however, it is clear that the main subjects of\u00a0<em>Horn Players<\/em>\u00a0are two famous jazz musicians\u2014the saxophonist Charlie Parker and the trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, who Basquiat has depicted in both linguistic and visual portraits. On the left of the canvas, the artist has drawn the figure of Parker, holding his saxophone which emits several hot pink musical notes and distorted waves of sound. We see Dizzy Gillespie in the right panel, who holds a silent instrument alongside his torso. The words \u201cDOH SHOO DE OBEE\u201d that float to the left of the figure\u2019s head call to mind the scat (wordless improvisational) singing Gillespie often performed onstage.\r\n\r\nMany of the words Basquiat has written on the canvas relate specifically to Charlie Parker, but they make sense only for those viewers with some knowledge of the musician\u2019s life. For example, the literal meaning of \u201cORNITHOLOGY\u201d is \u201cthe study of birds,\u201d but this is also the title of a famous composition by Parker, who named the tune (first recorded in 1946) in reference to his own nickname \u201cBird.\u201d The words \u201cPREE\u201d and \u201cCHAN\u201d that we see written above and below the saxophonist\u2019s portrait refer to Parker\u2019s infant daughter and common-law wife, respectively.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"807\"]<img src=\"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/arthc1200\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/72\/2026\/06\/basquiat-samo.jpg\" alt=\"Photograph of a person standing against a graffiti-covered brick wall, wearing a long coat and looking to the side. Graffiti includes large black and blue letters with some red markings, featuring words and symbols that appear to be political or social statements.\" width=\"807\" height=\"600\" \/> Jean-Michel Basquiat posing next to SAMO graffiti (<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/jean-michel-basquiat-horn-players\/\">Smarthistory<\/a>)[\/caption]\r\n<h3 id=\"basquiat-and-wordplay\">Basquiat and wordplay<\/h3>\r\nThis kind of wordplay is a characteristic that extends across most of Jean-Michel Basquiat\u2019s work. One of the most recognizable features of the artist\u2019s more than 2000 paintings and drawings is the overwhelming abundance of written words on the canvas. The art historian Robert Farris Thompson once declared: \u201cIt\u2019s as if he were dripping letters.\u201d [footnote]Robert Farris Thompson and Renee Ricard,<em>\u00a0Jean-Michel Basquiat<\/em>\u00a0(Gagosian Gallery, 2015).[\/footnote] Before his success as a painter, Basquiat was famous for writing on the walls of lower Manhattan as a teenager when he and a high school friend, Al Diaz, left cryptic messages in spray paint under the name \u201cSAMO\u201d (an acronym for \u201cSame Old Shit\u201d) from 1977 until 1979.\r\n\r\nAs SAMO, Basquiat and Diaz wrote maxims, jokes, and prophecies in marker and spray paint on subway trains throughout New York City (particularly the \u201cD\u201d train, which ran between downtown Manhattan and Basquiat\u2019s home in Brooklyn), as well as on the walls and sidewalks in the SoHo and Tribeca neighborhoods. Many of the locations where SAMO writings were to be found were in close proximity to prominent art galleries. Combined with these strategic positions, phrases like \u201cSAMO AS AN END TO PLAYING ART\u201d or \u201cSAMO FOR THE SO-CALLED AVANT-GARDE\u201d presented the \u201cSAMO\u201d persona as outside the commercial art world and critical of it. In fact, even after relinquishing the SAMO persona and emerging to the art world as Jean-Michel Basquiat, the artist remained an outsider to the mainstream art world, despite his meteoric rise on the art auction block.\r\n<h3 id=\"the-black-picasso\">\u201cThe Black Picasso\u201d<\/h3>\r\nBasquiat went from \u201cSAMO\u201d to commercial success at warp speed in the early 1980s. He first exhibited (still under the name SAMO) at the Times Square Show\u2014an exhibition in June 1980 that marked the genesis of the eighties art movement. He was later invited to exhibit in\u00a0New York\/New Wave, a group show of sixteen hundred works by 119 artists that opened at P.S. 1 on Valentine\u2019s Day. The show was affectionately called\u00a0\u201cThe Armory Show\u201d\u00a0of the 1980s.\r\n\r\nAlmost immediately afterward, the young Basquiat (at this point just 20 years old) was invited to exhibit in his first solo show in Modena, Italy. The gallerist Annina Nosei, who showed more established artists like David Salle and Richard Prince, agreed to represent Basquiat, who had a one-man show at her gallery the next year. That same year, Basquiat had exhibitions in Los Angeles, Zurich, Rome, and Rotterdam and became the youngest artist invited to participate in\u00a0Documenta\u00a07. By 1983 the average sale price of Basquiat\u2019s work had increased by 600 percent, and his popularity (both in the auction house and in popular culture) persists even today. You can buy his images on shirts and hats from popular retail outlets and his large paintings sell at auction for more than $20 million.\r\n\r\nBased on his meteoric success, critics referred to Jean-Michel Basquiat as \u201cthe Black Picasso.\u201d The nickname was complicated for Basquiat, who never embraced it, but was nevertheless concerned with his own place within art history. He often relied on textbooks and other sources for his visual material; most biographies of the artist note his reliance on the medical textbook\u00a0<em>Gray\u2019s Anatomy<\/em>\u00a0(a gift from the artist\u2019s mother when Basquiat was hospitalized as a child) for the anatomical drawings and references we see on many of his surfaces. Basquiat also appropriated the work of\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/about-leonardo\/\">Leonardo<\/a>,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/edouard-manet-olympia\/\">\u00c9douard Manet<\/a>, and\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/pablo-picasso-three-women\/\">Pablo Picasso<\/a>\u00a0into his own compositions. These appropriations were in part an homage to the great painters Basquiat admired, but they also were a way for Basquiat to rewrite art history and insert himself into the canon.\r\n\r\nLooking again at\u00a0<em>Horn Players<\/em>, for example, reveals several connections to Picasso\u2019s\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/pablo-picasso-three-musicians\/\"><em>Three Musicians<\/em><\/a>. Basquiat\u2019s use of the triptych format\u2014a popular device for the artist in this period\u2014echoes the triple subjects of the Picasso image. The figure of Parker in Basquiat\u2019s composition is also reproduced in the same position as the standing figure (playing the clarinet) in Picasso\u2019s work.\r\n\r\nThe central panel of Basquiat\u2019s canvas, which does not show a portrait of an identifiable musician like the other two panels, but instead a distorted head with roughly outlined features, suddenly comes into focus via its comparison with\u00a0<em>Three Musicians<\/em>. Here Picasso references in paint, his earlier experiments with paper collage especially in rendering the face and head of his central figure, whose jawline dramatically extends beyond what is anatomically possible to create an abstract, bulbous shape. Basquiat\u2019s central figure bears a similar protrusion\u2014this time from the top of the head\u2014which he fills in with hatch marks that are suggestive of the patterning of Picasso\u2019s \u201ccollaged\u201d paper. Once again, Basquiat seems to be speaking in code. This time, we are being asked not only to draw upon our knowledge of music history but of modern painting to fully understand his work.\r\n<h3 id=\"basquiats-musicians\">Basquiat\u2019s musicians<\/h3>\r\nMusicians were a popular subject for Basquiat, who himself played briefly in a noise band called Gray\u2014likely a reference to the\u00a0<em>Gray\u2019s Anatomy<\/em>\u00a0textbook. Jazz musicians began to appear in the artist\u2019s paintings around 1982; references to jazz musicians or recordings appear in more than thirty large-format paintings and twenty works on paper. Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie are the two musicians who appear most frequently, both as figures in the paintings and through linguistic references to their work. The artist painted canvases with figures playing the trumpet, the saxophone, and the drums. He also devoted several canvases to replicating the labels of jazz records or the discographies of musicians.\r\n\r\nMany scholars have connected Basquiat\u2019s interest in jazz to a larger investment in African American popular culture (for example, he also painted famous African American athletes) but an alternative explanation is that the young Basquiat looked to jazz music for inspiration and for instruction, much in the same way that he looked to the modern masters of painting. Parker, Gillespie, and the other musicians of the bebop era infamously appropriated both the harmonic structures of jazz standards, using them as a structure for their own songs, and repeated similar note patterns across several improvisations. Basquiat used similar techniques of appropriation throughout his career as a painter.\r\n<h2 id=\"barbara-kruger-untitled-your-gaze-hits-the-side-of-my-face\">Barbara Kruger, <a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/barbara-kruger-untitled-your-gaze-hits-side-face\/\">Untitled (Your gaze hits the side of my face)<\/a><\/h2>\r\nHas an artwork ever been more direct in acknowledging that the simple act of looking is a gendered (and gendering) act? \u201cYour gaze hits the side of my face,\u201d admonishes Barbara Kruger in\u00a0<em>Untitled<\/em>\u00a0(1981). The phrase is made stark and impersonal by arranging the words in a vertical stack, like those of a ransom note, to the left of a photograph of a female portrait bust in profile. Notice how the head is equally depersonalized; a stylized version in the classical tradition whose neck disappears into a block of stone, the suggestion here is that women are rendered inert in the act of being looked at. With an assumed male viewer \u2014 the subject of the possessive phrase \u201cyour gaze\u201d \u2014 the subject of the portrait bust readily conforms to patriarchal fantasies of the passive female object.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"1474\"]<img src=\"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/arthc1200\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/72\/2026\/06\/image499.jpeg\" alt=\"Book cover titled &quot;Ways of Seeing&quot; by John Berger, featuring a white background with blue and black text. Four framed images below text show a horse labeled &quot;the door,&quot; a clock labeled &quot;the wind,&quot; a pitcher labeled &quot;the bird,&quot; and a suitcase labeled &quot;the valise,&quot; illustrating surrealist painter Magritte's commentary on gaps between words and seeing.\" width=\"1474\" height=\"2286\" \/> John Berger, cover of <em>Ways of Seeing<\/em>, 1972 (<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/barbara-kruger-untitled-your-gaze-hits-side-face\/\">Smarthistory<\/a>))[\/caption]\r\n\r\nIn 1981 the concept of the male gaze spelled out a crucial\u00a0problematic\u00a0of feminist theory. Could women truly be liberated from the objectification implied in this act of being looked at? John Berger in his 1972 book\u00a0<em>Ways of Seeing<\/em>\u00a0described the history of Western oil painting as a catalogue of submissive nude women arranged for the pleasure of male viewers. Kruger confronts this tradition head on. The phrase \u201cmale gaze\u201d referenced in Kruger\u2019s title is taken from Laura Mulvey, who coined the phrase in her 1975 essay \u201cVisual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,\u201d a landmark text of feminist theory. [footnote]Laura Mulvey, \u201cVisual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,\u201d\u00a0<em>Screen<\/em>, volume 16, issue 3, (Autumn 1975), pp. 6\u201318.[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nKruger\u2019s art is characterized by a visual wit sharpened in the trenches of the advertising world where the savvy combination of graphic imagery and pithy phrasing targeted a growing population of consumers in the post-World War II years. The portrait bust she uses for<em>\u00a0Untitled (Your gaze hits the side of my face)<\/em>\u00a0is a found picture, one of any number the artist would have encountered in her early career in graphic design. This included a stint at\u00a0<em>Mademoiselle<\/em>\u00a0magazine, whose glossy pages were a virtual catalogue of stereotypical images of femininity. In the late 1970s, Kruger began to choose for her photomontages images of women that were often heightened examples of such stereotypes to which her addition of text would, often humorously, expose and thereby deconstruct the supposed realism of such imagery.\r\n\r\nA <a href=\"https:\/\/www.davidzwirner.com\/artworks\/barbara-kruger-untitled-we-have-received-orders-not-to-move--d8b14\">1982 work<\/a>, for example, shows a silhouette of a woman\u2019s body partially outlined by dressmaker\u2019s pins and leaning forward in a chair marked with the words \u201cWe have received orders not to move.\u201d The text here is laid across the body\u2019s midsection, adding another layer of the idea of being pinned in place. The sense that women were trapped or immobilized in the act of being seen runs throughout her body of work from this period and underlines how common this kind of depiction of women was in advertising, particularly during the mid-twentieth century, the period from which many of Kruger\u2019s images were culled.\r\n\r\nKruger offers some resistance to the objectifying gaze of the titular male viewer. Only hitting the side in\u00a0<em>Untitled (Your gaze hits the side of my face)<\/em>, one imagines it bouncing off as if merely ricocheting. But it nevertheless makes strategically visible the tacit assumption of Western visual traditions: women are looked at; men do the looking. In feminist terms, this means that women are negatively defined as lacking subjectivity or agency. Kruger staged an intervention, one could say, and it is in this way that her work is considered part of the feminist art canon.\r\n\r\nDuring the second wave of feminism in the 1970s, women artists sought, in different ways, to confront the problem of women\u2019s representation in art. Sylvia Sleigh\u2019s painting <em><a href=\"https:\/\/smartcollection.uchicago.edu\/objects\/9221\/the-turkish-bath\">The Turkish Bath\u00a0<\/a><\/em>(1973), for example, renders a group of nude men in a traditional portrait genre usually reserved for women typified by the Neoclassical painter\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/between-neclassicism-and-romanticism-ingres-la-grande-odalisque-2\/\">Jean-Dominque Ingres<\/a>. Other artists, like\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/antin-traditional-sculpture\/\">Eleanor Antin<\/a>\u00a0(who also riffs off the classical sculptural tradition in\u00a0<em>Carving: A Traditional Sculpture<\/em>, an important antecedent for Kruger) sought to subvert the usual depiction of women through unidealized and un-sexualized representations of the artist\u2019s own body.\r\n\r\nA different tactic was to refuse representation of women\u2019s bodies altogether.\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/mary-kelly-post-partum-document\/\">Mary Kelly<\/a>\u2019s monumental\u00a0<em>Post-Partum Document<\/em>\u00a0(1975), while an extensive portrayal of female subjectivity in relation to the mother-child relationship in psychoanalytic terms, makes no visual reference to herself or her body. Yet another approach was to develop a separate aesthetic predicated entirely upon women\u2019s experiences:\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/mcachicago.org\/Publications\/Websites\/West-By-Midwest\/Research\/Topics\/Womanhouse\"><em>Womanhouse<\/em><\/a>\u00a0was created by Miriam Schapiro and\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/judy-chicago-the-dinner-party\/\">Judy Chicago<\/a>\u00a0in the early 1970s as a space to showcase feminist performances about rape or installations about menstruation. Finally, there is the use of craft traditions typically associated with the domestic labor of women. Elevating \u201ccraft\u201d to a fine art became a symbol of the elevation of women themselves as they strove for inclusion and representation. Kruger\u2019s first artworks, in fact, were wall hangings that reframed craft in feminist terms. Despite the variances in approaches, at issue in feminist art practice was the place of imagery of women and artwork by women within patriarchy and in dialogue with political issues around gender and sexuality.\r\n\r\nKruger\u2019s work differs from her predecessors whose work I have just briefly outlined. She came of age as an artist at a time when many were taking existing imagery and then re-staging it in slightly altered form. The term for this was \u201cappropriation,\u201d and it defined the strategy of a new generation of artists who wanted to refute modernism through invalidating ideas of originality, uniqueness, and even authorship. They became known, as did Kruger, as postmodern artists. Interestingly, many of these artists were women. Already critical of modernism because of its male-centered ideology, they filled the ranks of postmodernism to such extent that the critic Craig Owens described this congruence as a \u201ccrossing of the feminist critique of patriarchy and the postmodernist critique of representation.\u201d [footnote]Craig Owens, \u201cThe Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism,\u201d\u00a0<em>The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture<\/em>, edited by Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press 1983), p. 78.