Thanks to recent patronage and recognition by historically holier-than-thou academies — to wit, JR’s TED Prize, Banksy’s Oscar nomination for Exit Through the Gift Shop, even Shepard Fairey’s moonlighting turn as political propagandist — street art is under a mainstream microscope like never before. Grimy subversion is trendy again among the artistic aristocracy, and this time the momentum isn’t limited to a couple New York City crossover street artists with interesting names and/or marketable minority status. Rest assured that, just as disco supplanted the longhair political ballad, as Eminem’s daughter replaced Eminem’s homicidal mushroom trips, as the Macarena hokey-pokeyed all over Cobain’s grave, pretty shiny things will soon return to favor — Jeff Koons, breath easy.
Until then, however, the masses need to prep for First Thursdays and Third Firstdays in Soho and Soma, in Silver Lake and the Marigny and the Pearl, at Moma and Lacma and the De Young and other venues and warehouse neighborhoods where the promise of free Rossi and cocktail wieners attract the more self-respecting and educated of the city’s impoverished alcoholics. They need banter material, and to banter passably, one must know enough to feign expertise — preferably in something current, hip, and, crucially, appealing to attractive members of the desired sex.
Herein, as always, enters Taschen: In Trespass: A History of Uncommissioned Urban Art, the iconic publishing house provides an encyclopedic overview of 150 of the most influential and relevant players in the game today. In profiling the core of the famously insular clique, Trespass sheds light upon an esoteric world dominated by semi-anonymous characters and complex discourse over the last few decades.
The book, released worldwide earlier this year, features context and commentary from the likes of Marc and Sara Schiller (Wooster Collective founders) and Carlo McCormick (senior editor at Paper magazine) alongside sprawling images tracking the evolution of the art form from its emergence in the early 1980s through the present day. The inconsistent quality and chronological distribution of the book’s photos would seem to owe much to advances in technology: Due to its ephemeral nature, urban art has long proven difficult to document, but thanks to the ubiquitous camera phone and the viral immediacy of twitter and its ilk, most works by today’s prominent artists are captured, disseminated and critiqued by the graph-geek crowd long before city workers or property owners get a chance to paint over them.
Portraying works by Keith Haring, Richard Hambleton and Paolo Buggiani, Trespass traces the roots of modern street art to Banksy and other contemporaries while posing a fundamental question about the motivation of its practitioners: Is street art an evolutionary step in the progression of human visual communication, or simply an instinct to mark territory as a dog would with its urine? This latter notion of human “aesthetic territorialism,” editor Ethel Seno asserts, dates back to the Paleolithic, in the form of cave paintings. And thus the crux of the debate is clarified: Is street art intended to push boundaries and awaken a systematically numbed public, as many of its major players claim, or is it merely “Kilroy was here” delivered in ever-more-elaborate forms? In other words, for all the artists’ grandiose proclamations of subversion and iconoclasm, is the basic motivator really just a yearning for recognition? In the case of NYC train bombers, BNE guy, Neckface, and your average neighborhood tagger, the answer would appear to be a resounding “yes.” When it comes to Banksy and Swoon, among others, the verdict is “uhhhh…well, that, uh…depends?”
To step backward for a moment — and not to get too abstractly philosophical up in here — many artists do seem to crave recognition and its attendant trappings of respect and, with the right medium and image, riches. Banksy can spit in the face of collectors and authority all he likes, but he’s no fool — he knows the best way to make a name (and a few enemies) is to upset the status quo. So when street artists attribute their work’s inspiration to principled flashpoints like “promoting the First Amendment” or “speaking truth to power,” digest this with the knowledge that controversy and artistic emergence are often symbiotic.
