Keith Sonnier was born in Louisiana in 1941. He went to Southwestern Louisiana Institute in 1963. He also went to Rutgers University in 1966, and graduated with his MFA. He studied under quite a few people and classmates where after he graduated, moved to New York City with a few of them to experiment together.

Keith Sonnier is a sculpture artist that experimented a lot with mediums. In the late 1900s he worked with latex, transmitters and incandescent light. He also started using neon light as well. He would draw in space with the neon tubes. He was one of first people in his fields to work with neon tubes. An experiments that he did with neon lights was at an installation for “Mies van der Rohe’s Neue National galerie in Berlin in 2002, entitled BA-O- BA Berlin” and since then he’s put up other temporary installations that involve neon lights. One of his more permanent works that was installed was in Los Angeles. It is called Motordom which lights up neon blue and red and is in a courtyard of Thomas Mayne.

He also did lots of work in Europe as well so a lot of his work is seen everywhere across the world. Some of the work he did are shown below:

Ba-O-Ba III  1967

BA-O-BA SERIES

Glass and Neon

Dis-Play II   1970

DIS-PLAY SERIES

Foam rubber, fluorescent powder, strobe light, black light, neon, glass

Cite: https://www.keithsonnier.net/sculpture-1970s.html

For my research post, I will be covering the American contemporary artist Kara Walker who explores themes of race, identity, gender, sexuality, and violence in her work. Walker works with a variety of mediums such as painting, installations, film, and printing, and is mostly known for her black cutout silhouettes that fill the space in a room. Walker’s work leads the audience through a critical understanding of the past by exposing the ongoing physiological damages that have been brought on by slavery and its tragic legacy. The first image I have included below is of Walker’s piece titled “Daytime Rebellion”, 2001. This piece includes a projection of colors and shapes being cast on the wall over her cutout silhouettes made from black construction paper. While the whimsical angles and decorative details may be the first thing the audience notices, the longer you stare you will realize the disturbing nature of the image dealing with themes of sexual subjection and violence. 

Robert Rauschenberg was an American painter and graphic artist born in Port Arthur, Texas who specialized in abstract expressionism. He took an experimental approach to art making which resulted in him being considered as one of the most influential American artists. Along with painting, he also worked with photography, printmaking, paper making, and performance art.

In his landmark series of Combines he mixed the materials of art making with ordinary things. With this series, Rauschenberg endowed new significance to ordinary objects by placing them in the context of art. The work ranged from free standing to wall-hung pieces, influenced by surrealism and the pop art movement.

Since her birthday is tomorrow, I decided to look at Yahoo Kusama this week. Kusama is a contemporary Japanese artist who mostly works with sculptures and installations. I also thought looking at Kusama was appropriate this week because she’s known around the world for her site-specific installations and right now we’re laying the groundwork for our site-specific installations.

Yayoi Kusama is from Matsumoto and she studied art at Kyoto City University of Arts. At the age of ten, Kusama began experiencing hallucinations. She described them as “seeing people’s auras” and also seeing lots of dots everywhere. As a result, polka dots became a life long obsession for her. Kusama says creating this polka dot art helps relieve her depression and anxiety that she has around her hallucinations. As an Asian woman, she had a really hard time beginning her career. Kusama moved to New York in hopes of “becoming a star.” She went from living a wealthy lifestyle with her family in Japan to living in poverty in America. As a result, she became a rather aggressive self-promoter.

If you’re a social media user, you’re likely familiar with what Kusama is best known for these days: her infinity rooms. Kusama creates these “infinity rooms” by placing mirrors on all four walls of a room as well as the floor and ceiling. She then creates something that will be replicated indefinitely by the reflections. These installations are super popular selfie spots, so that’s probably why you’ve seen one before.

Overall, Kusama is a super inspiring figure; she had lots of battles to fight to get to where she is today and I think we can all take something from her story.

Works cited:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yayoi_Kusama

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgSBtXNJjhs

Franz West was born on February 16, 1947, in Vienna, Austria. His father was a coal dealer while his mother was a dentist who had an interest in art herself. His mother would travel to go view different works of art, especially those in Italy. Even though he had been around art his whole life due to his mother’s interests he didn’t begin to study art with intent until his twenties. 

West began his studies of art in 1977 at the age of 30 at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna under the direction of the modern artist, Bruno Gironcoli. He first started out with drawing and moved to paint shortly after. Eventually, Franz moved to sculpture where he found the most success in his career. Materials that he would use were, paper-mache, aluminum, wire, and so many other materials. From the 1980s until his passing, on July 25, 2012, he worked on his sculptures and today can be found at the Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna located in Vienna, Austria.