[\/footnote]\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/the-pictures-generation-2\/\">Sherrie Levine<\/a>\u00a0re-photographed a suite of images by the photographer Walker Evans in order to void his authorship.\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/cindy-sherman-untitled-film-still-21\/\">Cindy Sherman<\/a>\u00a0appropriated the cinematic tropes of Hollywood whose stock and trade was the vulnerable female in trouble and re-staged them using herself as model. While feminist art (and postmodern art) was largely a white movement, later artists such as Lorna Simpson,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/carrie-mae-weems-untitled-woman-feeding-bird-from-the-kitchen-table-series\/\">Carrie Mae Weems<\/a>\u00a0or\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/kara-walker-darkytown-rebellion\/\">Kara Walker<\/a>\u00a0would expand upon these earlier artistic strategies to address the intersection of race and gender.\r\n\r\nThe art of the \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/the-pictures-generation-2\/\">Pictures Generation<\/a>\u201d as these postmodern artists came to be called, was glossier, slicker, and more enamored of media culture than what had come before, to such an extent that the cultural critic Fredric Jameson worried that art and advertising had become one. Of course the aim was to critically analyze such imagery; Kruger redeployed its seductive techniques, usually pressed into the service of enticing consumers (and historically much of it was aimed at women consumers), to expose the subtle and pervasive ways in which stereotypes of gender roles were reinforced through advertising and cinema (later works by Kruger would target consumerism directly).\r\n\r\nDeconstructing the supposed naturalism or ordinariness of these cultural fictions of femininity took on, within the larger political context of the feminist movement, an often\u00a0agitprop\u00a0or activist gloss.\u00a0<em>\u201cYour body is a battleground\u201d<\/em>\u00a0was produced for a 1989 women\u2019s march on Washington. Confining her imagery to black and white with the eventual addition of red was clearly a nod to the\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/stepanova-the-results-of-the-first-five-year-plan\/\">photomontages<\/a>\u00a0of Russian avant-garde artists in the early twentieth century. In the first years after the Russian Revolution, artists sought to harness the power of technology using photography and film to reach mass audiences and unmask false ideologies.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"1542\"]<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/48572145657_e4dde0a5f6_o.jpg\"><img src=\"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/arthc1200\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/72\/2026\/06\/48572145657_e4dde0a5f6_o.jpg\" alt=\"Photograph of a large mural on a building wall featuring bold white text on a red background with &quot;MOCA&quot; and &quot;Geffen Contemporary&quot; in black and white on the left side. The mural poses a series of provocative questions about law, freedom, loyalty, and mortality.\" width=\"1542\" height=\"600\" \/><\/a> Barbara Kruger, <em>Untitled (Questions)<\/em>, 1990\/2018 (<a href=\"https:\/\/www.moca.org\/exhibition\/barbara-kruger-untitled-questions-2\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Geffen Contemporary;<\/a>\u00a0photo:\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/rocor\/48572145657\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">rocor<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc\/2.0\/deed.en\">CC BY-NC 2.0<\/a>)[\/caption]\r\n\r\nMuch like the factory murals and posters of Russian avant-garde art, Kruger sought a broader audience outside the gallery. Her work would appear on billboards, train station platforms, bus stops, public parks, and even matchbook covers. In the early 2000s the street clothing brand Supreme acknowledged that Barbara Kruger was an inspiration for their logo, a white Futura font within a red box. Despite its critical stance toward the advertising industry, Kruger\u2019s unique graphic style couldn\u2019t help but ultimately become influential in packaging and product design. Had Jameson been right about the collapse of art and advertising? Did the promotional and publicity structures of a consumer society eventually absorb postmodernism and thereby render its critique neutral?\r\n<h2 id=\"contemporary-art\">Contemporary art<\/h2>\r\n<h3 id=\"getting-contemporary-art\">\u201cGetting\u201d Contemporary Art<\/h3>\r\nIt\u2019s ironic that many people say they don\u2019t \u201cget\u201d contemporary art because, unlike\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/private-tombs-and-items-afterlife\/\">Egyptian tomb<\/a>\u00a0painting or\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/greek_intro\/\">Greek sculpture<\/a>, art made since 1960 reflects our own recent past. It speaks to the dramatic social, political, and technological changes of the last 50 years, and it questions many of society\u2019s values and assumptions\u2014a tendency of\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/postmodernism\/\">postmodernism<\/a>, a concept sometimes used to describe contemporary art. What makes today\u2019s art especially challenging is that, like the world around us, it has become more diverse and cannot be easily defined through a list of visual characteristics, artistic themes, or cultural concerns.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"1429\"]<img src=\"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/arthc1200\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/72\/2026\/06\/image506.jpeg\" alt=\"Photograph of a gallery wall displaying 32 framed Campbell's soup can prints arranged in four rows and eight columns, showcasing various soup flavors with red and white labels. A child in a red shirt and blue jeans walks in front, highlighting scale and interaction with iconic pop art pieces.\" width=\"1429\" height=\"1211\" \/> Girl looking at: Andy Warhol, <em>Campbell\u2019s Soup Cans<\/em>, 1962, synthetic polymer on 32 canvases each 20 x 16 inches (The Museum of Modern Art; photo: <a href=\"https:\/\/flic.kr\/p\/6HJjad\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Steven Zucker<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-sa\/2.0\/deed.en\">CC BY-NC-SA 2.0<\/a>)[\/caption]\r\n\r\n<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/an-introduction-to-minimalism\/\">Minimalism<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/pop-art\/\">Pop Art<\/a>, two major art movements of the early 1960s, offer clues to the different directions of art in the late 20th and 21st century. Both rejected established expectations about art\u2019s aesthetic qualities and need for originality. Minimalist objects are spare geometric forms, often made from industrial processes and materials, which lack surface details, expressive markings, and any discernible meaning. Pop Art took its subject matter from low-brow sources like comic books and advertising. Like Minimalism, its use of commercial techniques eliminated emotional content implied by the artist\u2019s individual approach, something that had been important to the previous generation of modern painters. The result was that both movements effectively blurred the line distinguishing fine art from more ordinary aspects of life, and forced us to reconsider art\u2019s place and purpose in the world.\r\n<h3 id=\"shifting-strategies\">Shifting Strategies<\/h3>\r\nMinimalism and Pop Art paved the way for later artists to explore questions about the\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/conceptual-art-introduction\/\">conceptual nature of art<\/a>, its form, its production, and its ability to communicate in different ways. In the late 1960s and 1970s, these ideas led to a \u201cdematerialization of art,\u201d when artists turned away from painting and sculpture to experiment with new formats, including photography, film and video,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/performance-art-an-introduction\/\">performance art<\/a>, large-scale installations, and\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/the-case-for-land-art\/\">earth works<\/a>. Although some critics of the time foretold \u201cthe death of painting,\u201d art today encompasses a broad range of traditional and experimental media, including works that rely on Internet technology and other scientific innovations.\r\n\r\nContemporary artists continue to use a varied vocabulary of abstract and representational forms to convey their ideas. It is important to remember that the art of our time did not develop in a vacuum; rather, it reflects the social and political concerns of its cultural context. For example, artists like\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/judy-chicago-the-dinner-party\/\">Judy Chicago<\/a>, who were inspired by the feminist movement of the early 1970s, embraced imagery and art forms that had historical connections to women.\r\n\r\nIn the 1980s, artists appropriated the style and methods of mass media advertising to investigate issues of cultural authority and\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/identity-politics-from-the-margins-to-the-mainstream\/\">identity politics<\/a>. More recently, artists like Maya Lin, who designed the\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/maya-lin-vietnam-veterans-memorial\/\">Vietnam Veterans\u2019 Memorial Wall<\/a>\u00a0in Washington, D.C., and\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/richard-serra-band\/\">Richard Serra<\/a>, who was loosely associated with Minimalism in the 1960s, have adapted characteristics of Minimalist art to create new abstract sculptures that encourage more personal interaction and emotional response among viewers.\r\n\r\nThese shifting strategies to engage the viewer show how contemporary art\u2019s significance exists beyond the object itself. Its meaning develops from cultural discourse, interpretation, and a range of individual understandings, in addition to the formal and conceptual problems that first motivated the artist. In this way, the art of our times may serve as a catalyst for an on-going process of open discussion and intellectual inquiry about the world today.\r\n<h2 id=\"ai-weiwei-kui-hua-zi-sunflower-seeds\">Ai Weiwei, <a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/ai-weiwei-kui-hua-zi-sunflower-seeds\/\"><em>Kui Hua Zi (Sunflower Seeds)<\/em><\/a><\/h2>\r\n<h3 id=\"subversive-seeds\">Subversive seeds<\/h3>\r\nAi Weiwei\u00a0often uses his art to critique political and economic injustice. This can be seen in work such as his 2010 installation,\u00a0<em>Kui Hua Zi (Sunflower Seeds)<\/em>\u00a0at Tate Modern, London.\r\n\r\n<em>Kui Hua Zi (Sunflower Seeds)<\/em>\u00a0consists of more than 100 million tiny, handmade porcelain sunflower seeds, originally weighing in at 150 tons. They filled the enormous Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, an industrial building-turned-contemporary art space. Sunflower seeds evokes a warm personal memory for the artist, who recalls that while he was growing up, even the poorest in China would share sunflower seeds as a treat among friends. The use of sunflower seeds as the basis of his installation was also designed to subvert popular imagery rooted in the artist\u2019s childhood. Communist propaganda optimistically depicted leader\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/art-mao-era-cultural-revolution-introduction\/\">Mao Zedong<\/a>\u00a0as the sun and the citizens of the People\u2019s Republic of China as sunflowers, turning toward their chairman. Ai Weiwei reasserts the sunflower seed as a symbol of camaraderie during difficult times.\r\n\r\nThough each of the 100 million carefully crafted individual seeds can draw the viewer\u2019s attention, once arranged together in a neat rectangle, or covering the floor of an entire room, the hyper-realistic seeds create a sense of vastness. In the Tate installation, there was a sense of precision in the arrangement of the seeds, creating visual order and uniformity. The individual seed is lost among the millions, a critique of the conformity and censorship in modern China.\r\n<h3 id=\"made-in-china\">Made in China<\/h3>\r\nMore than 1,600 artisans worked to make the individual porcelain seeds by hand in Jingdezhen, the city known as the \u201cPorcelain Capital,\u201d where artists have been producing pottery for nearly 2,000 years.\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/chinese-porcelain-production-and-export\/\">Porcelain<\/a>, first produced during the\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/han-dynasty-intro\/\">Han dynasty<\/a>\u00a0in about 200 B.C.E. and later mastered during the\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/tang-dynasty-intro\/\">Tang dynasty<\/a>, is made by heating white clay (kaolin) to a temperature over 1200 degrees Celsius. The fusion of the particles within the clay during firing allowed artists to create vessels with thin but strong walls. Porcelain\u2014 a symbol of imperial culture in China\u2014was also made for export via the\u00a0Silk Road\u00a0and became important to the creation of the idea of China in the\u00a0West.\r\n\r\nAi Weiwei\u2019s use of porcelain comments on the long history of this prized material while also rejecting the negative connotations that the term \u201cMade in China\u201d has to some audiences.\u00a0Utilizing skilled artisans known for their exquisite craftsmanship to make objects that can only be differentiated one from another upon close inspection alludes to the important porcelain tradition in Jingdezhen, as well as to the uniformity and diffusion of\u00a0modern\u00a0(cheap and fast) labor that is responsible for China\u2019s hard-won place in the world economy.\u00a0<em>Sunflower Seeds<\/em>\u00a0asks us to examine how our consumption of foreign-made goods affects the lives of others across the globe.\r\n\r\nHow we experience an artwork impacts our perception of the work. In the tradition of\u00a0participatory contemporary art,\u00a0<em>Sunflower Seeds<\/em>\u00a0asks the public to physically interact with the art. Initially, Tate visitors were invited to walk over and lie on the seeds, though the museum, in consultation with the artist, suspended this opportunity about a week into the exhibition because of safety concerns.\r\n<h3 id=\"art-and-activism\">Art and activism<\/h3>\r\nAi Weiwei was arrested at the Beijing Capital International Airport on April 3, 2011 during his Tate exhibition. [footnote]Andrew Jacobs, \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2011\/04\/04\/world\/asia\/04china.html\">China Takes Dissident Artist Into Custody<\/a>,\u201d\u00a0<em>The New York Times<\/em>, April 3, 2011.[\/footnote] He was detained for 81 days. The artist, along with many in the international community, asserted that his true offense was his political activism for democracy and human rights. Ai Weiwei had blogged for four years\u2014investigating cover-ups and corruption in the government\u2019s handling of a devastating 2008 earthquake in Sichuan and the country\u2019s hosting of the Olympics. Ai Weiwei\u2019s blog was shut down in 2009. Since then, he has turned to Twitter and Instagram. During his detention, the international community, including major U.S. art institutions, rallied for his release. Officials eventually released him, charging Ai Weiwei with tax evasion, but his passport was withheld, preventing him from leaving the country for four years. It was returned in 2015.\r\n\r\nAi Weiwei\u2019s continues to address issues of human rights in his work. The 2015 exhibit\u00a0<em>@Large<\/em>, installed on Alcatraz, the former island prison in the San Francisco Bay, comments on surveillance, freedom, and political prisoners by mixing fine and traditional arts with pop culture materials including silk dragon kites and LEGO \u00ae portraits.\r\n<h2 id=\"yayoi-kusama-infinity-mirrored-roommy-heart-is-dancing-into-the-universe\">Yayoi Kusama,\u00a0<em>Infinity Mirrored Room\u2014My Heart is Dancing into the Universe<\/em><\/h2>\r\nA Japanese painter, sculptor, poet, printmaker, and installation and performance artist, Yayoi Kusama is best known for her infinity room installations. Kusama\u2019s installation of mirrors, orbs, and colorful lights simulates the feeling of ineffable vastness and infinity.\r\n\r\nhttps:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=0ofVlijFrx4\r\n<h2 id=\"conclusion-15\">Conclusion<\/h2>\r\nContemporary art is a dynamic and constantly changing topic. Built upon the history of artistic creation from across the globe, contemporary artists draw inspiration from the history of art and the world around them. Unlike previous generations of artists bound by the traditional rules of academics, contemporary artists have few limits and boundaries to their artistic creativity. In the digital age of the 21<sup>st<\/sup> century, we now can learn about art from the comfort of our homes. Museums and galleries offer virtual tours and websites provide an abundance of information about artists, artworks, and stylistic movements. However, art is meant to be experienced. In person, we can better understand the formal elements of an artwork: scale, texture, color, etc. In person, we can also enter a dialogue with the artist by experiencing their work. As the 20<sup>th<\/sup> century Abstract-Expressionist Mark Rothko said, \u201cA painting is not a picture of an experience; it is the experience.