This, as outlined in Trespass, is where the prospect of publicity and mainstream acceptance threatens to endanger the multifaceted medium: Street art began as a form of protest — against the galleried art world, against municipal intrusion on freedom of expression, against crooked politicians, against the concept of rules and authority in general (although the anarchist angle rings hypocritical considering that old-school street artists operated under rules of etiquette so revered that they were often backed up with the promise of violence). Now, with its international profile on the rise and its most prominent artists on display in chic galleries and auction houses on both sides of the Atlantic, street art must accept the fact that it has become, in large part, a contributor to the art-world status quo. While perhaps not a full-privileges member of the establishment just yet — with Warhol’s Marilyn portraits in mind, let’s wait five or so years before issuing such a declaration — the subculture has surrendered some measure of its power to subvert simply by virtue of gaining acceptance. As the authors of Trespass point out, a fundamental tenet of street art is that it question general consensus from an outsider’s perspective — from the viewpoint of the willful nonparticipant oppressed by the whims of society’s majorities. The question is, will the medium’s leading artists retain the ability to effectively speak truth to power if they’re on the inside looking out? Can street artists still subvert now that their work has been sanctioned by the powers that be (cops excluded, of course)?
To that end, street art’s celebrities must reassess the impetus behind new work: With a newly-informed public finally thinking critically (and en masse) about street art — that is, dismissing authorities’ adorably outdated blanket condemnations of street art as vandalistic rubbish — the audience for such artworks has grown dramatically of late. Whereas street artists originally painted and drew with only their fraternity in mind, striving to out-do the next guy in terms of innovation and — perhaps more importantly — base prolificness, the primary audience of today’s stars has expanded to include the art establishment and the general public. With this in mind, street artists stand to make money (and plenty of it). One must assume that this will affect the intentions of some street artists while encouraging more persuadable (or desperate) practitioners of classically acceptable artistic genres to try their hand at street art.
The relationship between street art and the gallery crowd has recently undergone a radical reinvention, both following and stoking renewed public interest in, and acceptance of, prominent artists and works. This, in turn, is placing successful street artists in a conflicted position, one in which commercial success may prove groundbreaking while simultaneously calling into question the artist’s ability to carry out one of the original aims of their craft. How this will all play out is anybody’s guess, but Taschen’s Trespass does well to supply readers with the street-art background necessary to formulate such a prediction — a prediction, we remind you, that should prove très useful at the gallery next week when you’re trying to impress that waif with the regrettable fixie tattoo. And don’t forget a Ziploc: Nothing screams “breakfast!” and “free!” like a pile of soggy celery sticks and picked-over cheese wheels. Godspeed.
Late. Late. Late, late, late. As always, we’re late on this. Well, actually, that’s subjective: If you’re in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, Miami, New Orleans, Portland, Seattle, D.C., Austin, Chicago, or the Greater Tri-State Area, we’re a good year late. If you’re in the rest of the country, we’re right on time. And if you’re in Mississippi, we’re eight years ahead of schedule. For you, Jed, we’re delivering news from 2019. Runtell your Unclebrothers and Sisterdaughters.
Exit Through the Gift Shop is Banksy’s feature filmmaking debut, and he remains true to iconoclastic form: Famous for his bold, rebellious street art and legalities-driven obsession with anonymity, Banksy has made his name — and, more recently, growing fortune — by undermining institution. And the movie, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2010, certainly excels in this regard, and on multiple levels.
First, though, a thorough, semi-spoiler (!!!) synopsis for the uninitiated: Exit is essentially a profile of Thierry Guetta, an excitable, thirtysomething Frenchman with no discernible job, a lovely and supportive family, and a habit, rooted in childhood trauma, of videotaping everything lest he forget anything. Guetta’s cousin, the film asserts, is the prominent street artist whose nom de guerre, “Invader,” is derived from the mosaics he epoxies to the sides of buildings in cities worldwide — works inspired by the heavily pixelated classic video game “Space Invaders.” Guetta follows and videotapes this cousin as he and other street artists decorate the walls of Paris, London, and other European locales before eventually landing in Los Angeles. Guetta’s big break comes when he meets up with Shepard Fairey in an L.A. Kinko’s (Invader is “sick” and thereafter more or less absent from the film) and convinces the RISD alum to let him shadow him; before long, Guetta has proven his mettle to Fairey as both a documenter and accomplice, and the unlikely pair sets off on a trans-continental spree of rooftop stenciling, scaffold wheatpasting, and cop-ducking.
