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

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…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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