\u201d\r\n<h3 id=\"citation-and-licensing-15\">Citation and Licensing<\/h3>\r\nThe following sections were written by Chelsea Wright and licensed <a href=\"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-sa\/4.0\/\">CC BY-NC-SA 4.0<\/a>:\r\n<ul>\r\n \t<li>Chapter Overview and Introduction<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Focus artwork and term list compiled by Chelsea Wright<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Conclusion<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\nThe following articles from <em>Smarthistory<\/em> licensed <a href=\"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-sa\/4.0\/\">CC BY-NC-SA 4.0<\/a> were remixed and adapted for the chapter:\r\n<ul>\r\n \t<li>Dr. Thomas Folland and Dr. Leta Y. Ming, \"<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/conceptual-art-introduction\/\">Conceptual art, an introduction<\/a>,\" in\u00a0<em>Smarthistory<\/em>, January 10, 2018.<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Dr. Virginia B. Spivey, \"<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/performance-art-an-introduction\/\">Performance art, an introduction<\/a>,\" in\u00a0<em>Smarthistory<\/em>, August 9, 2015.<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Smarthistory, \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/artist\/robert-smithson\/\">Robert Smithson<\/a>,\u201d in\u00a0<em>Smarthistory.<\/em><\/li>\r\n \t<li>Smarthistory, \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/artwork-type\/earthwork\/\">Earthwork<\/a>,\u201d in\u00a0<em>Smarthistory.<\/em><\/li>\r\n \t<li>Rebecca Taylor, \"<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/robert-smithson-spiral-jetty\/\">Robert Smithson,\u00a0<em>Spiral Jetty<\/em><\/a>,\" in\u00a0<em>Smarthistory<\/em>, September 18, 2016.<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Dr. Kelly Enright, \"<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/1980-now-in-the-united-states-an-introduction\/\">1980\u2013now in the United States, an introduction<\/a>,\" in\u00a0<em>Smarthistory<\/em>, June 25, 2024.<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Smarthistory, \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/artist\/maya-lin\/\">Maya Lin<\/a>,\u201d in\u00a0<em>Smarthistory.<\/em><\/li>\r\n \t<li>Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker, \"<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/maya-lin-vietnam-veterans-memorial\/\">Maya Lin, Vietnam Veterans Memorial<\/a>,\" in\u00a0<em>Smarthistory<\/em>, December 11, 2015.<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Dr. Jordana Moore Saggese, \"<a href=\"\/smarthistory.org\/the-pictures-generation-2\/\">The Pictures Generation<\/a>,\" in\u00a0<em>Smarthistory<\/em>, September 7, 2018.<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Dr. Matthew A. Postal, \"<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/venturi-house-in-new-castle-county-delaware\/\">Robert Venturi, House in New Castle County, Delaware<\/a>,\" in\u00a0<em>Smarthistory<\/em>, August 9, 2015.<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Dr. Jordana Moore Saggese, \"<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/identity-politics-from-the-margins-to-the-mainstream\/\">Identity politics: from the margins to the mainstream<\/a>,\" in\u00a0<em>Smarthistory<\/em>, August 9, 2021.<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Dr. Jordana Moore Saggese, \"<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/jean-michel-basquiat-horn-players\/\">Jean-Michel Basquiat,\u00a0<em>Horn Players<\/em><\/a>,\" in\u00a0<em>Smarthistory<\/em>, November 28, 2015.<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Dr. Thomas Folland, \"<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/barbara-kruger-untitled-your-gaze-hits-side-face\/\">Barbara Kruger,\u00a0<em>Untitled (Your gaze hits the side of my face)<\/em><\/a>,\" in\u00a0<em>Smarthistory<\/em>, June 27, 2020.<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Dr. Virginia B. Spivey, \"<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/contemporary-art-an-introduction\/\">Contemporary art, an introduction<\/a>,\" in\u00a0<em>Smarthistory<\/em>, August 9, 2015.<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Megan Lorraine Debin, \"<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/ai-weiwei-kui-hua-zi-sunflower-seeds\/\">Ai Weiwei,\u00a0<em>Kui Hua Zi (Sunflower Seeds)<\/em>,<\/a>\" in\u00a0<em>Smarthistory<\/em>, August 9, 2015.<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Smarthistory, \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/artist\/yayoi-kusama\/\">Yayoi Kusama<\/a>,\u201d in\u00a0<em>Smarthistory.<\/em><\/li>\r\n \t<li>Elise Raborg, Curatorial Associate, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and Dr. Beth Harris, \"<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/yayoi-kusama-infinity-mirrored-room-heart-dancing-universe\/\">Yayoi Kusama,\u00a0<em>Infinity Mirrored Room\u2014My Heart is Dancing into the Universe<\/em>,<\/a>\" in\u00a0<em>Smarthistory<\/em>, February 7, 2025.<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>","rendered":"<h2 id=\"chapter-overview-and-introduction-15\">Chapter Overview and Introduction<\/h2>\n<p>Various new art forms emerged in the later 20<sup>th<\/sup> century: conceptual art, performance art, environmental art, feminist art, postmodernism, etc. Many of these \u201cnew\u201d art forms have their origins in the Modern art movements of the early 20<sup>th<\/sup> century. For example, conceptual and performance art looked to ideas first begun by Dada artists, like Marcel Duchamp. In the 20<sup>th<\/sup> century, the United States remained an epicenter for artistic creation for avant-garde artists with metropolitan centers like Los Angeles expanding the discussion beyond New York. However, the global aspects of 20<sup>th<\/sup> and 21<sup>st<\/sup> century life resulted in an international contemporary art scene. Unlike previous generations where artists and patrons looked toward a specific geographic hub for artistic creativity and patronage, contemporary art flourishes across the globe. Contemporary art often refers to art produced from the 1970s through today in the 21<sup>st<\/sup> century. Although the chapter introduces the new types of art produced in the late 20<sup>th<\/sup> century and into the 21<sup>st<\/sup> century, the best way to learn about contemporary art is to explore your own community.<\/p>\n<h3 id=\"focus-artworks-15\">Focus Artworks<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li>Robert Smithson,\u00a0<em>Spiral Jetty<\/em>, 1970, Rozel Point, Great Salt Lake, Utah, 1500 (if unwound) x 15-foot spiral, basalt, sand, and soil<\/li>\n<li>Maya Lin,\u00a0<em>Vietnam Veterans Memorial,<\/em>\u00a01982, granite, 2 acres within Constitution Gardens, Washington D.C.<\/li>\n<li>Robert Venturi, John Rauch, and Denise Scott Brown, House in New Castle County, Delaware, 1978\u201383<\/li>\n<li>Jean-Michel Basquiat,\u00a0<em>Horn Players<\/em>, 1983, acrylic and oil stick on three canvas panels mounted on wood supports<\/li>\n<li>Barbara Kruger,\u00a0<em>Untitled (Your gaze hits the side of my face)<\/em>, 1981<\/li>\n<li>Ai Weiwei,\u00a0<em>Kui Hua Zi (Sunflower Seeds)<\/em>, 2010, one hundred million hand painted porcelain seeds<\/li>\n<li>Yayoi Kusama,\u00a0<em>Infinity Mirrored Room\u2014My Heart is Dancing into the Universe<\/em>, 2018, wood and glass mirror room with paper lanterns<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3 id=\"term-list-15\">Term List<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li>Conceptual art<\/li>\n<li>Performance art<\/li>\n<li>Happenings<\/li>\n<li>Feminist art<\/li>\n<li>Earthworks<\/li>\n<li>Land art<\/li>\n<li>Multiculturism<\/li>\n<li>Postmodernism<\/li>\n<li>Identity politics<\/li>\n<li>Contemporary art<\/li>\n<li>Installation art<\/li>\n<li>Participatory art<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2 id=\"conceptual-art-an-introduction\">Conceptual art, an introduction<\/h2>\n<p>In 1972 the De Saisset Art Museum at Santa Clara University in the San Francisco Bay Area gave the artist Tom Marioni several hundred dollars to help cover expenses for mounting an exhibition of his work at the institution. Instead of using the money to purchase art materials, Marioni bought an older model used car, a Fiat 750, which he carefully maneuvered into the museum for the opening of his show. The vehicle, parked on top of an oriental rug, formed the centerpiece for this exhibition, titled\u00a0My First Car. Was this really art, or was it a scam to get the museum to pay for a car the artist wanted? After learning about the show, the University President concluded that it was more of the latter and ordered the show closed. Presumably he was put off by how\u00a0My First Car\u00a0profited Marioni without involving any technical skill or hard work on the part of the artist.<\/p>\n<figure style=\"width: 1068px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/arthc1200\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/72\/2026\/06\/image479.png\" alt=\"Black and white photograph of a vintage compact car displayed inside a minimalist room with plain walls and ceiling lights. The car is positioned sideways, showing its rounded shape and small size, with a slightly grainy texture suggesting an older or retro style.\" width=\"1068\" height=\"886\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Tom Marioni, <em>My First Car<\/em>, 1972, De Saisset Gallery, Santa Clara, California (photo from <a href=\"https:\/\/books.google.com\/books?id=lu7KPDCfcXMC&amp;lpg=PA83&amp;ots=Ma92nlZlTL&amp;dq=saisset%20gallery%20marioni&amp;pg=PA83#v=onepage&amp;q=saisset%20gallery%20marioni&amp;f=false\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Performance Anthology: Source Book of California Performance Art<\/em><\/a>, eds. Carl E. Loeffler and Darlene Tong)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<h3 id=\"not-just-a-prank\">Not just a prank<\/h3>\n<p>Marioni\u2019s work was in many ways typical of the late 1960s and early 1970s art practices that came to be known as Conceptual art. As the term suggests, Conceptual art placed emphasis upon the concept or idea, and deemphasized the actual physical manifestation of the work. Thus an artist did not need manual skill to produce his work, and in fact could get away with not making anything at all. Rather than being a mere prank (as many dismissed it at the time), Marioni\u2019s work was a proposal for a new kind of art that deliberately disavowed art\u2019s traditional role as a showcase for the creative genius and technical abilities of the artist.<\/p>\n<p>Marioni\u2019s appropriation of a car is only one example of a number of very diverse art practices that are grouped under the term Conceptual art. Refusing to work in any one medium, and especially hostile to the painting and sculptural traditions in Western art, Conceptual artists would broaden their approach to art-making to include just about any material: text, photography, found objects, and even the physical space of the gallery, as long as there was a conceptual dimension that emphasized a set of principles or process involved in producing a given artwork, rather than a finished product.<\/p>\n<p>Take the artist <a href=\"https:\/\/www.moma.org\/collection\/works\/79441\">Mel Bochner\u2019s\u00a0<em>Measurement Room<\/em><\/a>, for example, a work that consisted of labeling gallery walls with numbers to indicate each wall\u2019s dimensions. In the place of attractive objects and captivating imagery, Bochner presented emotionless, mechanical text overlaid onto a pre-existing space. Art\u2019s new role, as proposed by Conceptual artists, was to convey information in the most straightforward, objective manner as possible and to engage the viewer within their immediate environment (instead of presenting a transcendent and imaginary world that\u00a0accentuated the pleasures of looking).<\/p>\n<h3 id=\"minimalism-as-precursor\">Minimalism as precursor<\/h3>\n<p>Conceptual art constituted a dramatic departure from traditional art-making, but it did not come out of nowhere. Minimalism, the movement that directly preceded Conceptual art and the style that dominated the 1960s, conceived of art not as something internally complete and detached from the everyday world (a view that had been strongly held by the\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/smarthistory.org\/abstract-expressionism-an-introduction\/\">Abstract Expressionists<\/a>\u00a0throughout the 1950s), but rather as something that related to both its site of display as well as the viewer\u2019s body. A Minimalist work like Carl Andre\u2019s\u00a0<em>144 Aluminum Square<\/em>, for example, offered a spare, industrially-produced, geometric installation that was radical because it made spectators think of the floor on which it was placed and how their bodies related to it (by trampling on it!).<\/p>\n<p>Emerging out of Minimalism, a Conceptual work like Bochner\u2019s\u00a0<em>Measurement Room<\/em>\u00a0also made viewers aware of the proportions of the physical gallery space and encouraged them to compare how they measured up to the room\u2019s dimensions. Minimalism, however, always maintained a reliance on a physical object, which was, in many cases, a highly finished and aestheticized form that lent itself to being traded on the art market and shown on gallery circuit. By contrast, Conceptual works like\u00a0<em>Measurement Room<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0<em>My First Car<\/em>\u00a0not only departed from the conventional media of painting and sculpture, but moreover, their unusual forms prevented them from being easily sold or collected.<\/p>\n<h3 id=\"the-art-market\">The art market<\/h3>\n<p>With the explosive expansion of the contemporary art market in the 1960s that included high auction prices for living artists (previously it was only dead European masters who fetched such prices), one\u00a0of the main concerns of artists in the 1960s was that art had become increasingly\u00a0commodified,\u00a0and yet artists weren\u2019t the ones benefiting from the growing market. At the mercy of dealers, collectors, and museum trustees, artists felt they had little control over their own work and careers. So it is not entirely surprising artists in the late 1960s and early 1970s began to reject technical artistic skill and material objects altogether. To make an object the essence of the artwork was to be in thrall to the concerns of the market and art institutions.<\/p>\n<h3 id=\"a-radical-era\">A radical era<\/h3>\n<p>The 1960s and early 1970s was tumultuous and divisive era defined by the Vietnam War, passionate social liberation movements (including the Black Power, Feminist, Chicano, and Gay Liberation Movements), as well as a massive countercultural youth rebellion. The emergence of such a radical practice as Conceptual art should be understood as part of this oppositional culture that envisioned a radically new world. To the new generation of Conceptual artists, the old rules of art making and the traditional art establishments could feel just as oppressive as the institutions of the state or police felt to the youthful protester on the streets.<\/p>\n<p>The backdrop of immense social upheaval in the 1960s and early 1970s relates to another important aspect of Conceptual art: the sense that it was entangled with larger social and political realities. In a series of collages called<em> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.moma.org\/collection\/works\/150123\">House Beautiful:\u00a0Bringing the War Home<\/a><\/em>, Martha Rosler combined graphic images of the Vietnam War from the popular news journal\u00a0<em>Life<\/em>\u00a0with those of upscale interiors from the home decorating magazine\u00a0<em>House Beautiful<\/em>\u00a0to make direct reference to the Vietnam War.<\/p>\n<p>In one collage, a middle-class housewife vacuums billowing drapes whose window reveals helmeted, rifle-wielding American soldiers in the trenches of war. This jarring juxtaposition not only commented on the war\u2019s insidious effects on the home front, but also signaled a sense that art should engage with and could reshape the social world. Likewise,\u00a0<em>My First Car<\/em>\u00a0employed a similar technique of inserting a temporal, everyday object into a sacred space of high art in order to highlight the connectedness of the art sphere to the social, physical, and economic world. Not afraid to embrace the mundanity of the everyday world, Conceptual artists polluted the museum space with commerce, contemporary images of war, and even leaking motor oil.<\/p>\n<h3 id=\"conceptual-goes-mainstream\">Conceptual goes mainstream<\/h3>\n<p>Conceptual art had its precursors, notably early twentieth-century Dada artists like\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/smarthistory.org\/marcel-duchamp-fountain\/\">Marcel Duchamp<\/a>, whose \u201creadymades\u201d (mass-produced objects like a urinal or bicycle wheel that he designated as artworks) also questioned the tenet that art be solely a demonstration of an artist\u2019s creative and technical abilities. In the 1950s and early 1960s, movements such as\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/smarthistory.org\/nam-june-paik-electronic-superhighway-continental-u-s-alaska-hawaii\/\">Fluxus<\/a>, Happenings, Neo-Dada, and Nouveau R\u00e9alisme also employed techniques we could categorize as Conceptual art from today\u2019s vantage point. Embracing ephemeral and performative practices, and provoking viewers with sometimes aggressive assaults upon \u201cgood taste,\u201d they, too, let go of the notion of art as refined object. In the decades following, Conceptual art strategies were taken up by feminist as well as postmodern artists, and today conceptualism has become a global phenomenon, with artists from around the world deploying video, photography, text, body art, performance, and installation, often interchangeably. Ironically, the strategies of Conceptual art, once a challenge to orthodox, mainstream modern art, have now become so fundamental that they are taken to be a given of contemporary art practice.