However, for all Guetta’s happenstance success in videography — the courageous and innovative vandalistic exploits captured in Exit are many, and much of the footage is breathtaking — the film’s protagonist is never sated. Guetta is portrayed throughout as more or less ignorant of the genre’s major players and their oeuvres, yet for reasons only cursorily clarified in the film (personable guy, trusted accessory, charming accent, “eccentric” facial hair?), he’s fully cleared to tape their illegal nocturnal (and occasionally diurnal) forays. Never star-struck (because he doesn’t know who the stars are), Guetta is nevertheless entranced by the thrill of street art, and for a brief time, he seems relatively fulfilled — that is, until somebody clues him onto the existence of Banksy, the Zeus of contemporary graf-culture mythology.
Five years ago today, a day after the western flank of Hurricane Katrina crawled over New Orleans, floodwaters continued to billow through dozens of levee breaches as they worked toward inundating four-fifths of the city. Thousands of displaced locals headed to the Superdome, joining the tens thousands who had sheltered there during the storm. In residential neighborhoods across much of the city, survivors who had defied Mayor Nagin’s order to evacuate — out of stubborn defiance or for a basic lack of the wherewithal to do so — adapted to the surreal reality that their city, an American city in the twenty-first century, had in many respects been abandoned by the powers that were.
Those who would survive would do so largely on their own.
But five years have passed, and New Orleans is rebuilding. There’s been a plethora of worthy journalism on the subject in recent days and weeks — a few examples here, here, here. We’re heading down there next week to see for ourselves and to work on a couple projects you’ll see in the coming months.
In the meantime, to tide you over, last year’s review of graphic novelist Josh Neufeld’s “A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge” (with a crucial footnote at bottom):
Graphic novels as journalism? On Josh Neufeld’s masterful “A.D.”
by Ben Fuchs
Bolstered by a glowing Sunday-edition New York Times book review, Josh Neufeld’s “A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge” plowed through a gauntlet of Batman-related titles to earn a spot on the Paper of Record’s Graphic Hardcover Bestseller List last month. However, for all the publicity Neufeld engendered through such critical acclaim and a modest book tour, the book’s tenure on the list ended after two weeks; apparently people are more interested in studying The Joker’s origin than in reliving Hurricane Katrina.
Neufeld, who built comic-geek street cred illustrating “American Splendor” for Harvey Pekar, truly began working on “A.D.” during the three weeks he spent working with the Red Cross in Katrina-ravaged Biloxi, Miss. after the 2005 storm: His blog on the experience spawned a self-published collection of choice works, which in turn drew the attention of SMITH Magazine. With the online mag as a platform, Neufeld expanded both his narrative breadth and the scope of his geographical focus (he migrated to a New Orleans angle after discarding, for logistical reasons, a considered examination of the larger Gulf Coast). Earlier this year, Smith — with Pantheon on board to bankroll — published “A.D.” in hardcover.
Neufeld’s work straddles a line between fact and fiction in a manner that might make traditional journalistic purists uneasy: “A.D.” is a novel, albeit one rooted in historically-accurate details, and Neufeld makes no claims to the contrary* (Ed: see correction below). Some of the book’s seven central characters, whose divergent narratives reflect the vastly different backgrounds of their subjects, are real people, while others are hybridized creations based on multiple real New Orleanians. Accordingly, Neufeld warns in the book’s first pages that “…some names and details have been changed for dramatic purposes….” As Neufeld told the Times in its “A.D.” review in August, “I did whatever worked to make the emotional truth of the stories much clearer. It’s what makes a certain scene emotionally satisfying in a way that makes the whole book add up to a novel.” But Neufeld’s intricate attention to detail (in addition to the obvious phone and in-person interviews he conducted, Neufeld “took tons of photos” in order to replicate precisely such minutiae as the contents of of one featured couple’s DVD collection) lends credence to Dave Eggers’ characterization of “A.D.” as “one of the best-ever examples of comics reportage.”