Nike was born in 1964 and is 59 years old. She a leading contemporary artist from Australia. Trained as a painter, Savvas works fluidly across sculpture, installation, kinetic and light-based media. Her conceptually grounded works draw inspiration from a range of references including film, painting and systems logic. Savvas’ work is held in many public collections including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Auckland Art Gallery; Toi Art Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney and so much more. In 2012, Leeds Art Gallery (UK) showcased Savvas’s work in a major survey show titled ” Liberty and Anarchy”. In 2005, she was included in the historic exhibition Visual Music at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Savvas’ inclusion represented a significant development in the history of visual music. Savvas was the recipient of a Jury Prize (Gold Medal) 11th Triennale of India, Dehli, The Anne and Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship, the A.C.T. Creative Arts Fellowship, and an Australia Council Fellowship.

Link To Her Website/Information:

https://nikesavvas.com/about/

https://nikesavvas.com/art/

For this week, I will be covering the artist Mathias Goeritz. Goeritz was a sculptor, painter, and architect of German origin who immigrated to Mexico in the 1940’s where he was recognized as an abstract artist after his arrival. Goeritz integrated abstract forms into religious and civic structures which made a transformative impact on mid-century Mexican art and design. He founded the movement of emotional architecture and created massive concrete sculptures which established the conjunction of light, water, and color to highlight the senses and create new atmospheres. The purpose of these works were to incite sensations in the viewer through the use of space, shapes, and volume. Goeritz surpassed the emotionally practical and functional purpose of form by approaching his work with the relationship between art and spirituality in mind. Goeritz was commissioned to create a local entrepreneur’s vision of a cultural space for private purposes. Goeritz made this vision come to life by suppressing function and rationality which was unlike architecture and design at the time. The name for it was called “El Eco” and is considered a cornerstone in the modern art scene of Mexico. The last image I included is of his sketch of the space.

Chris Gilmour is a UK-born sculptural artist whose work is both selective and unique. Using only cardboard and glue, Gilmour creates large, realistic pieces. I think it’s really interesting how he comes up with so many different solutions to make the cardboard look like the appropriate objects/material, making the appearance transcend cardboard. When asked about his process and why he chooses to do this, he stated “The cardboard, although not as strong as traditional sculpture materials like marble or wood, is very flexible. In the end, my works are no more fragile than the works on paper, bronze or wood. As long as the cardboard is treated with care, it should last a lifetime; the oldest piece I have made is nearly twenty years old and is intact.” In 2006, Chris won the Premio Cairo art prize, along with multiple awards and recognitions throughout his art career. Currently, Chris is working in the film industry at a company he created called Vectar Sets. Using his sculptural problem-solving skills, Chris and his team collect sustainable materials (cardboard included) and create sets for movies and tv.

Robert Forman is a yarn/string painting artist that began his journey back during high school in 1969. Before the yarn painting, Forman was already highly skilled with drawing and then discovered he could combine his drawing skills with his mother’s embroidery threads to make paintings that utilized these threads. This technique gave birth to his specialization in making yarn paintings. Forman continued to develop his yarn painting technique well into college at The Cooper Union. Foreman graduated from The Cooper Union with a BFA in Painting for his string paintings.

Forman’s painting professor and mentor, Jack Whitten, brought Forman to Mexico where he learned that the Wixárika people, or Hurichols, use yarn painting as a traditional art form. This allowed Forman to develop relationships with other yarn painters and learn from them how they go about with their yarn paintings.

On Foreman’s website, he describes his process on how he goes about creating his paintings.

First, he creates full-scale drawings, traces them, and then transfers them over to a clayboard with carbon paper. Next, he uses Elmer’s Glue to glue yarn of various weights, colors, and materials (cotton, silk, linen, and rayon) to the clayboard. After all the yarn has covered the drawing on the clayboard, Foreman seals the finished painting with fabric glue and then frames it using a frame he built himself in his wood shop.

Foreman mentioned in an interview that his most important tool when making his paintings is a small screwdriver that he uses to press the yarn strands and move around the glue. “This screwdriver, a pair of thread snips and a small Elmer’s glue container are my indispensable tools.”

C Dutch, born in 1957, is a Southern California Contemporary Artist. He makes sculptures and paintings. Some of his materials include array discs and polymers. He has spent his artistic life exploring and experimenting with light. His work has an effect where it seems like it is lit up inside, but in reality they collect available light and amplify it back into the environment.  In the lucite box he uses in his works, light is shaped, bent and sculpted as if a solid, then blended, merged and projected, creating an illusion of three dimensionality. The colors in each piece vary based on the viewer’s position as well as the changing light throughout the day and night. 

“Light in a work can express many emotions including strength, sensitivity, awe, wonder, calm and enlightenment,”–C. Dutch