<\/p>\n<h2 id=\"performance-art-an-introduction\">Performance art, an introduction<\/h2>\n<h3 id=\"when-art-intersects-with-life\">When art intersects with life<\/h3>\n<p>Many people associate performance art with highly publicized controversies over government funding of the arts, censorship, and standards of public decency. Indeed, at its worst, performance art can seem gratuitous, boring, or just plain weird. But, at its best, it taps into our most basic shared instincts: our physical and psychological needs for food, shelter, sex, and human interaction; our individual fears and self-consciousness; our concerns about life, the future, and the world we live in. It often forces us to think about issues in a way that can be disturbing and uncomfortable, but it can also make us laugh by calling attention to the absurdities in life and the idiosyncrasies of human behavior.<\/p>\n<figure style=\"width: 1429px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/arthc1200\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/72\/2026\/06\/image482.jpeg\" alt=\"Photograph of a group of people observing a large wall covered in densely packed handwritten names and dates in black ink, arranged to create a perspective effect that draws the eye toward a vanishing point. The artwork emphasizes human presence and passage of time through the extensive list of names, with the crowd adding scale and engagement to the installation.\" width=\"1429\" height=\"1072\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Roman Ond\u00e1k, <em>Measuring the Universe<\/em>, 2007, shown enacted at MoMA, 2009 (photo: <a href=\"https:\/\/flic.kr\/p\/6HEdPn\">Steven Zucker<\/a>,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-sa\/2.0\/deed.en\">CC BY-NC-SA 2.0<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Performance art differs from traditional theater in its rejection of a clear narrative, use of random or chance-based structures, and direct appeal to the audience. The art historian RoseLee Goldberg writes:<\/p>\n<p>\u201cHistorically, performance art has been a medium that challenges and violates borders between disciplines and genders, between private and public, and between everyday life and art, and that follows no rules.\u201d<a class=\"footnote\" title=\"RoseLee Goldberg,\u00a0Performance: Live art since the 60s\u00a0(New York: Thames &amp; Hudson, 1998), p. 20.\" id=\"return-footnote-3400-1\" href=\"#footnote-3400-1\" aria-label=\"Footnote 1\"><sup class=\"footnote\">[1]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Although the term encompasses a broad range of artistic practices that involve bodily experience and live action, its radical connotations derive from this challenge to conventional social mores and artistic values of the past.<\/p>\n<h3 id=\"historical-sources\">Historical sources<\/h3>\n<p>While performance art is a relatively new area of art history, it has roots in experimental art of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Echoing utopian ideas of the period\u2019s avant-garde, these earliest examples found influences in theatrical and music performance, art, poetry, burlesque, and other popular entertainment. Modern artists used live events to promote extremist beliefs, often through deliberate provocation and attempts to offend bourgeois tastes or expectations. In Italy, the anarchist group of\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/italian-futurism-an-introduction\/\">Futurist artists<\/a>\u00a0insulted and hurled profanity at their middle-class audiences in hopes of inciting political action.<\/p>\n<p>Following World War II, performance emerged as a useful way for artists to explore philosophical and psychological questions about human existence. For this generation, who had witnessed destruction caused by the Holocaust and atomic bomb, the body offered a powerful medium to communicate shared physical and emotional experience. Whereas painting and sculpture relied on expressive form and content to convey meaning, performance art forced viewers to engage with a real person who could feel cold and hunger, fear and pain, excitement and embarrassment\u2014just like them.<\/p>\n<h3 id=\"action-and-contingency\">Action and contingency<\/h3>\n<p>Some artists, inspired largely by\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/abstract-expressionism-an-introduction\/\">Abstract Expressionism<\/a>, used performance to emphasize the body\u2019s role in artistic production. Working before a live audience,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/shiraga-kazuo-challenging-mud\/\">Kazuo Shiraga<\/a> of the Japanese\u00a0Gutai Group\u00a0made <a href=\"https:\/\/www.tate.org.uk\/art\/artworks\/otsuji-shiraga-kazuo-demonstrating-his-signature-painting-style-2nd-gutai-exhibition-p82280\">sculpture by crawling<\/a> through a pile of mud. Georges Mathieu staged similar performances in Paris where he violently threw paint at his canvas. These performative approaches to making art built on philosophical interpretations of Abstract Expressionism, which held the gestural markings of action painters as visible evidence of the artist\u2019s own existence. Bolstered by\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/06\/PollockKrasner.jpg\">Hans Namuth\u2019s photographs<\/a>\u00a0of Jackson Pollock in his studio, moving dance-like around a canvas on the floor, artists like Shiraga and Mathieu began to see the artist\u2019s creative act as equally important, if not more so, to the artwork produced. In this light, Pollock\u2019s distinctive drips, spills, and splatters appeared as a mere remnant, a visible trace left over from the moment of creation.<\/p>\n<p>Shifting attention from the art object to the artist\u2019s action further suggested that art existed in real space and real time. In New York, visual artists combined their interest in action painting with ideas of the avant-garde composer John Cage to blur the line between art and life. Cage employed chance procedures to create musical compositions such as 4\u201933\u201d. In this (in)famous piece, Cage used the time frame specified in the title to bracket ambient noises that occurred randomly during the performance. By effectively calling attention to the hum of fluorescent lights, people moving in their seats, coughs, whispers, and other ordinary sounds, Cage transformed them into a unique musical composition.<\/p>\n<h3 id=\"the-private-made-political\">The private made political<\/h3>\n<p>Drawing on these influences, new artistic formats emerged in the late 1950s. Environments and\u00a0Happenings\u00a0physically placed viewers in commonplace surroundings, often forcing them to participate in a series of loosely structured actions.\u00a0Fluxus\u00a0artists, poets, and musicians likewise challenged viewers by presenting the most mundane events\u2014brushing teeth, making a salad, exiting the theater\u2014as forms of art. A well-known example is the \u201cbed-in\u201d that Fluxus artist\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/case-for-yoko-ono\/\">Yoko Ono<\/a>\u00a0staged in 1969 in Amsterdam with her husband John Lennon. Typical of much performance art, Ono and Lennon made ordinary human activity a public spectacle, which demanded personal interaction and raised popular awareness of their pacifist beliefs.<\/p>\n<p>In the politicized environment of the 1960s, many artists employed performance to address emerging social concerns. For feminist artists in particular, using their body in live performance proved effective in challenging historical representations of women, made mostly by male artists for male patrons. In keeping with past tradition, artists such as Carolee Schneemann, Hannah Wilke, and Valie Export displayed their nude bodies for the viewer\u2019s gaze; but, they resisted the idealized notion of women as passive objects of beauty and desire. Through their words and actions, they confronted their audiences and raised issues about the relationship of female experience to cultural beliefs and institutions, physical appearance, and bodily functions including menstruation and childbearing. Their ground-breaking work paved the way for male and female artists in the 1980s and 1990s, who similarly used body and performance art to explore issues of gender, race, and sexual identity.<\/p>\n<h3 id=\"where-is-it\">Where is it?<\/h3>\n<p>Throughout the mid-20th century, performance has been closely tied to the search for alternatives to established art forms, which many artists felt had become fetishized as objects of economic and cultural value. Because performance art emphasized the artist\u2019s action and the viewer\u2019s experience in real space and time, it rarely yielded a final object to be sold, collected, or exhibited. Artists of the 1960 and 70s also experimented with other \u201cdematerialized\u201d formats including\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/the-case-for-land-art\/\">Earthworks<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/conceptual-art-introduction\/\">Conceptual<\/a>\u00a0art that resisted commodification and traditional modes of museum display. The simultaneous rise of photography and video, however, offered artists a viable way to document and widely distribute this new work.<\/p>\n<figure style=\"width: 2048px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/05\/Abramovic_ArtistIsPresent.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/arthc1200\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/72\/2026\/06\/Abramovic_ArtistIsPresent.jpg\" alt=\"Photograph showing two women seated on wooden chairs facing each other, engaged in conversation or interview. A photographer with a camera on a tripod and a woman walking in the background are also visible, indicating a staged setting.\" width=\"2048\" height=\"1289\" \/><\/a><figcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Marina Abramovi\u0107, <em>The Artist is Present<\/em>, performed at the Museum of Modern Art, 2010 (photo: <a href=\"https:\/\/flic.kr\/p\/7Nq526\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Alejandro Mallea<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/2.0\/deed.en\">CC BY 2.0<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Performance art\u2019s acceptance into the mainstream over the past 30 years has led to new trends in its practice and understanding. Ironically, the need to position performance within art\u2019s history has led museums and scholars to focus heavily on photographs and videos that were intended only as documents of live events. In this context, such archival materials assume the art status of the original performance. This practice runs counter to the goal of many artists, who first turned to performance as an alternative to object-based forms of art. Alternatively, some artists and institutions now stage re-enactments of earlier performances in order to recapture the experience of a live event. In a 2010 retrospective exhibition at New York\u2019s Museum of Modern Art, for example, performers in the galleries staged live reenactments of works by the pioneering performance artist\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/marina-abramovic-the-artist-is-present\/\">Marina Abramovi\u0107<\/a>, alongside photographs and video documentation of the original performances.<\/p>\n<h3 id=\"dont-try-this-at-home\">Don\u2019t try this at home<\/h3>\n<p>New strategies, variously described as situations,\u00a0relational aesthetics, and interventionist\u00a0art, have recently begun to appear. Interested in the social role of the artist, Rirkrit Tiravanija stages performances that encourage interpersonal exchange and shared conversation among individuals who might not otherwise meet. His performances have included cooking traditional Thai dinners in museums for viewers to share and relocating the entire contents of a gallery\u2019s offices and storage rooms, including the director at his desk, into public areas used to exhibit art. Similar to performance art of the past, such approaches engage the viewer and encourage their active participation in artistic production; however, they also speak to a cultural shift toward interactive modes of communication and social exchange that characterize the 21st century.<\/p>\n<h2 id=\"land-art-robert-smithson-spiral-jetty\">Land Art: Robert Smithson,\u00a0<em>Spiral Jetty<\/em><\/h2>\n<p>An American sculptor, painter, and writer, Robert Smithson was a pioneer of earthworks sculpture, creating gallery works as well as land art. Earthworks are artworks that manipulate natural earth and stone, altering the terrain of the land itself for artistic purposes.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" id=\"oembed-1\" title=\"Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/vrbNsHs7ptE?feature=oembed&#38;rel=0\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<h2 id=\"now-in-the-united-states-an-introduction\">1980\u2013now in the United States, an introduction<\/h2>\n<figure style=\"width: 515px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/arthc1200\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/72\/2026\/06\/image485.jpeg\" alt=\"Photograph of an astronaut standing on a lunar surface next to a flag featuring the MTV logo in yellow and green on a purple background. The scene combines iconic moon landing imagery with MTV branding.\" width=\"515\" height=\"380\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">MTV\u2019s moonman, first broadcast in 1981 (<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/1980-now-in-the-united-states-an-introduction\/\">Smarthistory<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>On August 1, 1981, television viewers tuned in to video footage of a rocket launch and still photographs of an astronaut near a flag emblazoned with the letters MTV. \u201cLadies and gentlemen,\u201d a crackly voice announced, \u201crock and roll.\u201d Using authentic NASA images, Music Television announced its presence in unsubtle terms. This was a new era of home entertainment.<\/p>\n<p>MTV charted new territory by breaking with narrative forms of programming and by targeting a growing youth market. Over the next decades, music videos and the channel that spread them would shape tastes, reflect cultural moments, and provide round-the-clock entertainment for Americans at home as well as expanding markets abroad as one of America\u2019s globalized purveyors of culture.<\/p>\n<p>This period saw revolutionary changes in mass media and information technologies that spread countless ideas, images, and products around the world. The dozens of channels introduced by cable television in the 1980s was eclipsed in the 2000s by seemingly unlimited content available streaming from apps. The internet made content choice and on-demand viewing at the touch of a button a basic expectation.<\/p>\n<p>Americans connected wirelessly 24-hours a day to news, information, entertainment \u2014 and to each other \u2014 through computers, cellphones, tablets, and smart watches that fulfilled an early nineteenth-century call to \u201cconquer space\u201d\u2014to connect the nation by roads and canals.<\/p>\n<p>This\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/nam-june-paik-electronic-superhighway-continental-u-s-alaska-hawaii\/\">spirit of interconnectivity<\/a>\u00a0transformed culture and society, with many Americans embracing diversity and equal opportunity for all. However, growing economic inequality between rich and poor led others to blame advances in civil rights. Multiculturalism was undercut by economic stagnation. Conservatism became an increasingly powerful political movement that, in conflict with progressive forces, polarized the nation into the twenty-first century.<\/p>\n<h3 id=\"multiculturalism\">Multiculturalism<\/h3>\n<p>In the 1980s and 1990s, the U.S. attracted numerous immigrant groups including Koreans, Vietnamese, South Asians, and from Latin America, Dominicans, Cubans, Mexicans, and Central Americans. At the same time, many already in the United States embraced and revived the traditions of their own heritages. While opportunities improved for people of various races, ethnicities, and genders, the fight for equal rights was\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/seeing-america-2\/nari-ward-people\/\">not complete<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The African American middle-class grew with more seeking college education and benefiting from affirmative action programs. Backlash against these programs resonated throughout the 1980s. But the decade also saw the first serious bid of an African American for president when Rev. Jesse Jackson ran with a campaign meant to unite people across racial and ethnic lines.<\/p>\n<p>The first black president, Barack Obama, was elected more than two decades later.\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/seeing-america-2\/saar-topsy-sa\/\">Reacting to stereotypes<\/a>\u00a0that not only influence public opinion, but led to life and death situations, the Black Lives Matter movement spoke out against police violence.<\/p>\n<p>Native Americans opened their own museums, and older museums of natural history, history, and art questioned the moral underpinnings of their collections, many of them stolen and sacred to people of other cultures. In 1990, the\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/mesa-verde-cliff-dwellings-2\/\">Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act<\/a>\u00a0established the right of tribes to ask for the return of museum objects. At the same time, residents of reservations reinvested in\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/seeing-america-2\/resilience-robe\/\">learning, preserving, and reviving<\/a>\u00a0native arts and languages.<\/p>\n<p>But the 1990s also pushed the nation into \u201cculture wars.\u201d Conservatives reacted to the liberal advances of earlier decades, debating issues of race, homosexuality, abortion, gun control, and censorship. These debates played out in the media and politics, characterized by conservative Pat Buchanan as a war for the \u201csoul of America.