The human perspectives Neufeld provides certainly reflect a level of journalistic integrity rivaling or exceeding that exhibited by much of the mainstream media during and after Katrina. He wisely resisted the urge to overtly damn the federal agencies’ abominable reaction to the crisis (FEMA isn’t even a blip on the book’s radar), instead forcing readers to draw their own conclusions based on his characters’ hyper-localized trials. In doing so, we see thugs — left, along with everyone else, to their own devices by unresponsive authorities — maintaining peace at the city’s convention center, rather than raping and pillaging as had been reported at the time. (This isn’t to say that none of the atrocious rumors relayed ad nauseum by CNN and its ilk during the catastrophe played out as fact. But the erosion of these sensationalist outlets’ fact-checking standards during the meltdown was palpable, and their follow-up on such rumors during the recovery period was markedly insufficient.)
Neufeld, however, does mimic Anderson Cooper — as much a Gonzo student as a straight-edged, impeccably-coiffed WASP can be — by inserting himself into the story at book’s end. Neufeld introduces this narrative transition to bring closure to each character’s tale, portraying himself following up with the seven by phone from his Brooklyn apartment. Some of the characters initially moved away from New Orleans after the hurricane, while others stayed in the area; all have since returned to New Orleans or have plans to do so. By describing each of these stories in polychromatic form and without regard to the “official” assessment of conditions in the city during and after Katrina, Neufeld provides a raw, revelatory and intensely personal perspective on the largest domestic humanitarian failure of the 21st century.
Perhaps of equal importance in these sad, helpless days of print media consolidation and syndication, though, “A.D.” confers a considerable measure of legitimacy on a form of quasi-journalism Neufeld by no means invented (see: “Maus”): Comics and graphic novels as social conscience.
*EDITOR’S NOTE: Josh Neufeld contacted DCQ after this piece first ran to clarify a “misperception” that he says originated in the Timespiece mentioned in the first sentence. In the article, Times critic George Gene Gustines concludes that the book “is a novel, not a documentary: Mr. Neufeld edited parts of the survivors’ stories and combined some characters.” Gustines goes on to quote Neufeld as saying that he “did whatever worked to make the emotional truth of the stories much clearer. It’s what makes a certain scene emotionally satisfying in a way that makes the whole book add up to a novel.” Neufeld wrote to us to clarify that “…in truth A.D. IS journalism, and IS a documentary. I did not combine any characters when it came to the main players and their stories (I did take out a couple of people — who we never meet — from certain scenes when it became too confusing)…I felt my job as artist was to synthesize the characters’ experiences into a complete whole that FELT novelistic. I guess it sounds a bit high-falutin’; what I meant is that I did what any good journalist does when writing their story: edited it and refined it to make it a good read.”
Swiss artist Urs Fischer took over three floors of the New Museum — the ones sandwiched between the lobby and the consistently underwhelming “educational” top floor — for his “Marguerite de Ponty” show last winter. Fischer’s offerings ranged from a Gheorghe Mureşan-sized British telly booth to the assortment of oddities and aluminum sculptures pictured above (the only shot we squeezed off before security got uppity). Fischer (or, more likely, peons thereof) cast the hulking sculptures from small clay models, reproducing the shapes with such mega-scope and precision that fingerprints from the original models reappear in large form in the finished product.
Fischer also exhibited (ha! get it? er.) a sense of humor and an appreciation for smaller-scale works, as the exhilarating video below aptly displays.
