OK, once again I've had to discuss why I teach real art history to empower artists, when I could just propagandize them in the latest consensus correct attitudes of a history no longer than a decade ago, or alternatively why I have expanded the coverage to areas beyond central Euros. So read my darn dissertation chapter about it and get over it --- or hopefully enjoy it.
Young artists love my approach and are demanding it and are empowering themselves.
Jennifer Karmin's text-sound epic, Aaaaaaaaaaalice, was published by Flim Forum Press in 2010. She curates the Red Rover Series and is co-founder of the public art group Anti Gravity Surprise. Her multidisciplinary projects have been presented at festivals, artist-run spaces, community centers, and on city streets across the U.S., Japan, and Kenya. At home in Chicago, Jennifer teaches creative writing to immigrants at Truman College and works as a Poet-in-Residence for the public schools.
Artist Jack Whitten paints a verbal picture of his memorial art, in talking with Stuart Horodner, curator of the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center. For the past 40 years, New York-based painter Jack Whitten has created elaborately constructed abstract paintings, which are conceived to memorialize various cultural figures (artists, musicians, dancers, politicians, writers), family members, and tragic events that have shaped his life. Whitten has studied the historical impulses behind the honoring of the dead (in various cultures through time) and he has developed a contribution to the notion of abstraction and representation. In the 70s he did some amazing paintings pre-figuring Richter's abstraction by decades.