\u201d At their core, the culture wars revisited long-held American debates about the role of government in controlling and legislating perceived immoral activities within the nation.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/seeing-america-2\/teraoka-american-kabuki\/\">The AIDS pandemic<\/a>, first identified in the U.S. in 1981, quickly became a polarizing political issue. Fear and ignorance stigmatized those with the deadly disease. Gay activists fought for government action, and for education to prevent the spread of the disease, but the Federal response lagged for years because of the association of the disease with the gay community. By the end of the 1980s, federal funding for research brought advances in treatment that began to save lives.<\/p>\n<h3 id=\"environment\">Environment<\/h3>\n<p>Environmental activism grew as the deforestation of rainforests and rapidly expanding industrial and consumer activity continued largely unchecked, and as the scientific community better understood the connection between human activity and global warming. Agricultural chemicals continued to impact land and\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/seeing-america-2\/work-exchange-tech\/teaching-guide-work-exchange-and-technology-thiebaud-%e2%80%8bponds-and-streams\/\">water quality<\/a>, and the naturally-arid western region of the United States struggled to meet the water needs of its\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/seeing-america-2\/couturier-eastlake-greens-sa\/\">growing population<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>In 1989, an oil tanker dumped 11 million gallons of crude oil into Alaska\u2019s Prince William Sound with devastating consequences to area wildlife. The Exxon Valdez spill was at the time the worst environmental disaster Americans had witnessed (since surpassed by the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill) and raised awareness of the harm done by fossil fuels. In 1990, the Oil Pollution Act changed regulations for tankers and increased penalties for accidents.<\/p>\n<p>Under President Reagan (and more recently under President Trump), environmental regulations on businesses were loosened, including the Paris Agreement on climate change in 2016, where President Obama committed the nation, along with 190 others, to reducing reliance on fossil fuels and to make efforts to change behaviors that contribute to global warming. Changing weather patterns, increasing hurricanes and forest fires, as well as regular tidal flooding in coastal cities began pushing Americans to rethink harmful behaviors.<\/p>\n<h3 id=\"america-and-the-world\">America and the world<\/h3>\n<p>By the 1990s, American culture had reached around the globe. American businesses, restaurants, movies, and music extolled American values and lifestyles. With the opening of the U.S.S.R. to western culture and business (a policy Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union called \u201cglasnost\u201d), the barriers of the Cold War began to come down, including, in 1989, the\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/the-berlin-wall\/\">Berlin Wall<\/a>. Globalization brought people around the world closer together through technologies and through shared consumer culture, much of it originating in the U.S.<\/p>\n<p>But many nations resented American cultural imperialism as well as its military power. Tensions in the Middle East, in particular, intensified. When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, President George H.W. Bush moved to deploy U.S. forces to stop dictator Saddam Hussein \u2014 and to protect U.S. oil interests. He then organized U.N. nations to liberate Kuwait. Though the Gulf War was successful, Hussein was not ousted as the leader of Iraq and conflicts in the region multiplied.<\/p>\n<p>On September 11, 2011, hijacked commercial airliners flew into the towers of the World Trade Center in New York. Another hit the Pentagon and a fourth went down in Pennsylvania, missing its intended target. The hijackers were members of the terrorist group, al-Qaeda which had a distinct disdain for the spread of western culture, and which the nations of Afghanistan and Iraq had protected within their borders. The American War on Terror was launched to root out the organization.<\/p>\n<p>The War on Terror brought with it suspicions about loyalties within the United States. In 2001, the USA Patriot Act enabled the government to establish surveillance of all Americans, including cell phone data. Issues regarding digital privacy remain unresolved, as does the regulation of social media platforms. Americans broadly embraced the new technologies of the century\u2019s end, but remain uncertain about their impact on individual lives, on national politics, and on world affairs.<\/p>\n<p>Greater mobility in combination with war, increasing concentrations of wealth, and the impact of climate change have dramatically increased migration around the world. This movement of people, often fleeing desperate circumstances such as civil war in Syria or violence in Central America, has raised the specter of Nationalism around the world and in the United States. Just 30 years after the Berlin wall came down, many American conservatives have backed President Donald Trump\u2019s call for a wall on the southern border of the United States (on land that the United States took from Mexico in the aftermath of the Mexican American War). The United States helped create technologies that have made the world more mobile; now we have to decide if we like the result.<\/p>\n<h2 id=\"maya-lin-vietnam-veterans-memorial\">Maya Lin, Vietnam Veterans Memorial<\/h2>\n<p>An American sculptor and architect, Maya Lin\u2019s mature work has focused on earthworks, sculptures, and other works that explore environmental issues. An early work of Lin\u2019s, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is a powerful accumulation of names inscribed on slabs of reflective stone that cuts into the earth on the National Mall.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" id=\"oembed-2\" title=\"Maya Lin, Vietnam Veterans Memorial\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/wuxjTxxQUTs?feature=oembed&#38;rel=0\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<h2 id=\"postmodernism\">Postmodernism<\/h2>\n<p>Artists directly engaged with appropriation in the 1970s were doing so under the influence of postmodernism. In previous generations, artists were praised for their ability to create new ideas and objects. Originality was the hallmark of modernism, and artists were presumed to be independent creators of objects and their meaning. However, by the late 1960s such ideas were beginning to break down. New theories about the impossibility of originality developed in the field of literary theory began to permeate the art world. A key text of this period was a 1968 essay by French philosopher Roland Barthes entitled \u201cDeath of the Author.\u201d Barthes realigned the focus of literary theory from the creation of language to its enunciation. This meant that the act of interpretation was more important than the act of creation. Artists were suddenly freed from the burden and the expectations of complete originality; what mattered now was how artists could interpret, reconfigure, and reposition already extant works and ideas to create other meanings.<\/p>\n<h2 id=\"postmodern-architecture-robert-venturi-house-in-new-castle-county-delaware\">Postmodern Architecture: <a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/venturi-house-in-new-castle-county-delaware\/\">Robert Venturi, House in New Castle County, Delaware<\/a><\/h2>\n<h3 id=\"that-postmodern-moment\">That postmodern moment<\/h3>\n<p>Robert Venturi\u2019s New Castle County House offers a modest but instructive example of the\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/postmodernism\/\">postmodern<\/a>\u00a0style set in rural north Delaware. An influential teacher and theorist, Venturi studied architecture at Princeton University and attended the American Academy in Rome during the mid-1950s, where he developed a \u201cpartiality\u201d towards post-Renaissance architecture, particularly works built during the\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/europe-1300-1800\/italy-16th-century\/mannerism-introduction\/\">Mannerist<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/a-beginners-guide-to-baroque-art\/\">Baroque<\/a>\u00a0periods in Italy.<\/p>\n<p>In 1966, The Museum of Modern Art in New York published his first book\u00a0<em>Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture<\/em>. Written while he was teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, it contains dozens of small black-and-white photographs of\u00a0Western\u00a0architecture from ancient times to the present day, as well as examples of the architect\u2019s early work.<\/p>\n<figure style=\"width: 2560px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/Venturi-pages-scaled.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/arthc1200\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/72\/2026\/06\/Venturi-pages-scaled-1.jpg\" alt=\"A black and white photograph collage and architectural text page showcasing classical building facades, detailed ceiling designs, and structural plans. The layout includes labeled images of columns, arches, and ornamental ceilings.\" width=\"2560\" height=\"959\" \/><\/a><figcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 2nd edition, T<em>he Museum of Modern Art<\/em>, 1966, pp. 26\u201327<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<h3 id=\"a-gentle-manifesto\">A gentle manifesto<\/h3>\n<p>Venturi used the first chapter, sub-titled \u201cA Gentle Manifesto,\u201d to express his strongly held belief that orthodox\u00a0modern architecture\u00a0and city planning had run its course. Rather\u00a0than continue in the disciplined, austere footsteps of European architects\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/le-corbusier-villa-savoye\/\">Le Corbusier<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/smarthistory.org\/ludwig-mies-van-der-rohe-seagram-building-new-york-city\/\">Mies van der Rohe<\/a>, he highlighted historic structures that exhibit a \u201cmessy vitality over obvious unity\u201d\u2014seen, for example, in his inclusion of a \u201ccontradictory\u201d Byzantine capital from\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/hagia-sophia-istanbul\/\">Hagia Sophia<\/a>\u00a0in Istanbul.<\/p>\n<p><em>Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture<\/em>\u00a0was well-received by contemporary critics, particularly Yale University professor Vincent Scully, who wrote in the introduction that Venturi presented a fresh approach to looking at architecture, preferring complexity and contradiction over abstraction and what Venturi called the \u201cfairy stories\u201d of modernist purity. His follow-up, the\u00a0marvelously-titled\u00a0<em>Learning From Las Vegas<\/em>, co-authored in 1972 with his wife and partner Denise Scott Brown and partner Steven Izenour, highlighted the way buildings are experienced from a distance while traveling along the gaudy Sunset Strip. For Venturi, how buildings look, and are perceived, was far more important than the techniques, systems, and theories used to plan and construct them.<\/p>\n<h3 id=\"vanna-venturi-house\">Vanna Venturi House<\/h3>\n<p>The New Castle County House dates to an important period in Venturi\u2019s career and postmodernism. Though some of his peers designed buildings that respectfully imitate the past, he was no\u00a0mere\u00a0revivalist.<\/p>\n<figure style=\"width: 2560px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/Vanna-Venturi-house-scaled.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/arthc1200\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/72\/2026\/06\/Vanna-Venturi-house-scaled-1.jpg\" alt=\"Photograph of a modern, symmetrical house with a flat roof and two large triangular walls painted gray, surrounded by green grass and trees. The house features a central entrance with a small overhang, multiple rectangular windows, and a prominent chimney-like structure at the top center.\" width=\"2560\" height=\"1500\" \/><\/a><figcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Robert Venturi, Vanna Venturi House, 1959\u201364, Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia (Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress; photo: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.loc.gov\/pictures\/collection\/highsm\/item\/2011631329\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Carol M. Highsmith<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Rather than copy a specific style, he borrowed freely, juxtaposing, collaging, and reinterpreting forms from distinct periods and places. This was particularly true in the Vanna Venturi House. Built in the Philadelphia suburbs, this famous house is located at the end of a driveway and resembles a child\u2019s drawing. Viewed through the lens of\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/classic-classical-and-classicism-explained-2\/\">classicism<\/a>\u00a0and 1960s\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/pop-art\/\">Pop Art<\/a>, his witty design incorporates a large\u00a0gable, recessed porch, and noticeably off-center chimney.<\/p>\n<h3 id=\"american-vernacular\">American vernacular<\/h3>\n<p>The New Castle County House was built for a family of three and sits comfortably in nature. In contrast to Andrea Palladio\u2019s\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/smarthistory.org\/palladio-la-rotonda\/\">Villa Rotonda<\/a>\u00a0or Le Corbusier\u2019s Villa Savoye, it neither crowns a hilltop nor hovers above a well-trimmed lawn. Instead, the house sits surrounded by rolling fields, beside a thickly-wooded forest. Like many traditional farmhouses and barns in the United States, the painted siding is white and the intersecting gables are clad with unstained wood shingles.\u00a0It may look conventional and familiar but on closer inspection the exterior is enlivened by a diverse array of mischievous and sometimes perplexing architectural features.<\/p>\n<figure style=\"width: 2000px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/6310090780_5e48e01fa3_k.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/arthc1200\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/72\/2026\/06\/6310090780_5e48e01fa3_k.jpg\" alt=\"Photograph of a modernist architectural building elevated on white stilts with a flat roof and horizontal windows wrapping around the upper level. Surrounded by green grass and trees, the structure features clean white walls and an open ground floor area.\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1328\" \/><\/a><figcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Le Corbusier, Villa Savoye, 1929, Poissy, France (photo: <a href=\"https:\/\/flic.kr\/p\/aBAS9C\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Renato Saboya<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-sa\/2.0\/deed.en\">CC BY-NC-SA 2.0<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<h3 id=\"form-as-sign\">Form as sign<\/h3>\n<p>Of particular interest is how Venturi treated the \u201cfront\u201d and \u201crear\u201d fa\u00e7ades. In\u00a0<em>Learning from Las Vegas<\/em>, the authors celebrated the concept of the \u201cdecorated shed\u201d\u2014buildings that exploit easily recognizable two-dimensional elements to generate visual interest and meaning. The \u201cfront\u201d fa\u00e7ade of the New Castle County House incorporates a floating arched screen that, like a highway billboard, rises somewhat awkwardly from the lower edge of the gable. Though Venturi claimed this curved feature had Austrian Baroque origins, like a garden gate or\u00a0eyebrow dormers\u00a0found on some Victorian houses, it functions as a sign, identifying the structure as a residence. Furthermore, since the owners enjoyed bird watching it may also have doubled as a blind, camouflaging the large windows behind it.<\/p>\n<p>The \u201crear\u201d fa\u00e7ade is even more curious and complex. While it, too, is dominated by a prominent arched screen, this screen is framed by the edges of the gabled roof. Supported by what appears to be a\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/greek-architectural-orders\/\">Doric colonnade<\/a>, the four stubby columns are, in fact, almost flat.\u00a0Thin as the outer walls, these cut-outs carry little weight and enclose the recessed porch. While the column on the far right grows seamlessly out of the adjoining wall, the left column appears split in half by the addition of an aluminum drain pipe. Classical in derivation yet slightly cartoonish, this somewhat awkward assemblage gives the house a simultaneously grand and whimsical appearance.<\/p>\n<h3 id=\"playfully-challenging\">Playfully challenging<\/h3>\n<p>In photographs dating from the time of the building\u2019s completion the spacious interiors appear simple and comfortable, with wood decorations inspired by various 19th century design traditions.\u00a0The painted arches in the vaulted music room, the quirky chandeliers, and perforated wall patterns exhibit a straight-forward craftsman-like quality, as if cut by hand or jigsaw. Conspicuously two dimensional, their fanciful silhouettes evoke the\u00a0Carpenter Gothic\u00a0and\u00a0Queen Anne\u00a0styles.<\/p>\n<p>Venturi never liked the stylistic term postmodern, but his buildings and critical writings helped propel late 20th-century architecture in a new direction. This private residence remains a playfully challenging work expressing a refreshingly pluralistic view of architecture and design.<\/p>\n<h2 id=\"identity-politics-from-the-margins-to-the-mainstream\">Identity politics: from the margins to the mainstream<\/h2>\n<h3 id=\"whose-art-history\">Whose art history?