That’s all we’ve got for now; our Art + Architecture Editor has locked herself in a studio in New Orleans and isn’t coming out till Gay Mardi Gras. Fareal. Read The New Yorker and The New York Times talk good about the show’s meaning here and here, respectively, while Artforum’s got the TMZ angle covered here.
And yes, we know this all took place nine months ago. Stop trying to foist your traditional interpretation of “timely reportage” on us, conformist swine.
Disclaimer: This post will be relevant to almost nobody who reads DCQ.
A couple Dunces grew up in Burlingame, Calif., a “leafy” suburb south of San Francisco. The town is known for its politely progressive vibe and for producing an abundance of garage bands and a sum total of one professional athlete. Over the past decade, Burlingame also gained a reputation for fostering a slightly more lively bar scene than the slightly more boring suburbs it is wedged between (the Bay Area beyond San Fran proper being one oval-shaped clusterfuck of unbroken suburbs).
Thus, it would seem somewhat less than entirely impossible that a nightclub in Burlingame would find a way to commandeer the artists behind the marketing for Studio B and Santos Party House in New York:
Not the case: SonicLiving, through a partnership announced last spring (yeah, we know, we’re slipping) with burgeoning urban clothier/art space Upper Playground, provides poster templates created by UP-backed artists for anyone who lists an event on the site. More examples below.
As for this “Club 261,” I still say it sounds fun. I’m in. We’ll reminisce on the good old days and talk about Vegas and real estate. Don’t forget your Giants hat and Tapout tee.
For those who missed the Preview Issue launch party in NYC last month, a communist message under the guise of a schematic tutorial from DCQ creative director Dusty Mendes:
We braved Olympic-sized slush puddles Sunday night to drop by the East Village’s Mars Bar, known around town as an anachronistic ode to “authentic New York.” In bar-speak, this translates to “dim lights, cheap drinks, and Trainspotting-worthy toilets” (it apparently also means “desirable place to stage awkward celebrity photo shoots”).
The occasion: Mars Bar was getting a makeover, courtesy of a dozen-plus local graffiti artists. The show’s curator, Grimace, gave a nod to the establishment’s history as a hub for street art, mentioning Jean-Michel Basquiat, Lee Quiñones and Keith Haring — arguably the three most influential names behind graffiti’s acceptance by mainstream gallery culture — as one-time patrons. Pointing out that he and his collaborators had protected a swath of the bar’s pre-existing wall — a colorful mish-mash of abstract geometrics hovering above a guitar-playing skeleton — Grimace stressed a desire to “bridge the gap between the old and the new” in reinventing the bar as “a living, breathing, drinking art piece”:
The artists overhauled about half of the bar on Sunday, whitewashing and painting directly on some walls and installing hung pieces on others while adding complementary flourishes to the bathrooms and the underside of the weathered, wooden bar itself. Other surfaces — notably the ceiling — will receive facelifts sometime in the future, according to Grimace.
We caught up with a couple other street art vets, New York natives both: Like Grimace, who spins regularly at 3rd Ward’s massive “Danger” bacchanals in Bushwick, ShazOne and Milk are renaissance men of sorts. In addition to their involvement in street art, both now focus, to varying degrees, on music, with Milk professing to having “retired” entirely from graf writing. They also share a measure of dismay over the perceived degradation of graffiti etiquette in New York, with ShazOne the more outspoken of the two. Here, he describes the graffiti community’s self-imposed justice system — and we’re inclined to trust his explanation, given the assumption that his residence “in the mountains for a couple years” doesn’t mean he was opening for Don Rickles in the Borscht Belt:
Milk employed a different, yet related, euphemism, explaining that “in the early 1990s, I kinda terrorized the L train, the M train, and…doing that type of work kind of led me to a 10-year vacation.” He also forwarded a theory that sound entirely plausible to anyone who’s familiar with the recidivism rate of American ex-convicts…or the origin of the MS-13 street gang…or the move Blow: that New York City abolished its practice of sentencing artists convicted of vandalism to clean graffiti-adorned walls because such programs promoted networking among artists, who would bond over the cleaning and plan future ‘bombing’ sessions — with “future” typically being “right after we’re done cleaning this wall”:
If you’ve ever strolled the streets of San Fran, Manhattan or any number of other global metropoli, you’ve seen the BNE guy’s work. It’s pretty basic: Put “BNE” in all-caps Helvetica Neue Condensed, black on white. Multiply times 100,000 or so. Travel around the world, affix to stop signs, parking meters, streetlight poles, etc. Wait for people to get curious.
