2. “If anything, art is...about morals,
about our belief in humanity.
Without that, there simply is no
art.”
- Ai Weiwei, Contemporary Chinese Activist Artist
3. Honoré Daumier (French Realism), The Third Class Carriage, Oil on Canvas, 1862 -64,
65.4 x 90.2 cm
4. As a graphic artist and painter, Daumier chronicled the impact of
industrialization on modern urban life in mid-nineteenth-century Paris.
Here, he amplifies the subject of a lithograph made some ten years earlier:
the hardship and quiet fortitude of third-class railway travelers. Bathed
in light, the nursing mother, elderly woman, and sleeping boy emanate a
serenity not often associated with public transport. Unfinished and squared
for transfer, this picture closely corresponds to a watercolor of 1864 (Walters
Art Museum, Baltimore) and a roughly contemporary oil (National Gallery of
Canada, Ottawa), but the sequence of the compositions remains unresolved.
Retrieved from https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/436095
6. Dorothea Lange took this photograph in 1936, while employed by the
U.S. government’s Farm Security Administration (FSA) program, formed
during the Great Depression to raise awareness of and provide aid to
impoverished farmers. In Nipomo, California, Lange came across Florence
Owens Thompson and her children in a camp filled with field workers whose
livelihoods were devastated by the failure of the pea crops. Recalling her
encounter with Thompson years later, she said, “I saw and approached the
hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember
how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she
asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer
from the same direction.” One photograph from that shoot, now known
as Migrant Mother, was widely circulated to magazines and
newspapers and became a symbol of the plight of migrant farm
workers during the Great Depression.
Retrieved from https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/dorothea-lange-migrant-mother-nipomo-
california-1936
7. Hashimoto Sadahide, Illustration from Record of Things Seen and Heard at
the Open Port of Yokohama, Ukiyo-e Woodblock Print, 1862
8. From the end of the 1850s to the early 1870s, during the period immediately after the
opening of the Treaty Ports, sensational images of "foreign things in Yokohama"
were published as woodblock prints and books targeted at a Japanese audience.
The overwhelming popularity of these Yokohama prints, or Yokohama ukiyo-e, which sold
as many as 250,000 copies between 1859 and 1862, bears witness to the insatiable
demand for this inexpensive, traditional news media featuring the latest, topical subjects.
These Yokohama ukiyo-e were seldom created from first-hand observation and often relied
heavily on illustrations from foreign newspapers like the Illustrated London News. These
illustrations were mingled with existing visual rhetoric borrowed from mid-eighteenth
century Nagasaki-e and other contemporary Yokohama prints, as well as with invented
motifs. Claiming the artist's direct observation as one of his sources, the Yokohama-based
artist, Hashimoto Sadahide, underscored the authenticity of the illustrations and texts in his
three-volume bestseller, A Record of Things Seen and Heard at the Open Port of
Yokohama, first published in 1862, with an additional three volumes in 1865. Interestingly,
all the Yokohama prints, including Sadahide's work, were silent about the more realistic
aspects of the encounter with the West. They say nothing, for instance, about the series of
bloody conflicts that occurred during the first decade after the opening of the port. Instead
they focused largely on the curious 'peculiarities' brought by the Westerners to
Yokohama - their customs, vessels, commodities, and even their bodies.
Retrieved from http://heiup.uni heidelberg.de/journals/index.php/transcultural/article/view/11067/5640
9. Socially Engaged Practice
Socially engaged practice, also referred to as social practice or socially
engaged art, can include any art form which involves people and
communities in collaboration or social interaction. This can often be
organized as the result of an outreach or education program, but many
independent artists also use it within their work. The term new genre public
art, coined by Suzanne Lacy, is also a form of socially engaged practice.
The participatory element of socially engaged practice, is key, with the
artworks created often holding equal or less importance to the
collaborative act of creating them. As Tom Finkelpearl outlines in his book
What We Made: Conversations on Art and Social Cooperation, social
practice is ‘art that’s socially engaged, where the social interaction is at
some level the art.’
Retrieved from http://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/s/socially-engaged-practice
10. Installation view of Rirkrit Tiravanija’s untitled (free/still), 2011–12, at the
Museum of Modern Art in New York
11. “I followed my nose—through the contemporary galleries of New York’s Museum of Modern
Art, into a room housing a wooden architectural frame erected around mounds of
cardboard boxes, a beat-up fridge, low tables and stools, and a serving station
complete with steaming pots and a ladle-wielding MoMA employee. I had arrived at
Rirkrit Tiravanija’s untitled (free/still). And at 12:36 p.m., I was eating piping-hot Thai green
curry (vegetarian, medium spicy), served on a scoop of rice.”
Tiravanija—who was born in 1961 to Thai parents in Buenos Aires, attended high school in
Bangkok, and now spreads his time between New York, Berlin, and Chiang Mai, Thailand
—originally staged this pungent artwork in 1992, when he moved all contents from the back
office of New York’s 303 Gallery into the exhibition space. In the back room, the artist
cobbled together a rudimentary kitchen where visitors could help themselves to a free meal
and mingle. MoMA acquired the work last year, and the wooden structure framing the
installation at the museum is a to-scale replica of 303’s office.
Earlier this year, hungry museum-goers could queue up to sample untitled (free/still) at
MoMA, where green curry and rice was dished out for three hours per day. Unlike the 1992
configuration, the food was prepared outside the room, in the museum’s cafeteria kitchen,
and ferried up to the exhibition space. (Fire regulations prohibit cooking in the galleries.) On
the afternoon of my visit, I was the 101st person to feast on Tiravanija’s art in the 36
minutes since they had begun serving, at noon.
