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Seeing America – topic: The Cold War media and popular culture

Marisol Escobar, The Party, 1965-66, fifteen freestanding, life-size figures and three wall panels, with painted and carved wood, mirrors, plastic, television set, clothes, shoes, glasses, and other accessories, variable dimensions (Toledo Museum of Art, © artist’s estate) — At this party, everyone has the same face and seems profoundly alone.

Fashion & alienation in 1960s New York

by Dr. Halona Norton-Westbrook, Toledo Museum of Art and Dr. Steven Zucker

Jess (Burgess Franklin Collins), If All the World Were Paper and All the Water Sink, 1962, oil on canvas, 96.5 x 142.2 cm (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco) © the artist's estate — From the Manhattan Project to nursery rhymes, a collision of art and science.

If All the World Were Paper…

by Emma Acker at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and Dr. Beth Harris

Robert Rauschenberg, Retroactive I, 1963, oil and silkscreen-ink print on canvas, 213.4 x 152.4 cm (Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art) All works © Robert Rauschenberg — A portrait of a president transformed by tragedy.

Rauschenberg’s Homage to JFK

by Patricia Hickson, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art and Dr. Steven Zucker

Gary Winogrand, Democratic National Convention, Los Angeles, 1960 (printed c. 1980), gelatin silver print, 45.88 x 30.8 cm (Minneapolis Institute of Art, © The Estate of Gary Winogrand). — Go backstage at the 1960 Democratic National Convention with photographer Gary Winogrand.

JFK and the power of media

by Dr. Robert Cozzolino, Minneapolis Institute of Art and Dr. Steven Zucker

Mark Rothko, No. 210/No. 211 (Orange), 1960, oil on canvas, 175.3 x 160 cm (Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art) — Spirituality and transcendence were important postwar themes expressed in Rothko's work.

Transcendence and Cold War

by Dr. Margaret C. Conrads and Dr. Steven Zucker

Maya Lin, Vietnam Veterans Memorial, 1982, granite, 2 acres within Constitution Gardens, (National Mall, Washington, D.C.) — A powerful accumulation of names is inscribed on slabs of reflective stone that cuts into the earth on the Mall.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial

by Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker

Claes Oldenburg, Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks, 1969-74, cor-ten steel, aluminum, cast resin, polyurethane enamel, 740 × 760 × 330 cm, Yale University (photo: vige, CC: BY 2.0) — This sculpture, installed on the Yale campus during Vietnam War protests, was never meant to be permanent.

Protesting the Vietnam War, with lipstick

by Dr. Mya Dosch

Nam June Paik, Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii, 1995, fifty-one channel video installation (including one closed-circuit television feed), custom electronics, neon lighting, steel and wood; color, sound, approx. 15 x 40 x 4' (Smithsonian American Art Museum) (© Nam June Paik Estate) — The “father of video art” argued that electronic communication, not transportation, unites the modern world.

Television nation

by Tina Rivers Ryan

Jasper Johns, Flag, 1954-55 (dated on reverse 1954), encaustic, oil, and collage on fabric mounted on plywood, three panels, 42-1/4 x 60-5/8" / 107.3 x 153.8 cm (MoMA) — The American flag is a potent symbol that has different meanings for different viewers.

Icon and irony: Jasper Johns, Flag

by Sal Khan and Dr. Steven Zucker

Ruth Asawa, Untitled, c. 1958, iron wire, 219.7 × 81.3 × 81.3 cm Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. — Asawa was interned in World War II, but we must be careful about interpreting her artworks as related to that trauma.

From wire to weightlessness

by Allison Glenn, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and Dr. Beth Harris

Andy Warhol, Coca-Cola [3], 1962, casein on canvas, 176.2 x 137.2 cm (Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts) — Warhol’s art celebrates the consumerism and advertising that inundated American culture in the 1960s.

Consumers, Warhol, and 1960s America

by Alejo Benedetti, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and Dr. Steven Zucker