We started seeing the BNE stickers around SF in 2006 or thereabouts; the perpetrator would get slap-silly on entire blocks of meters in the Tendernob. Someone working for Gavin Newsom noticed it soon thereafter, and the mayor caught a few headlines — and, more significantly, contributed to the BNE guy’s murky legend — by putting a $2,500 bounty on his head. Nobody managed to collect, stickers kept going up, and the artist’s identity remained an enigma.
Then, news broke earlier this month that the guy behind BNE was setting up for a show in Hell’s Kitchen. The Paper of Record scored an unprecedented interview with the alleged artist and managed to reveal next to nothing about him. We took matters into our own filthy hands. NYC ad agency Mother, underwriting the show at its new warehouse on 11th Ave. and West 44th, tried to play up the show’s import by making it an exclusive “who do you know” deal, complete with a tight guest list we managed to weasel onto. For all the frills — dance floor, DJ, pretty people, free booze galore — the show felt uninspired: The artist’s trademark, predictably, dominated the landscape in varying forms, the most evocative of which was a 15-foot-tall block-graf rendering running the length of the north wall. Most of the other pieces commented on the alleged artist’s announced desire to rival the visibility of multinational brands. (He told the Times that “I don’t see other graffiti writers as my competition anymore. Now I’m going up against the Tommy Hilfigers, Starbucks, Pepsi. You have these billion-dollar companies, and I’ve got to look at their logos every day. Why can’t I put mine up?”)
A couple awaking-at-3pm thoughts on what appears to be a beauty of a wintry Sunday in New York:
1.) Kettle’s new “Fully Loaded Baked Potato” chips are a fairly large disappointment. It seems the stoners in their R&D department merely combined the seasonings of the BBQ and sour cream-and-onion lines and called it a day. Bacon isn’t even mentioned among the ingredients. Thusly, I’m saving the second half of the bag until my re-up of Bacon Salt arrives (no, really). Will report back.
2.) Ghostland Observatory + Terminal 5 = laser armageddon. Yes, Steph, this is my review.
3.) A couple of Brits are immersed in a very cool project of modest intentions (via): “To write to everyone in the world.” In April, Lenka Clayton and Michael Crowe sent a unique, handwritten letter to all 467 residents of the Irish town of Cushendall. The recipients learnt all about the origins of the horse and the artists’ outdoor exploits. Last month, Clayton and Crowe launched part two of Mysterious Letters, this time loosing their thoughts upon the 620 denizens of Polish Hill, Pennsylvania. The results include such genius dickery as this. Looks like they’re catching some press, too. Coffee table book in six months’ time.
Along with the crisp November (now December — I know, we lag) weather, and falling colored leaves came a refreshing perspective from the Bay, in the form of the new Jeremy Fish exhibition at the Laguna Art Museum. Weathering the Storm is the San Francisco artist’s premiere museum showing, and an impressive one at that, including a boatload of new paintings and a smattering of hand-carved dark wood pieces filling the stairwell and the mezzanine level of LAM.