“The work has to do with igniting some sort of commonality,” says Laura Hoptman,
curator of painting and sculpture at the museum. “It’s about eating and about talking to
people.”
Retrieved from http://www.artnews.com/2012/03/13/curry-up/
12. Tsubasa Kato, The Light Houses, Iwaki City, Fukushima Prefecture, Japan, 2011
13. Tsubasa Kato's “The Light Houses” project, held in Iwaki City on the Fukushima
coastline in November, 2011 was a sight to behold. As the evening sun cast an
orange hue over houses and buildings whose first floors were ripped apart from
the tsunami, Kato brought together a group of around 300 locals to heave on
ropes that raised a three-story wooden lighthouse. The deeply symbolic
structure, raised through a massive communal effort, seemed to shine the
light of hope into the future.
Retrieved from https://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2011/12/22/arts/seeking-solace-in-artistic-responses-to-
march-11/#.WeCxYxOCyb8
14. eL Seed (French-Tunisian artist), painted mural on 50 buildings in Cairo, Egypt, 2016
“Anyone who wants to see the sunlight clearly needs to wipe his eyes first.”
– Saint Athanasius of Alexandria, a Coptic bishop from the 3rd century
15. Activist Art
The aim of activist artists is to create art that is a form of social
currency, actively addressing cultural power structures rather than
representing them or simply describing them. In describing the art she
makes, the activist artist Tania Bruguera said, ‘I don’t want art that points to
a thing. I want art that is the thing’.
Retrieved from http://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/a/activist-art
16. Keith Haring (1958 – 1990)
American Neo-Pop Artist / Activist
Throughout his career, Haring devoted much of his time to public works, which
often carried social messages. He produced more than 50 public artworks between
1982 and 1989, in dozens of cities around the world, many of which were created for
charities, hospitals, children’s day care centers and orphanages. The now famous
Crack is Wack mural of 1986 has become a landmark along New York’s FDR Drive.
Other projects include; a mural created for the 100th anniversary of the Statue of
Liberty in 1986, on which Haring worked with 900 children; a mural on the exterior of
Necker Children’s Hospital in Paris, France in 1987; and a mural painted on the
western side of the Berlin Wall three years before its fall. Haring also held drawing
workshops for children in schools and museums in New York, Amsterdam, London,
Tokyo and Bordeaux, and produced imagery for many literacy programs and other
public service campaigns.
Haring was diagnosed with AIDS in 1988. In 1989, he established the Keith Haring
Foundation, its mandate being to provide funding and imagery to AIDS organizations
and children’s programs, and to expand the audience for Haring’s work through
exhibitions, publications and the licensing of his images. Haring enlisted his
imagery during the last years of his life to speak about his own illness and
generate activism and awareness about AIDS.
Retrieved from http://www.haring.com/!/about-haring/bio#.WeC0TROCyb8
19. Guerrilla Girls
“The Guerrilla Girls are feminist activist artists. We wear
gorilla masks in public and use facts, humor and outrageous
visuals to expose gender and ethnic bias as well as corruption in
politics, art, film, and pop culture. Our anonymity keeps the focus
on the issues, and away from who we might be: we could be
anyone and we are everywhere. We believe in an intersectional
feminism that fights discrimination and supports human rights for
all people and all genders.” - from www.guerrillagirls.com
20.
21.
22. Ai Weiwei (b. 1957)
Chinese Conceptual Artist / Activist
As an activist, Ai Weiwei calls attention to human rights violations on
an epic scale; as an artist, he expands the definition of art to include
new forms of social engagement. In a country where free speech is not
recognized as a right, the police have beaten him up, kept him under house
arrest, bulldozed his newly-built studio and subjected him to surveillance. He
is viewed as a threat to "harmonious society." The West did not invent
revolutionaries. China has an illustrious history of dissidents, anti-
authoritarian originals and eccentrics, from the drunken monks of pre-history
to counter-culture artists living in today's Beijing. Ai himself is from this long
line of free-thinkers and writers, marginalized both by the right and left. From
smashing an ancient vase to reciting the names of children who died due to
government negligence, Ai's dramatic actions highlight the widening gap
between the ideal and the real in Chinese society. He is also one of the
earliest conceptual artists to use social media - Instagram and Twitter, in
particular - as one of his primary media.
Retrieved from http://www.theartstory.org/artist-ai-weiwei.htm
24. Ai Weiwei, Remembering, 2009, backpacks on the façade of the Haus de Kunst, Munich,
Germany (Detail)
25. In 2009, Weiwei created the installation Remembering on the façade of the
Haus der Kunst in Munich, Germany. It was constructed from nine
thousand children's backpacks. They spelled out the sentence “She
lived happily for seven years in this world” in Chinese characters (this
was a quote from a mother whose child died in the earthquake).
Regarding this work, Weiwei said, “The idea to use backpacks came from
my visit to Sichuan after the earthquake in May 2008. During the earthquake
many schools collapsed. Thousands of young students lost their lives, and
you could see bags and study material everywhere. Then you realize
individual life, media, and the lives of the students are serving very different
purposes. The lives of the students disappeared within the state
propaganda, and very soon everybody will forget everything.”
Retrieved from https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/global-culture/global-art-architecture/a/ai-weiwei-
remembering-and-the-politics-of-dissent