<\/h3>\n<p>For most of the twentieth century, major American museums rarely exhibited the work of artists from underrepresented groups, preferring instead to privilege the dominant narratives of a white, male, heterosexual art history. The 1984 blockbuster exhibition \u201c\u2018Primitivism\u2019 in 20th Century Art: Affinities of the Tribal and the Modern\u201d at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, for example, juxtaposed the work of recognized masters of modern art with artifacts from nonwestern (mostly African or East Asian) populations. However, the relative positioning of the nonwestern works seemed to many observers to present these objects as inferior to the works of European and American artists.<\/p>\n<p>Critics of the exhibition specifically took issue with MoMA\u2019s emphasis on formal comparisons of western objects by well-known modern and contemporary artists (e.g.,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/constantin-brancusi-the-kiss\/\">Constantin Brancusi<\/a>,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/gauguin-where-do-we-come-from-what-are-we-where-are-we-going\/\">Paul Gauguin<\/a>, and\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/pablo-picasso-les-demoiselles-davignon\/\">Pablo Picasso<\/a>) and nonwestern objects produced by unidentified artists and artisans. The exhibition failed to consider the significant political, ideological, and social contexts of its nonwestern objects\u2014a presentation that some critics argued positioned the works of European and American artists as more \u201cadvanced.\u201d For many artists, critics, and curators positioned outside the so-called mainstream art world it was becoming increasingly clear that nonwhite artists were only included in major museum exhibitions if they reinforced these hierarchies.<\/p>\n<h3 id=\"addressing-a-history-of-exclusion-the-decade-show\">Addressing a history of exclusion: \u201cThe Decade Show\u201d<\/h3>\n<p>In response to this history of exclusion, and to MoMA\u2019s \u201cPrimitivism\u201d show specifically, three cultural institutions in New York City collaborated on an exhibition that would recognize the perspectives of marginal groups and assign them a place in a mainstream. The landmark exhibition \u201cThe Decade Show: Frameworks of Identity in the 1980s,\u201d organized by curators from The New Museum of Contemporary Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and The Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art, opened in May 1990 and featured more than 200 objects by ninety-four artists of diverse heritage. According to the organizers, \u201cThe Decade Show\u201d artists were connected by their willingness to address the phenomenon of exclusion in their work. This exhibition worked from the idea that as the perspectives of the marginalized entered the mainstream, they would likewise receive greater political agency.<\/p>\n<p>James Luna, a Pooyukitchum and Mexican-American artist included in \u201cThe Decade Show,\u201d was one of many artists working in this period to reconstruct a political position via representational visibility. For his performance <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nga.gov\/artworks\/223884-artifact-piece\"><em>Artifact Piece<\/em><\/a>,\u00a0the artist lay inside a display case at the Studio Museum in Harlem with his nude body covered only by a breechcloth. Small white cards with stories describing the origin of several body markings (scars, tan lines, etc.) and written in the third person were scattered alongside the artist\u2019s body. The perceived objectivity of the descriptive cards and Luna\u2019s own prone position in the display case, allows\u00a0<em>Artifact Piece<\/em>\u00a0to directly reference the history of ethnographic displays, which often positioned \u201cother\u201d bodies as objects to be looked at by a mainstream public.<\/p>\n<p>As Luna explained in a 2008 interview: \u201cI had long looked at representation of our peoples in museums and they all dwelled in the past. They were one-sided. We were simply objects among bones, bones among objects, and then signed and sealed with a date.\u201d Luna\u2019s inclusion of his own subjective narrative radically transforms the historically marginalized body of the \u201cother\u201d in the museum from a passive object to a speaking agent.\u00a0<em>Artifact Piece<\/em>\u00a0also played an important part in inverting the power dynamics between the observed and the observer. Here, Luna placed himself on display; his presence in an art museum creates an unsettling effect for the viewer, who is forced to consider their own relationship to this history of display and exploitation.<\/p>\n<h3 id=\"whitney-biennial\">1993 Whitney Biennial<\/h3>\n<p>On the heels of \u201cThe Decade Show,\u201d several other institutions began to reconsider their relationship to artists outside the mainstream. Perhaps the most well known of these exhibitions was the 1993 Biennial exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, which many scholars consider to be the turning point for identity-based art discourse. The main theme of this exhibition, according to David Ross, the Whitney\u2019s director at the time, was \u201cthe construction of identity.\u201d Contemporary artists, Ross claimed, \u201cinsist on reinscribing the personal, political, and social back into the practice and history of art.\u201d Reviews of the exhibition show that the effects of this reinscription were received ambivalently; many critics praised the shows risk-taking, while others questioned the aesthetic merits of the works. Nevertheless, it was impossible to ignore the emergence of an entire generation of artists, including Ren\u00e9e Green, Byron Kim, Glenn Ligon,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/osorio-en-la-barberia-no-se-llora-no-crying-allowed-in-the-barbershop\/\">Pep\u00f3n Osorio<\/a>, and\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/lorna-simpson-everything-i-do-comes-from-the-same-desire\/\">Lorna Simpson<\/a>, who were explicitly working to de-center the institutional focus on whiteness.<\/p>\n<p>Byron Kim\u2019s contribution to the exhibition, a multi-paneled painting titled <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nga.gov\/artworks\/142289-synecdoche\"><em>Synecdoche<\/em><\/a>, 1991-present, captures both the aesthetic and political ambitions of art in this period. On first glance, Kim\u2019s monochromatic palette and his arrangement of small paintings into a grid seem to recall\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/an-introduction-to-minimalism\/\">minimalist<\/a>\u00a0work of the 1960s. However, visitors to the exhibition quickly learned that\u00a0<em>Synecdoche<\/em>\u00a0was much more than an aesthetic exercise. To construct the work, Kim asked members of his community (friends, neighbors, strangers) to let him copy the color of their skin, which the artist then reproduced in oil on a ten-by-eight-inch canvas panel.<\/p>\n<p>Far from an exercise in objectivity or geometry, each small painting is a portrait. The title of Kim\u2019s work refers to a figure of speech, in which a term for a part of something refers to the whole of something, or vice-versa (e.g., saying \u201call hands on deck\u201d to refer to a group of sailors). In\u00a0<em>Synecdoche<\/em>, each individual person pictured is reduced to and represented by skin color alone. But in highlighting the uniqueness and individuality of every skin tone, this painting provokes us to reconsider the ways in which skin color has been used to stereotype or otherwise marginalize individuals. In this way,\u00a0<em>Synecdoche<\/em>\u00a0set a standard for dealing with the complexity of the visual markers of identity.<\/p>\n<h3 id=\"shifting-art-history\">Shifting art history<\/h3>\n<p>As the ideas and perspectives from non-white artists, queer artists, and those with other intersectional identities were given space in the museum throughout the 1990s, the terrain of art history began to shift as well. We are still seeing the effects of this today as more and more artists from the margins enter mainstream institutions and their histories. In the words of author and activist bell hooks, difference means not only exclusion but \u201cthe site of radical possibility, a space of resistance.\u201d<\/p>\n<h2 id=\"jean-michel-basquiat-horn-players\">Jean-Michel Basquiat, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thebroad.org\/art\/jean-michel-basquiat\/horn-players\"><em>Horn Players<\/em><\/a><\/h2>\n<p>Jean-Michel Basquiat\u2019s 1983 painting\u00a0<em>Horn Players<\/em>\u00a0shows us all the main stylistic features we have come to expect from this renowned American artist. In addition to half-length portraits on the left and right panels of this triptych (a painting consisting of three joined panels), the artist has included several drawings and words\u2014many of which Basquiat drew and then crossed out. On each panel we also notice large swaths of white paint, which seem to simultaneously highlight the black background and obscure the drawings and\/or words beneath. Most notable perhaps is the preponderance of repeated words like \u201cDIZZY,\u201d \u201cORNITHOLOGY,\u201d \u201cPREE\u201d and \u201cTEETH\u201d that the artist has scattered across all three panels of this work.<\/p>\n<h3 id=\"charlie-parker-and-dizzy-gillespie\">Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie<\/h3>\n<p>Despite the seeming disorder of the composition, however, it is clear that the main subjects of\u00a0<em>Horn Players<\/em>\u00a0are two famous jazz musicians\u2014the saxophonist Charlie Parker and the trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, who Basquiat has depicted in both linguistic and visual portraits. On the left of the canvas, the artist has drawn the figure of Parker, holding his saxophone which emits several hot pink musical notes and distorted waves of sound. We see Dizzy Gillespie in the right panel, who holds a silent instrument alongside his torso. The words \u201cDOH SHOO DE OBEE\u201d that float to the left of the figure\u2019s head call to mind the scat (wordless improvisational) singing Gillespie often performed onstage.<\/p>\n<p>Many of the words Basquiat has written on the canvas relate specifically to Charlie Parker, but they make sense only for those viewers with some knowledge of the musician\u2019s life. For example, the literal meaning of \u201cORNITHOLOGY\u201d is \u201cthe study of birds,\u201d but this is also the title of a famous composition by Parker, who named the tune (first recorded in 1946) in reference to his own nickname \u201cBird.\u201d The words \u201cPREE\u201d and \u201cCHAN\u201d that we see written above and below the saxophonist\u2019s portrait refer to Parker\u2019s infant daughter and common-law wife, respectively.<\/p>\n<figure style=\"width: 807px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/arthc1200\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/72\/2026\/06\/basquiat-samo.jpg\" alt=\"Photograph of a person standing against a graffiti-covered brick wall, wearing a long coat and looking to the side. Graffiti includes large black and blue letters with some red markings, featuring words and symbols that appear to be political or social statements.\" width=\"807\" height=\"600\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Jean-Michel Basquiat posing next to SAMO graffiti (<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/jean-michel-basquiat-horn-players\/\">Smarthistory<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<h3 id=\"basquiat-and-wordplay\">Basquiat and wordplay<\/h3>\n<p>This kind of wordplay is a characteristic that extends across most of Jean-Michel Basquiat\u2019s work. One of the most recognizable features of the artist\u2019s more than 2000 paintings and drawings is the overwhelming abundance of written words on the canvas. The art historian Robert Farris Thompson once declared: \u201cIt\u2019s as if he were dripping letters.\u201d <a class=\"footnote\" title=\"Robert Farris Thompson and Renee Ricard,\u00a0Jean-Michel Basquiat\u00a0(Gagosian Gallery, 2015).\" id=\"return-footnote-3400-2\" href=\"#footnote-3400-2\" aria-label=\"Footnote 2\"><sup class=\"footnote\">[2]<\/sup><\/a> Before his success as a painter, Basquiat was famous for writing on the walls of lower Manhattan as a teenager when he and a high school friend, Al Diaz, left cryptic messages in spray paint under the name \u201cSAMO\u201d (an acronym for \u201cSame Old Shit\u201d) from 1977 until 1979.<\/p>\n<p>As SAMO, Basquiat and Diaz wrote maxims, jokes, and prophecies in marker and spray paint on subway trains throughout New York City (particularly the \u201cD\u201d train, which ran between downtown Manhattan and Basquiat\u2019s home in Brooklyn), as well as on the walls and sidewalks in the SoHo and Tribeca neighborhoods. Many of the locations where SAMO writings were to be found were in close proximity to prominent art galleries. Combined with these strategic positions, phrases like \u201cSAMO AS AN END TO PLAYING ART\u201d or \u201cSAMO FOR THE SO-CALLED AVANT-GARDE\u201d presented the \u201cSAMO\u201d persona as outside the commercial art world and critical of it. In fact, even after relinquishing the SAMO persona and emerging to the art world as Jean-Michel Basquiat, the artist remained an outsider to the mainstream art world, despite his meteoric rise on the art auction block.<\/p>\n<h3 id=\"the-black-picasso\">\u201cThe Black Picasso\u201d<\/h3>\n<p>Basquiat went from \u201cSAMO\u201d to commercial success at warp speed in the early 1980s. He first exhibited (still under the name SAMO) at the Times Square Show\u2014an exhibition in June 1980 that marked the genesis of the eighties art movement. He was later invited to exhibit in\u00a0New York\/New Wave, a group show of sixteen hundred works by 119 artists that opened at P.S. 1 on Valentine\u2019s Day. The show was affectionately called\u00a0\u201cThe Armory Show\u201d\u00a0of the 1980s.<\/p>\n<p>Almost immediately afterward, the young Basquiat (at this point just 20 years old) was invited to exhibit in his first solo show in Modena, Italy. The gallerist Annina Nosei, who showed more established artists like David Salle and Richard Prince, agreed to represent Basquiat, who had a one-man show at her gallery the next year. That same year, Basquiat had exhibitions in Los Angeles, Zurich, Rome, and Rotterdam and became the youngest artist invited to participate in\u00a0Documenta\u00a07. By 1983 the average sale price of Basquiat\u2019s work had increased by 600 percent, and his popularity (both in the auction house and in popular culture) persists even today. You can buy his images on shirts and hats from popular retail outlets and his large paintings sell at auction for more than $20 million.<\/p>\n<p>Based on his meteoric success, critics referred to Jean-Michel Basquiat as \u201cthe Black Picasso.\u201d The nickname was complicated for Basquiat, who never embraced it, but was nevertheless concerned with his own place within art history. He often relied on textbooks and other sources for his visual material; most biographies of the artist note his reliance on the medical textbook\u00a0<em>Gray\u2019s Anatomy<\/em>\u00a0(a gift from the artist\u2019s mother when Basquiat was hospitalized as a child) for the anatomical drawings and references we see on many of his surfaces. Basquiat also appropriated the work of\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/about-leonardo\/\">Leonardo<\/a>,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/edouard-manet-olympia\/\">\u00c9douard Manet<\/a>, and\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/pablo-picasso-three-women\/\">Pablo Picasso<\/a>\u00a0into his own compositions. These appropriations were in part an homage to the great painters Basquiat admired, but they also were a way for Basquiat to rewrite art history and insert himself into the canon.<\/p>\n<p>Looking again at\u00a0<em>Horn Players<\/em>, for example, reveals several connections to Picasso\u2019s\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/pablo-picasso-three-musicians\/\"><em>Three Musicians<\/em><\/a>. Basquiat\u2019s use of the triptych format\u2014a popular device for the artist in this period\u2014echoes the triple subjects of the Picasso image. The figure of Parker in Basquiat\u2019s composition is also reproduced in the same position as the standing figure (playing the clarinet) in Picasso\u2019s work.<\/p>\n<p>The central panel of Basquiat\u2019s canvas, which does not show a portrait of an identifiable musician like the other two panels, but instead a distorted head with roughly outlined features, suddenly comes into focus via its comparison with\u00a0<em>Three Musicians<\/em>. Here Picasso references in paint, his earlier experiments with paper collage especially in rendering the face and head of his central figure, whose jawline dramatically extends beyond what is anatomically possible to create an abstract, bulbous shape. Basquiat\u2019s central figure bears a similar protrusion\u2014this time from the top of the head\u2014which he fills in with hatch marks that are suggestive of the patterning of Picasso\u2019s \u201ccollaged\u201d paper. Once again, Basquiat seems to be speaking in code. This time, we are being asked not only to draw upon our knowledge of music history but of modern painting to fully understand his work.<\/p>\n<h3 id=\"basquiats-musicians\">Basquiat\u2019s musicians<\/h3>\n<p>Musicians were a popular subject for Basquiat, who himself played briefly in a noise band called Gray\u2014likely a reference to the\u00a0<em>Gray\u2019s Anatomy<\/em>\u00a0textbook. Jazz musicians began to appear in the artist\u2019s paintings around 1982; references to jazz musicians or recordings appear in more than thirty large-format paintings and twenty works on paper. Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie are the two musicians who appear most frequently, both as figures in the paintings and through linguistic references to their work. The artist painted canvases with figures playing the trumpet, the saxophone, and the drums. He also devoted several canvases to replicating the labels of jazz records or the discographies of musicians.