Unit 10 Essentials

Taking an existing image, object, or style from another context and re-presenting it with altered meaning; Wiley appropriates David's Napoleon, Koons appropriates Pink Panther; the "original" is changed by new context

Critical framework examining the ongoing legacy of colonial power in culture, economics, and identity; Shonibare, El Anatsui, and Tuffery all engage with colonial histories embedded in their materials and subjects

The use of art to assert, question, or critique socially constructed identity categories — race, gender, sexuality, class, nationality; central to Unit 10 as a whole; artists make identity itself the subject

Art that transforms a space; the environment is the work; Xu Bing's scrolls fill a room, Osorio's barbershop fills a gallery, Walker's silhouettes cover walls; viewer moves through the work rather than standing before it

Works that require viewer action to complete or alter the piece; González-Torres's candy requires viewers to take pieces; Walker's projectors require viewers to cast shadows; The Gates invited public use of Central Park

1980s return to gestural, emotionally intense painting after Conceptual Art's rejection of painting; Basquiat is the key AP example; raw mark-making, personal imagery, urban and art-historical references combined

1980s–90s art that appropriates mass-media imagery and consumer objects in the tradition of Pop Art; Koons is the key AP example; challenges the boundary between commercial culture and fine art

Cheap, sentimental, or mass-produced objects considered to be in poor taste; Koons elevates kitsch to high art; Osorio uses excessive kitsch to assert Latino cultural abundance against middle-class taste hierarchies

Term from feminist film theory (Laura Mulvey, 1975): the tendency of visual culture to present the world from a heterosexual male point of view; Sherman's Film Stills critique the construction of femininity for a male audience

Art that critiques gender inequity and the patriarchal structures of art history and visual culture; Sherman, Ringgold, Neshat, and González-Torres all engage feminist concerns in different ways

The AIDS epidemic of the 1980s–90s, which disproportionately affected gay men and communities of color; the Reagan administration's silence made it a political crisis; González-Torres's candy portrait of Ross is the AP example of AIDS memorial art

Art made in and from landscape, often at monumental scale; Christo and Jeanne-Claude work in this tradition; art is temporarily in the world, not the gallery; process of making and removing is part of the work

Broader category encompassing art that engages with natural or urban environments; The Gates transforms Central Park without altering it permanently; no nails, no paint, no damage — the park returns unchanged after 16 days

Faith Ringgold's innovation: acrylic paintings surrounded by pieced fabric quilt borders with narrative text; quilting = African American women's tradition; "French Collection" series (12 quilts) places Black women in Paris art history

A figure represented as a solid dark shape; Kara Walker uses the 19th-century parlor silhouette tradition (associated with delicacy and femininity) to depict scenes of slavery, rape, and violence — the form's elegance is deliberately disturbing

Being involved in or morally responsible for an act; central to Walker and González-Torres; Walker's projectors force viewers into slave scenes; González-Torres's viewers take candy from a dying man's body portrait — their pleasure = his loss

Industrially printed cotton fabric with bold geometric patterns; originally based on Indonesian batik; manufactured in the Netherlands and sold in colonial West African markets; Shonibare uses it as his signature material to critique colonial constructions of "African" identity

Woven silk and cotton textile from Ghana; associated with Ashanti royalty; El Anatsui's bottle-cap works reference kente's structure (strips joined together) and its visual logic (complex pattern, precious material) through entirely different means

Graffiti tag (Same Old Shit) used by Basquiat and collaborator Al Diaz on Lower East Side New York walls, late 1970s; Basquiat's roots in street art inform his raw style, textual layering, and critique of the art market that later sold his work for millions

The 500th anniversary of Columbus's 1492 arrival in the Americas (celebrated in 1992); Quick-to-See Smith made Trade precisely for this moment — to counteract official celebration with a Native American perspective on 500 years of dispossession

Use of Native American imagery as sports team logos (Washington Redskins, Cleveland Indians, etc.); Quick-to-See Smith attached objects bearing these logos to Trade — framing them as the "gifts" that supposedly justify taking Native land

Xu Bing's Chinese title for A Book from the Sky; literally "book from the sky" or "heavenly book"; suggests a sacred, authoritative text — but the contents are entirely unreadable, exposing the gap between the authority of text and actual meaning

Mao Zedong's 1966–1976 political campaign in China; attempted to destroy traditional culture and enforce communist ideology; language, literature, and art were weaponized as ideological tools; Xu Bing's childhood was shaped by this period and it informs A Book from the Sky

Shirin Neshat's photographic series (1993–97) exploring Iranian Muslim womanhood after the 1979 revolution; Rebellious Silence is from this series; images pair gelatin silver prints of veiled women with Persian poetry calligraphed on exposed skin

Persian poetry written in Farsi calligraphy on the exposed skin (face, hands, feet) of figures in Neshat's photographs; the text is by Iranian women poets; the body becomes a page — the word and the skin are inseparable

Branch of Mahayana Buddhism focused on rebirth in Amitabha Buddha's Western Paradise (Pure Land); Mori's photograph reimagines this paradise in digital terms — a futuristic realm where technology and enlightenment merge

In Buddhism, a being who delays their own enlightenment to help others reach nirvana; Mori appears in Pure Land as a bodhisattva-like figure — a spiritual guide in a digital paradise, dressed in futuristic robes

Samoan word for canned food — a corruption of "pea soup," the first canned food introduced by colonial traders; pisupo came to mean all canned goods; Tuffery's work title uses it to name the bull made from corned beef tins

Art made from found or everyday objects assembled together; Tuffery's bull from corned beef cans; El Anatsui's bottle-cap works are also assemblage; the origin/history of materials is part of the meaning

The Dreaming (or Dreamtime) in Aboriginal Australian cosmology is not a past time but a parallel reality — past, present, and future coexist; Judy Watson's title "Everywhen" captures this non-linear time; the Pleiades star cluster is a living presence, not ancient history

Judy Watson pours or soaks pigment into unprimed canvas so it is absorbed, not applied on the surface; the mark comes from within the canvas rather than sitting on top; parallels Aboriginal understanding of country as something one is part of, not something one stands before

Kehinde Wiley's method of finding subjects: he approaches Black and Latino men on the street and invites them to pose in heroic compositions drawn from Western art history; the subjects choose which Old Master pose they will inhabit

Christo and Jeanne-Claude funded all their projects by selling preparatory drawings, collages, and early works; they refused grants, corporate sponsorship, and museum funding; this maintained absolute creative and political independence from institutional control

An artwork intentionally designed to exist for a limited time; The Gates stood 16 days; its temporariness is essential — the experience cannot be purchased, collected, or owned; the memory and the documentation are all that remain

The dispersal of a people from their homeland; Shonibare (Nigerian/British), Tuffery (Samoan/New Zealander), González-Torres (Cuban/American) all work from diaspora positions; their art negotiates between multiple cultural belongings simultaneously

The hierarchical distinction between "high" (fine art, opera, literature) and "low" (popular culture, kitsch, commercial design) culture; Koons deliberately collapses this — a glazed porcelain Pink Panther in a white-cube gallery IS fine art; Basquiat's graffiti roots challenge the same hierarchy