Best known for his whimsical woodland creature/skull hybrids, Fish reveals a successful transition in the show: His familiar forms become sculptural works, including myriad bas-relief frames, a fully functional couchette, and several individual sculptures such as the F-Unicorn (my personal favorite; pictured immediately below). Fish also created a large mural engulfing several walls, overlaid with cutout paintings bearing rainy day themes referencing current world crises and struggles. Having followed his work since my San Francisco salad days, this show seems more reactionary than anything I’ve viewed previously, presenting substantial commentary throughout.
The long hallway of the mezzanine was adorned with a series of smaller cutout paintings. Reflecting on Fecal Face’s earlier coverage of Fish’s studio pre-opening, I vividly imagined how each piece came jigsawed to life in his North Beach space. These cutouts maintained the strongest link to his previous work, providing comedic and lighthearted subjects in bright colors.
The crowds came out in full force, with many from the action sports industry, established Laguna Beach art-types, and families with small children in attendance. LAM’s evolving programming is bolstered significantly by shows such as this, which appeal to patrons beyond the institution’s Sunday-afternoon-luncheon base — as evidenced by the number of youthful bodies roaming the halls.
BONUS: Upon approaching the bar, I excitedly realized that my favorite bartender-about-town, Armando, was manning the buckets. He majorly hooked a sister and her brother up. Armando, you’re “Our-Man…do” (doh.)
There has been plentiful talk about town recently regarding the Obamas’ artistic choices for the White House. The First Family, thanks to one of the major perks of White House residency, has the opportunity to borrow works not currently on public display from the collections of myriad Washington art museums and galleries in order to reflect their artistic preferences within the mansion. As with Jacqueline Kennedy’s love for Cézanne and Hillary Rodham Clinton’s affinity for living amidst de Kooning and Kandinsky, the Obamas will leave a significant artistic legacy based upon their choices. Many argue that they also have the power to affect the market, boosting the sales and popularity of any artist they decide to showcase. Such was the situation when the Bushes acquired Jacob Lawrence’s The Builders in 2007, which significantly raised the prices of Lawrence works at subsequent auctions.
Working since before the inauguration with White House Curator William Allman and personal decorator Michael S. Smith, the Obamas have selected 45 artworks reflecting bold and eclectic tastes. Within the group lie modern and contemporary gems as well as classics by Mark Rothko, Ed Ruscha, Richard Diebenkorn, Louise Nevelson, Jasper Johns, Edgar Degas, Glenn Ligon, and Josef Albers, among others. The group demonstrates the strong American persona that the Obamas hoped to depict. In fact, all of the selected artists, with the exception of Degas, are American (though even Degas spent time as an expat in New Orleans, perhaps justifying his inclusion).
As with any good political inquiry, a bit of scandal has also emerged. The Obamas had selected two paintings by female African American expressionist Alma Thomas. One of said works, Watusi (Hard Edge) from 1963, is a highly resemblant homage to Henri Matisse’s L’Escargot, completed a decade earlier. The selection immediately brought criticism, especially from Obama-haters, who blustered that “even the artworks he selects are phony.” The painting was later returned to the Hirshorn Museum, with the given explanation that its dimensions were not compatible with the wall in Michelle’s East Wing office. The White House denies that the accusation of plagiary had any affect on the decision to return the painting. Ms. Thomas’ Sky Light is still affixed in the collection.
Ultimately, the Obamas have successfully furthered their much-hyped platform of “change” through the art collection. For the first time, the White House contains a plethora of contemporary works, the rooms and halls adorned with paintings and sculptures by a diverse artists’ set: Asian Americans, African Americans, females and immigrants galore. It’s refreshing to see a collection that is somewhat representative of our country’s residents and their ideals — as opposed to one dominated by antiquated portraiture of wealthy old white men.
Images, top to bottom: Berkeley, No. 52, by Richard Diebenkorn, 1955; The Builders, by Jacob Lawrence, 1947; Watusi (Hard Edge), by Alma Thomas, 1963; Alma Thomas in her studio, ca. 1968.