<\/p>\n<p>Many scholars have connected Basquiat\u2019s interest in jazz to a larger investment in African American popular culture (for example, he also painted famous African American athletes) but an alternative explanation is that the young Basquiat looked to jazz music for inspiration and for instruction, much in the same way that he looked to the modern masters of painting. Parker, Gillespie, and the other musicians of the bebop era infamously appropriated both the harmonic structures of jazz standards, using them as a structure for their own songs, and repeated similar note patterns across several improvisations. Basquiat used similar techniques of appropriation throughout his career as a painter.<\/p>\n<h2 id=\"barbara-kruger-untitled-your-gaze-hits-the-side-of-my-face\">Barbara Kruger, <a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/barbara-kruger-untitled-your-gaze-hits-side-face\/\">Untitled (Your gaze hits the side of my face)<\/a><\/h2>\n<p>Has an artwork ever been more direct in acknowledging that the simple act of looking is a gendered (and gendering) act? \u201cYour gaze hits the side of my face,\u201d admonishes Barbara Kruger in\u00a0<em>Untitled<\/em>\u00a0(1981). The phrase is made stark and impersonal by arranging the words in a vertical stack, like those of a ransom note, to the left of a photograph of a female portrait bust in profile. Notice how the head is equally depersonalized; a stylized version in the classical tradition whose neck disappears into a block of stone, the suggestion here is that women are rendered inert in the act of being looked at. With an assumed male viewer \u2014 the subject of the possessive phrase \u201cyour gaze\u201d \u2014 the subject of the portrait bust readily conforms to patriarchal fantasies of the passive female object.<\/p>\n<figure style=\"width: 1474px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/arthc1200\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/72\/2026\/06\/image499.jpeg\" alt=\"Book cover titled &quot;Ways of Seeing&quot; by John Berger, featuring a white background with blue and black text. Four framed images below text show a horse labeled &quot;the door,&quot; a clock labeled &quot;the wind,&quot; a pitcher labeled &quot;the bird,&quot; and a suitcase labeled &quot;the valise,&quot; illustrating surrealist painter Magritte's commentary on gaps between words and seeing.\" width=\"1474\" height=\"2286\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">John Berger, cover of <em>Ways of Seeing<\/em>, 1972 (<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/barbara-kruger-untitled-your-gaze-hits-side-face\/\">Smarthistory<\/a>))<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>In 1981 the concept of the male gaze spelled out a crucial\u00a0problematic\u00a0of feminist theory. Could women truly be liberated from the objectification implied in this act of being looked at? John Berger in his 1972 book\u00a0<em>Ways of Seeing<\/em>\u00a0described the history of Western oil painting as a catalogue of submissive nude women arranged for the pleasure of male viewers. Kruger confronts this tradition head on. The phrase \u201cmale gaze\u201d referenced in Kruger\u2019s title is taken from Laura Mulvey, who coined the phrase in her 1975 essay \u201cVisual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,\u201d a landmark text of feminist theory. <a class=\"footnote\" title=\"Laura Mulvey, \u201cVisual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,\u201d\u00a0Screen, volume 16, issue 3, (Autumn 1975), pp. 6\u201318.\" id=\"return-footnote-3400-3\" href=\"#footnote-3400-3\" aria-label=\"Footnote 3\"><sup class=\"footnote\">[3]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Kruger\u2019s art is characterized by a visual wit sharpened in the trenches of the advertising world where the savvy combination of graphic imagery and pithy phrasing targeted a growing population of consumers in the post-World War II years. The portrait bust she uses for<em>\u00a0Untitled (Your gaze hits the side of my face)<\/em>\u00a0is a found picture, one of any number the artist would have encountered in her early career in graphic design. This included a stint at\u00a0<em>Mademoiselle<\/em>\u00a0magazine, whose glossy pages were a virtual catalogue of stereotypical images of femininity. In the late 1970s, Kruger began to choose for her photomontages images of women that were often heightened examples of such stereotypes to which her addition of text would, often humorously, expose and thereby deconstruct the supposed realism of such imagery.<\/p>\n<p>A <a href=\"https:\/\/www.davidzwirner.com\/artworks\/barbara-kruger-untitled-we-have-received-orders-not-to-move--d8b14\">1982 work<\/a>, for example, shows a silhouette of a woman\u2019s body partially outlined by dressmaker\u2019s pins and leaning forward in a chair marked with the words \u201cWe have received orders not to move.\u201d The text here is laid across the body\u2019s midsection, adding another layer of the idea of being pinned in place. The sense that women were trapped or immobilized in the act of being seen runs throughout her body of work from this period and underlines how common this kind of depiction of women was in advertising, particularly during the mid-twentieth century, the period from which many of Kruger\u2019s images were culled.<\/p>\n<p>Kruger offers some resistance to the objectifying gaze of the titular male viewer. Only hitting the side in\u00a0<em>Untitled (Your gaze hits the side of my face)<\/em>, one imagines it bouncing off as if merely ricocheting. But it nevertheless makes strategically visible the tacit assumption of Western visual traditions: women are looked at; men do the looking. In feminist terms, this means that women are negatively defined as lacking subjectivity or agency. Kruger staged an intervention, one could say, and it is in this way that her work is considered part of the feminist art canon.<\/p>\n<p>During the second wave of feminism in the 1970s, women artists sought, in different ways, to confront the problem of women\u2019s representation in art. Sylvia Sleigh\u2019s painting <em><a href=\"https:\/\/smartcollection.uchicago.edu\/objects\/9221\/the-turkish-bath\">The Turkish Bath\u00a0<\/a><\/em>(1973), for example, renders a group of nude men in a traditional portrait genre usually reserved for women typified by the Neoclassical painter\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/between-neclassicism-and-romanticism-ingres-la-grande-odalisque-2\/\">Jean-Dominque Ingres<\/a>. Other artists, like\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/antin-traditional-sculpture\/\">Eleanor Antin<\/a>\u00a0(who also riffs off the classical sculptural tradition in\u00a0<em>Carving: A Traditional Sculpture<\/em>, an important antecedent for Kruger) sought to subvert the usual depiction of women through unidealized and un-sexualized representations of the artist\u2019s own body.<\/p>\n<p>A different tactic was to refuse representation of women\u2019s bodies altogether.\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/mary-kelly-post-partum-document\/\">Mary Kelly<\/a>\u2019s monumental\u00a0<em>Post-Partum Document<\/em>\u00a0(1975), while an extensive portrayal of female subjectivity in relation to the mother-child relationship in psychoanalytic terms, makes no visual reference to herself or her body. Yet another approach was to develop a separate aesthetic predicated entirely upon women\u2019s experiences:\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/mcachicago.org\/Publications\/Websites\/West-By-Midwest\/Research\/Topics\/Womanhouse\"><em>Womanhouse<\/em><\/a>\u00a0was created by Miriam Schapiro and\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/judy-chicago-the-dinner-party\/\">Judy Chicago<\/a>\u00a0in the early 1970s as a space to showcase feminist performances about rape or installations about menstruation. Finally, there is the use of craft traditions typically associated with the domestic labor of women. Elevating \u201ccraft\u201d to a fine art became a symbol of the elevation of women themselves as they strove for inclusion and representation. Kruger\u2019s first artworks, in fact, were wall hangings that reframed craft in feminist terms. Despite the variances in approaches, at issue in feminist art practice was the place of imagery of women and artwork by women within patriarchy and in dialogue with political issues around gender and sexuality.<\/p>\n<p>Kruger\u2019s work differs from her predecessors whose work I have just briefly outlined. She came of age as an artist at a time when many were taking existing imagery and then re-staging it in slightly altered form. The term for this was \u201cappropriation,\u201d and it defined the strategy of a new generation of artists who wanted to refute modernism through invalidating ideas of originality, uniqueness, and even authorship. They became known, as did Kruger, as postmodern artists. Interestingly, many of these artists were women. Already critical of modernism because of its male-centered ideology, they filled the ranks of postmodernism to such extent that the critic Craig Owens described this congruence as a \u201ccrossing of the feminist critique of patriarchy and the postmodernist critique of representation.\u201d <a class=\"footnote\" title=\"Craig Owens, \u201cThe Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism,\u201d\u00a0The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, edited by Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press 1983), p. 78.\" id=\"return-footnote-3400-4\" href=\"#footnote-3400-4\" aria-label=\"Footnote 4\"><sup class=\"footnote\">[4]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/the-pictures-generation-2\/\">Sherrie Levine<\/a>\u00a0re-photographed a suite of images by the photographer Walker Evans in order to void his authorship.\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/cindy-sherman-untitled-film-still-21\/\">Cindy Sherman<\/a>\u00a0appropriated the cinematic tropes of Hollywood whose stock and trade was the vulnerable female in trouble and re-staged them using herself as model. While feminist art (and postmodern art) was largely a white movement, later artists such as Lorna Simpson,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/carrie-mae-weems-untitled-woman-feeding-bird-from-the-kitchen-table-series\/\">Carrie Mae Weems<\/a>\u00a0or\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/kara-walker-darkytown-rebellion\/\">Kara Walker<\/a>\u00a0would expand upon these earlier artistic strategies to address the intersection of race and gender.<\/p>\n<p>The art of the \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/the-pictures-generation-2\/\">Pictures Generation<\/a>\u201d as these postmodern artists came to be called, was glossier, slicker, and more enamored of media culture than what had come before, to such an extent that the cultural critic Fredric Jameson worried that art and advertising had become one. Of course the aim was to critically analyze such imagery; Kruger redeployed its seductive techniques, usually pressed into the service of enticing consumers (and historically much of it was aimed at women consumers), to expose the subtle and pervasive ways in which stereotypes of gender roles were reinforced through advertising and cinema (later works by Kruger would target consumerism directly).<\/p>\n<p>Deconstructing the supposed naturalism or ordinariness of these cultural fictions of femininity took on, within the larger political context of the feminist movement, an often\u00a0agitprop\u00a0or activist gloss.\u00a0<em>\u201cYour body is a battleground\u201d<\/em>\u00a0was produced for a 1989 women\u2019s march on Washington. Confining her imagery to black and white with the eventual addition of red was clearly a nod to the\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/stepanova-the-results-of-the-first-five-year-plan\/\">photomontages<\/a>\u00a0of Russian avant-garde artists in the early twentieth century. In the first years after the Russian Revolution, artists sought to harness the power of technology using photography and film to reach mass audiences and unmask false ideologies.<\/p>\n<figure style=\"width: 1542px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/48572145657_e4dde0a5f6_o.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/arthc1200\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/72\/2026\/06\/48572145657_e4dde0a5f6_o.jpg\" alt=\"Photograph of a large mural on a building wall featuring bold white text on a red background with &quot;MOCA&quot; and &quot;Geffen Contemporary&quot; in black and white on the left side. The mural poses a series of provocative questions about law, freedom, loyalty, and mortality.\" width=\"1542\" height=\"600\" \/><\/a><figcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Barbara Kruger, <em>Untitled (Questions)<\/em>, 1990\/2018 (<a href=\"https:\/\/www.moca.org\/exhibition\/barbara-kruger-untitled-questions-2\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Geffen Contemporary;<\/a>\u00a0photo:\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/rocor\/48572145657\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">rocor<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc\/2.0\/deed.en\">CC BY-NC 2.0<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Much like the factory murals and posters of Russian avant-garde art, Kruger sought a broader audience outside the gallery. Her work would appear on billboards, train station platforms, bus stops, public parks, and even matchbook covers. In the early 2000s the street clothing brand Supreme acknowledged that Barbara Kruger was an inspiration for their logo, a white Futura font within a red box. Despite its critical stance toward the advertising industry, Kruger\u2019s unique graphic style couldn\u2019t help but ultimately become influential in packaging and product design. Had Jameson been right about the collapse of art and advertising? Did the promotional and publicity structures of a consumer society eventually absorb postmodernism and thereby render its critique neutral?<\/p>\n<h2 id=\"contemporary-art\">Contemporary art<\/h2>\n<h3 id=\"getting-contemporary-art\">\u201cGetting\u201d Contemporary Art<\/h3>\n<p>It\u2019s ironic that many people say they don\u2019t \u201cget\u201d contemporary art because, unlike\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/private-tombs-and-items-afterlife\/\">Egyptian tomb<\/a>\u00a0painting or\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/greek_intro\/\">Greek sculpture<\/a>, art made since 1960 reflects our own recent past. It speaks to the dramatic social, political, and technological changes of the last 50 years, and it questions many of society\u2019s values and assumptions\u2014a tendency of\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/postmodernism\/\">postmodernism<\/a>, a concept sometimes used to describe contemporary art. What makes today\u2019s art especially challenging is that, like the world around us, it has become more diverse and cannot be easily defined through a list of visual characteristics, artistic themes, or cultural concerns.<\/p>\n<figure style=\"width: 1429px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/arthc1200\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/72\/2026\/06\/image506.jpeg\" alt=\"Photograph of a gallery wall displaying 32 framed Campbell's soup can prints arranged in four rows and eight columns, showcasing various soup flavors with red and white labels. A child in a red shirt and blue jeans walks in front, highlighting scale and interaction with iconic pop art pieces.\" width=\"1429\" height=\"1211\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Girl looking at: Andy Warhol, <em>Campbell\u2019s Soup Cans<\/em>, 1962, synthetic polymer on 32 canvases each 20 x 16 inches (The Museum of Modern Art; photo: <a href=\"https:\/\/flic.kr\/p\/6HJjad\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Steven Zucker<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-sa\/2.0\/deed.en\">CC BY-NC-SA 2.0<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/an-introduction-to-minimalism\/\">Minimalism<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/pop-art\/\">Pop Art<\/a>, two major art movements of the early 1960s, offer clues to the different directions of art in the late 20th and 21st century. Both rejected established expectations about art\u2019s aesthetic qualities and need for originality. Minimalist objects are spare geometric forms, often made from industrial processes and materials, which lack surface details, expressive markings, and any discernible meaning. Pop Art took its subject matter from low-brow sources like comic books and advertising. Like Minimalism, its use of commercial techniques eliminated emotional content implied by the artist\u2019s individual approach, something that had been important to the previous generation of modern painters. The result was that both movements effectively blurred the line distinguishing fine art from more ordinary aspects of life, and forced us to reconsider art\u2019s place and purpose in the world.<\/p>\n<h3 id=\"shifting-strategies\">Shifting Strategies<\/h3>\n<p>Minimalism and Pop Art paved the way for later artists to explore questions about the\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/conceptual-art-introduction\/\">conceptual nature of art<\/a>, its form, its production, and its ability to communicate in different ways. In the late 1960s and 1970s, these ideas led to a \u201cdematerialization of art,\u201d when artists turned away from painting and sculpture to experiment with new formats, including photography, film and video,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/performance-art-an-introduction\/\">performance art<\/a>, large-scale installations, and\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/the-case-for-land-art\/\">earth works<\/a>. Although some critics of the time foretold \u201cthe death of painting,\u201d art today encompasses a broad range of traditional and experimental media, including works that rely on Internet technology and other scientific innovations.