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Alison Saar
(b. 1956)
Compton Nocturne
1999
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In the second half of the twentieth century, artists seriously questioned whether or not individual originality was an essential component of being an artist and whether or not there was such a thing as ‘high’ art separate from popular culture. Whereas traditional approaches to art making did not disappear, new generations of artists rejected the emphasis on the self-contained art object in favor of happenings, performance, video and film. Artists increasingly borrowed imagery from popular culture in order to redefine our expectations as to what art is and how it should (or should not) function. At the same time, the art market and the museum world expanded greatly and contemporary artists were given more opportunity to experiment with new media. Museums, universities and galleries have since worked to assimilate and interpret the wide variety of new art forms that comprise the contemporary art world.
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Collection Highlights
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Robert Overby
(1935-1993)
Yellow Door with Bumps
1972
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Robert Overby believed that everything you needed to make art, both in material and subject, was "in your backyard." Yellow Door with Bumps is an "image" of one of several doors Overby cast from latex in 1972. Like many artists of his generation, Overby was intensely engaged with the physical properties inherent in the often non-art materials that he employed. For Overby, latex was a material with conceptual as well as physical characteristics. Latex quite accurately records the surface to which it is applied (and then removed), and one of the great pleasures of Overby’s casts is the variety and sensuousness of their surfaces. In its scale and two-dimensionality, the piece can be considered as a large monochromatic painting. Yet to him, categories were shifting, fluid and even compound: he variously characterized his work as "representational painting," "photographic," and "like a print."
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Gregory Crewdson
(1962)
Untitled
1998
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We no longer count on photographs to be truthful records of reality. Staged photographs like this one by Gregory Crewdson have more to do with fiction than fact, and as much to do with filmmaking as they do with traditional camera work. Like a filmmaker, Crewdson can spend upwards of a month preparing a scene before he "shoots" it, and he works with a cast and crew of actors and technicians. In this mysterious scene, what may be a brother and sister are immersed in a strange ritual in their suburban living room. Their actions seem possessed by forces beyond their cognition or control. Instead of directing us through editing and movement, like a film, Crewdson’s uncanny still images encourage the viewer to invent his or her own narrative. |
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Dona Nelson
(b. 1947)
Octopus Blue
1991-92
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Dona Nelson is an artist passionate about paint, color and the surface of her canvases. Octopus Blue is the result of immersion in the act of applying paint, in the color blue itself, and in the search for unusual textures in a finished painting. So emotionally and physically engaged is she in her work that Nelson calls Octopus Blue a "self-portrait like a lot of my painting." Part of the meaning in Nelson’s work is the sensual stimulation derived from both making a painting like this, and in looking at it—that is, she was moved in the creation of it and perhaps the viewer will be moved likewise. As the image in Octopus Blue takes on the writhing and mysterious rhythms of a sea creature, Nelson suggests that the dark and mythic nature of an octopus is not unlike the dark and mythic nature of painting. |
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Robert Rauschenberg
(b. 1925)
Straw-Boss
1962
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The early 1960’s art world embraced popular culture and its wealth of material imagery. Both Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol experimented with silkscreening found photographic images onto canvas in a deliberate statement against original handmade objects. Straw-Boss exemplifies and illustrates the adventuresome artistic spirit of this era in its combination of Apollo space program rockets, baseball scenes, automobile bumpers, and repetitive views of two posed hands that refer to these pulse-quickening images. |
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Stuart Klipper
(b. 1941)
Ice Front of the Ross Ice Shelf, Ross Sea, East of Cape Crozier, ross I.—from the USCGC HH-1 ‘Dolphin’ Helicopter, Antarctica
1992
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Stuart Klipper has made six trips to the polar regions since 1976. Between 1989 and 1994, Klipper returned to Antarctica three times. He is an artist who still finds nature to be all-inspiring and capable of giving the viewer visual metaphors for all kinds of experience, including emotional, intellectual, and spiritual. "Places tell you something about their own essence," he says, "so you don’t have to carry your own satchel of content." By this, he is saying in part that nature carries its own structure and operates within timeless forces regardless of anyone’s own personal, present-day interpretation of it. As a photographer, Klipper stresses clarity of forms within large formats to convey the powerful, larger-than-life "essence" of the landscape, making him a part of a vital tradition in American landscape art that has existed now for two centuries. |
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Alison Saar
(b. 1956)
Compton Nocturne
1999
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Alison Saar’s work raises issues of personal, racial and gender identity and thereby reflects several major concerns of the art of the last decade. This particular piece carries a number of potent references: fertility and transformation; the relationship between nature and culture as well as between natural and found materials; the use of bottles to ward off evil spirits (a very Southern idea); and even the suggestion that the bottles may be some kind of elaborate mechanism for hair-processing. By combining visual echoes of classical art with the eclectic use of materials common in contemporary art, Saar brings fresh meaning to the timeless subject of woman as recumbent Venus or goddess. |
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