Search results for ""Author Cecile Whiting""

Andy Warhol said about his road trip to Los Angeles in 1963: 'The farther West we drove, the more Pop everything looked on the highways'. In this original and engaging book, Cecile Whiting examines what Pop looked like when it left the highbrow cloisters of Manhattan's art galleries and ventured westward to the sprawling suburbs of Los Angeles. She finds that the artists who made California their home in the 1960s did not abandon their paint brushes for tennis rackets and surfboards, but rather created in their works a new and different sense of space, the urban experience, and popular culture. Whiting shows how artists such as Vija Celmins, Llyn Foulkes, David Hockney, Dennis Hopper, Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, Ed Ruscha, and Judy Chicago helped to shape the identity of Los Angeles as an emerging art center, while avoiding in their representation of the city the cliches of both its boosters and its detractors. Delving deep into the southern California aesthetic sensibility, "Pop L.A." recounts how the artists transformed the image of the city in works that focused on the ocean and landscape, suburban life, dilapidated houses in aging neighborhoods, streets and parking lots, and public buildings such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The common bond of place, for Whiting, gives coherence to the varied experiments in the visual and performance arts that altered the cultural terrain during this pivotal time. The Los Angeles art scene in the 1960s inspired a new generation of architectural writing about the metropolis and its debased sister city, Las Vegas. Over the course of the decade, the conception of the city pioneered by artists in Los Angeles spread beyond the city of angels to characterize cultural life in the United States.

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This fully illustrated catalogue is the first comprehensive monograph on Alexis Smith in 30 years and presents the full range of the artist’s dynamic output, from her intimate artist books and collages to large wall paintings and installations. Providing new insights into Smith’s work, this volume connects the themes that have persisted throughout the artist’s career, from her exploration of identity and self-invention to her preoccupation with stereotypes and clichés in film and literature. This publication will introduce Smith’s expansive body of work to a new generation of viewers. Situated alongside movements of conceptual and pop art and shaped by the feminist movements of the 1970s, Smith’s singular career expands our understanding of American art and provokes us to think critically on the culture we share. Published to accompany a major retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, 1 October 2022-26 February 2023

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This timely and original study transforms our understanding of the relationship between art and economics Bearing witness to the changing economic landscape amid the Cold War, artists in the 1960s created works that critiqued, reshaped, and sometimes reinforced the spirit of capitalism. At a time when currency and finance were becoming ever more abstracted—and the art market increasingly an arena for speculation—artists on both sides of the Atlantic turned to economic themes, often grounded in a human context. The Artist as Economist examines artists who approached these issues in critical, imaginative, and humorous ways: Andy Warhol and Larry Rivers incorporated the iconography of printed currency into their paintings, while Ray Johnson sought to disrupt and reinvent circuits of commerce with his mail art collages. Yves Klein and Edward Kienholz critiqued conceptions of artistic and monetary value, as Lee Lozano and Dennis Oppenheim engaged directly with the New York Stock Exchange. Such examples, which author Sophie Cras insightfully situates within their historic economic context, reveal capitalism’s visual dimension. As art and economics grow more entangled, this volume offers a timely consideration of art’s capacity to reflect on and reimagine economic systems.

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Recognized as a major Pop artist in his day, Allan D’Arcangelo (1930–1998) has yet to receive the critical reevaluation of painters like Roy Lichtenstein and James Rosenquist. His first monograph in nearly a decade introduces new audiences to his iconic paintings, particularly his celebrated visions of life on the road.Like Pop peers Andy Warhol and Ed Ruscha, Allan D’Arcangelo incorporated mass-manufactured images in works that elevate scenes of everyday American life. While his work often features imagery from more familiar 1960s art—Jacqueline Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, smoking pin-up girls, Superman, Lucky Strike—it differs in the surreal elements he introduced to Pop tropes and romantic views of the American industrial landscape.D’Arcangelo once observed his “most profound experiences of landscape were looking through the windshield.” The artist brought a Pop sensibility to the tradition of landscape painting in a graphic style that touched on Minimalism, Precisionism, and Hard-edge painting. Often framed from the perspective of the driver’s seat, D’Arcangelo’s work captures the deeply American experience of flying down an endless road. D’Arcangelo’s signature scrolling landscape cut through with flashing signs is as familiar to road trippers as it is to video game racers.This comprehensive publication includes over 200 reproductions and three essays detailing what critic Dore Ashton describes as the “poetic awareness of the vastnesses both visible and invisible in American life [that] marked and distinguished [D’Arcangelo’s] work.” This book is edge stained.

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