<\/p>\n<p>Contemporary artists continue to use a varied vocabulary of abstract and representational forms to convey their ideas. It is important to remember that the art of our time did not develop in a vacuum; rather, it reflects the social and political concerns of its cultural context. For example, artists like\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/judy-chicago-the-dinner-party\/\">Judy Chicago<\/a>, who were inspired by the feminist movement of the early 1970s, embraced imagery and art forms that had historical connections to women.<\/p>\n<p>In the 1980s, artists appropriated the style and methods of mass media advertising to investigate issues of cultural authority and\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/identity-politics-from-the-margins-to-the-mainstream\/\">identity politics<\/a>. More recently, artists like Maya Lin, who designed the\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/maya-lin-vietnam-veterans-memorial\/\">Vietnam Veterans\u2019 Memorial Wall<\/a>\u00a0in Washington, D.C., and\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/richard-serra-band\/\">Richard Serra<\/a>, who was loosely associated with Minimalism in the 1960s, have adapted characteristics of Minimalist art to create new abstract sculptures that encourage more personal interaction and emotional response among viewers.<\/p>\n<p>These shifting strategies to engage the viewer show how contemporary art\u2019s significance exists beyond the object itself. Its meaning develops from cultural discourse, interpretation, and a range of individual understandings, in addition to the formal and conceptual problems that first motivated the artist. In this way, the art of our times may serve as a catalyst for an on-going process of open discussion and intellectual inquiry about the world today.<\/p>\n<h2 id=\"ai-weiwei-kui-hua-zi-sunflower-seeds\">Ai Weiwei, <a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/ai-weiwei-kui-hua-zi-sunflower-seeds\/\"><em>Kui Hua Zi (Sunflower Seeds)<\/em><\/a><\/h2>\n<h3 id=\"subversive-seeds\">Subversive seeds<\/h3>\n<p>Ai Weiwei\u00a0often uses his art to critique political and economic injustice. This can be seen in work such as his 2010 installation,\u00a0<em>Kui Hua Zi (Sunflower Seeds)<\/em>\u00a0at Tate Modern, London.<\/p>\n<p><em>Kui Hua Zi (Sunflower Seeds)<\/em>\u00a0consists of more than 100 million tiny, handmade porcelain sunflower seeds, originally weighing in at 150 tons. They filled the enormous Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, an industrial building-turned-contemporary art space. Sunflower seeds evokes a warm personal memory for the artist, who recalls that while he was growing up, even the poorest in China would share sunflower seeds as a treat among friends. The use of sunflower seeds as the basis of his installation was also designed to subvert popular imagery rooted in the artist\u2019s childhood. Communist propaganda optimistically depicted leader\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/art-mao-era-cultural-revolution-introduction\/\">Mao Zedong<\/a>\u00a0as the sun and the citizens of the People\u2019s Republic of China as sunflowers, turning toward their chairman. Ai Weiwei reasserts the sunflower seed as a symbol of camaraderie during difficult times.<\/p>\n<p>Though each of the 100 million carefully crafted individual seeds can draw the viewer\u2019s attention, once arranged together in a neat rectangle, or covering the floor of an entire room, the hyper-realistic seeds create a sense of vastness. In the Tate installation, there was a sense of precision in the arrangement of the seeds, creating visual order and uniformity. The individual seed is lost among the millions, a critique of the conformity and censorship in modern China.<\/p>\n<h3 id=\"made-in-china\">Made in China<\/h3>\n<p>More than 1,600 artisans worked to make the individual porcelain seeds by hand in Jingdezhen, the city known as the \u201cPorcelain Capital,\u201d where artists have been producing pottery for nearly 2,000 years.\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/chinese-porcelain-production-and-export\/\">Porcelain<\/a>, first produced during the\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/han-dynasty-intro\/\">Han dynasty<\/a>\u00a0in about 200 B.C.E. and later mastered during the\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/tang-dynasty-intro\/\">Tang dynasty<\/a>, is made by heating white clay (kaolin) to a temperature over 1200 degrees Celsius. The fusion of the particles within the clay during firing allowed artists to create vessels with thin but strong walls. Porcelain\u2014 a symbol of imperial culture in China\u2014was also made for export via the\u00a0Silk Road\u00a0and became important to the creation of the idea of China in the\u00a0West.<\/p>\n<p>Ai Weiwei\u2019s use of porcelain comments on the long history of this prized material while also rejecting the negative connotations that the term \u201cMade in China\u201d has to some audiences.\u00a0Utilizing skilled artisans known for their exquisite craftsmanship to make objects that can only be differentiated one from another upon close inspection alludes to the important porcelain tradition in Jingdezhen, as well as to the uniformity and diffusion of\u00a0modern\u00a0(cheap and fast) labor that is responsible for China\u2019s hard-won place in the world economy.\u00a0<em>Sunflower Seeds<\/em>\u00a0asks us to examine how our consumption of foreign-made goods affects the lives of others across the globe.<\/p>\n<p>How we experience an artwork impacts our perception of the work. In the tradition of\u00a0participatory contemporary art,\u00a0<em>Sunflower Seeds<\/em>\u00a0asks the public to physically interact with the art. Initially, Tate visitors were invited to walk over and lie on the seeds, though the museum, in consultation with the artist, suspended this opportunity about a week into the exhibition because of safety concerns.<\/p>\n<h3 id=\"art-and-activism\">Art and activism<\/h3>\n<p>Ai Weiwei was arrested at the Beijing Capital International Airport on April 3, 2011 during his Tate exhibition. <a class=\"footnote\" title=\"Andrew Jacobs, \u201cChina Takes Dissident Artist Into Custody,\u201d\u00a0The New York Times, April 3, 2011.\" id=\"return-footnote-3400-5\" href=\"#footnote-3400-5\" aria-label=\"Footnote 5\"><sup class=\"footnote\">[5]<\/sup><\/a> He was detained for 81 days. The artist, along with many in the international community, asserted that his true offense was his political activism for democracy and human rights. Ai Weiwei had blogged for four years\u2014investigating cover-ups and corruption in the government\u2019s handling of a devastating 2008 earthquake in Sichuan and the country\u2019s hosting of the Olympics. Ai Weiwei\u2019s blog was shut down in 2009. Since then, he has turned to Twitter and Instagram. During his detention, the international community, including major U.S. art institutions, rallied for his release. Officials eventually released him, charging Ai Weiwei with tax evasion, but his passport was withheld, preventing him from leaving the country for four years. It was returned in 2015.<\/p>\n<p>Ai Weiwei\u2019s continues to address issues of human rights in his work. The 2015 exhibit\u00a0<em>@Large<\/em>, installed on Alcatraz, the former island prison in the San Francisco Bay, comments on surveillance, freedom, and political prisoners by mixing fine and traditional arts with pop culture materials including silk dragon kites and LEGO \u00ae portraits.<\/p>\n<h2 id=\"yayoi-kusama-infinity-mirrored-roommy-heart-is-dancing-into-the-universe\">Yayoi Kusama,\u00a0<em>Infinity Mirrored Room\u2014My Heart is Dancing into the Universe<\/em><\/h2>\n<p>A Japanese painter, sculptor, poet, printmaker, and installation and performance artist, Yayoi Kusama is best known for her infinity room installations. Kusama\u2019s installation of mirrors, orbs, and colorful lights simulates the feeling of ineffable vastness and infinity.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" id=\"oembed-3\" title=\"Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Mirrored Room\u2014My Heart is Dancing into the Universe\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/0ofVlijFrx4?feature=oembed&#38;rel=0\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<h2 id=\"conclusion-15\">Conclusion<\/h2>\n<p>Contemporary art is a dynamic and constantly changing topic. Built upon the history of artistic creation from across the globe, contemporary artists draw inspiration from the history of art and the world around them. Unlike previous generations of artists bound by the traditional rules of academics, contemporary artists have few limits and boundaries to their artistic creativity. In the digital age of the 21<sup>st<\/sup> century, we now can learn about art from the comfort of our homes. Museums and galleries offer virtual tours and websites provide an abundance of information about artists, artworks, and stylistic movements. However, art is meant to be experienced. In person, we can better understand the formal elements of an artwork: scale, texture, color, etc. In person, we can also enter a dialogue with the artist by experiencing their work. As the 20<sup>th<\/sup> century Abstract-Expressionist Mark Rothko said, \u201cA painting is not a picture of an experience; it is the experience.\u201d<\/p>\n<h3 id=\"citation-and-licensing-15\">Citation and Licensing<\/h3>\n<p>The following sections were written by Chelsea Wright and licensed <a href=\"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-sa\/4.0\/\">CC BY-NC-SA 4.0<\/a>:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Chapter Overview and Introduction<\/li>\n<li>Focus artwork and term list compiled by Chelsea Wright<\/li>\n<li>Conclusion<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The following articles from <em>Smarthistory<\/em> licensed <a href=\"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-sa\/4.0\/\">CC BY-NC-SA 4.0<\/a> were remixed and adapted for the chapter:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Dr. Thomas Folland and Dr. Leta Y. Ming, &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/conceptual-art-introduction\/\">Conceptual art, an introduction<\/a>,&#8221; in\u00a0<em>Smarthistory<\/em>, January 10, 2018.<\/li>\n<li>Dr. Virginia B. Spivey, &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/performance-art-an-introduction\/\">Performance art, an introduction<\/a>,&#8221; in\u00a0<em>Smarthistory<\/em>, August 9, 2015.<\/li>\n<li>Smarthistory, \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/artist\/robert-smithson\/\">Robert Smithson<\/a>,\u201d in\u00a0<em>Smarthistory.<\/em><\/li>\n<li>Smarthistory, \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/artwork-type\/earthwork\/\">Earthwork<\/a>,\u201d in\u00a0<em>Smarthistory.<\/em><\/li>\n<li>Rebecca Taylor, &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/robert-smithson-spiral-jetty\/\">Robert Smithson,\u00a0<em>Spiral Jetty<\/em><\/a>,&#8221; in\u00a0<em>Smarthistory<\/em>, September 18, 2016.<\/li>\n<li>Dr. Kelly Enright, &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/1980-now-in-the-united-states-an-introduction\/\">1980\u2013now in the United States, an introduction<\/a>,&#8221; in\u00a0<em>Smarthistory<\/em>, June 25, 2024.<\/li>\n<li>Smarthistory, \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/artist\/maya-lin\/\">Maya Lin<\/a>,\u201d in\u00a0<em>Smarthistory.<\/em><\/li>\n<li>Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker, &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/maya-lin-vietnam-veterans-memorial\/\">Maya Lin, Vietnam Veterans Memorial<\/a>,&#8221; in\u00a0<em>Smarthistory<\/em>, December 11, 2015.<\/li>\n<li>Dr. Jordana Moore Saggese, &#8220;<a href=\"\/smarthistory.org\/the-pictures-generation-2\/\">The Pictures Generation<\/a>,&#8221; in\u00a0<em>Smarthistory<\/em>, September 7, 2018.<\/li>\n<li>Dr. Matthew A. Postal, &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/venturi-house-in-new-castle-county-delaware\/\">Robert Venturi, House in New Castle County, Delaware<\/a>,&#8221; in\u00a0<em>Smarthistory<\/em>, August 9, 2015.<\/li>\n<li>Dr. Jordana Moore Saggese, &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/identity-politics-from-the-margins-to-the-mainstream\/\">Identity politics: from the margins to the mainstream<\/a>,&#8221; in\u00a0<em>Smarthistory<\/em>, August 9, 2021.<\/li>\n<li>Dr. Jordana Moore Saggese, &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/jean-michel-basquiat-horn-players\/\">Jean-Michel Basquiat,\u00a0<em>Horn Players<\/em><\/a>,&#8221; in\u00a0<em>Smarthistory<\/em>, November 28, 2015.<\/li>\n<li>Dr. Thomas Folland, &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/barbara-kruger-untitled-your-gaze-hits-side-face\/\">Barbara Kruger,\u00a0<em>Untitled (Your gaze hits the side of my face)<\/em><\/a>,&#8221; in\u00a0<em>Smarthistory<\/em>, June 27, 2020.<\/li>\n<li>Dr. Virginia B. Spivey, &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/contemporary-art-an-introduction\/\">Contemporary art, an introduction<\/a>,&#8221; in\u00a0<em>Smarthistory<\/em>, August 9, 2015.<\/li>\n<li>Megan Lorraine Debin, &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/ai-weiwei-kui-hua-zi-sunflower-seeds\/\">Ai Weiwei,\u00a0<em>Kui Hua Zi (Sunflower Seeds)<\/em>,<\/a>&#8221; in\u00a0<em>Smarthistory<\/em>, August 9, 2015.<\/li>\n<li>Smarthistory, \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/artist\/yayoi-kusama\/\">Yayoi Kusama<\/a>,\u201d in\u00a0<em>Smarthistory.<\/em><\/li>\n<li>Elise Raborg, Curatorial Associate, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and Dr. Beth Harris, &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/yayoi-kusama-infinity-mirrored-room-heart-dancing-universe\/\">Yayoi Kusama,\u00a0<em>Infinity Mirrored Room\u2014My Heart is Dancing into the Universe<\/em>,<\/a>&#8221; in\u00a0<em>Smarthistory<\/em>, February 7, 2025.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<hr class=\"before-footnotes clear\" \/><div class=\"footnotes\"><ol><li id=\"footnote-3400-1\">RoseLee Goldberg,\u00a0<em>Performance: Live art since the 60s<\/em>\u00a0(New York: Thames &amp; Hudson, 1998), p. 20. <a href=\"#return-footnote-3400-1\" class=\"return-footnote\" aria-label=\"Return to footnote 1\">&crarr;<\/a><\/li><li id=\"footnote-3400-2\">Robert Farris Thompson and Renee Ricard,<em>\u00a0Jean-Michel Basquiat<\/em>\u00a0(Gagosian Gallery, 2015). <a href=\"#return-footnote-3400-2\" class=\"return-footnote\" aria-label=\"Return to footnote 2\">&crarr;<\/a><\/li><li id=\"footnote-3400-3\">Laura Mulvey, \u201cVisual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,\u201d\u00a0<em>Screen<\/em>, volume 16, issue 3, (Autumn 1975), pp. 6\u201318. <a href=\"#return-footnote-3400-3\" class=\"return-footnote\" aria-label=\"Return to footnote 3\">&crarr;<\/a><\/li><li id=\"footnote-3400-4\">Craig Owens, \u201cThe Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism,\u201d\u00a0<em>The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture<\/em>, edited by Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press 1983), p. 78. <a href=\"#return-footnote-3400-4\" class=\"return-footnote\" aria-label=\"Return to footnote 4\">&crarr;<\/a><\/li><li id=\"footnote-3400-5\">Andrew Jacobs, \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2011\/04\/04\/world\/asia\/04china.html\">China Takes Dissident Artist Into Custody<\/a>,\u201d\u00a0<em>The New York Times<\/em>, April 3, 2011. <a href=\"#return-footnote-3400-5\" class=\"return-footnote\" aria-label=\"Return to footnote 5\">&crarr;<\/a><\/li><\/ol><\/div>","protected":false},"author":2,"menu_order":17,"template":"","meta":{"pb_show_title":"on","pb_short_title":"","pb_subtitle":"","pb_authors":[],"pb_section_license":""},"chapter-type":[],"contributor":[],"license":[],"class_list":["post-3400","chapter","type-chapter","status-publish","hentry"],"part":3,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/arthc1200\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/3400","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/arthc1200\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/arthc1200\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/chapter"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/arthc1200\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/arthc1200\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/3400\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3501,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/arthc1200\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/3400\/revisions\/3501"}],"part":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/arthc1200\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/parts\/3"}],"metadata":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/arthc1200\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/3400\/metadata\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/arthc1200\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"chapter-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/arthc1200\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapter-type?post=3400"},{"taxonomy":"contributor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/arthc1200\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/contributor?post=3400"},{"taxonomy":"license","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/arthc1200\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/license?post=3400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}