Looking for inspiration for your “Portraits of the Pandemic” exhibition submission? What about some inspiration from art history?
Featured Historic Self Portrait: Jacob Lawrence
American artist Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000) was best known for his dynamic and vibrant depictions of African American life and history. Unlike many artists, he rarely engaged in self-portraiture. In a rare self-portrait Lawrence portrayed himself as an artist in his studio in Seattle, Washington. The artist is surrounded by his tools and materials–tubes and jars of paint, clamps, a drill, a lathe, and a hammer. On the left, one of Lawrence’s paintings hangs on the wall. It is an image of Harriet Tubman leading slaves to freedom, originally executed for a children’s book, Harriet and the Promised Land.
Jacob Lawrence, Self-Portrait, 1977. Gouache and tempera on paper.
In a self-portrait rendered in ink over graphite on paper, Lawrence concentrated his appearance into a few essential lines and shapes. A black arc describes the shape of his skull. His mustache is a complex of wavy lines flanked by heavier curves evoking folds of aging flesh. Lawrence left most of his face white to set off the abstracted black shapes of his nose, eyes, mouth, and mustache.
Jacob Lawrence, Self-Portrait, 1993, Ink over graphite on paper
Feeling inspired? Click the link below for information on how to submit your self-portrait:
Chinese artist Ai Weiwei produces sculptural installations, architectural projects, photographs and videos. He is known for the frequently provocative and subversive dimension of his art, as well as his political outspokenness, which has triggered various forms of repression from Chinese authorities.
Ai lives with more than 30 cats in his Beijing studio. Offering him daily solace, he often posts pictures of them on social media. He has a profound connection to animals writing in a blog post, “The cats and dogs in my home enjoy high status; they seem more like the lords of the manor than I do. The poses they strike in the courtyard often inspire more joy in me than the house itself.”
Agnes Bernice Martin (1912-2004) was an American-Canadian painter known for her pared down geometric abstractions. Her work has been defined as an “essay in discretion on inward-ness and silence”. Martin is often considered a minimalist and her work was influenced by Taoist and other eastern philosophies.
Like her art, her daily life and dietary habits were marked by restraint and simplicity. After she left the bustle of New York in the mid-1960s, she settled in the New Mexican desert. There, she lived a mostly solitary life, which she believed kept her mind clear and gave her more time and energy to paint. Her diet was not surprisingly simple and repetitive. One winter, she consumed only walnuts, hard cheeses, and preserved tomatoes grown in her garden; another season, she subsisted on a concoction of gelatin, orange juice, and bananas. In times of intense artistic output, her go to snack was bananas and coffee. As Martin entered her eighties, she began to loosen up, allowing herself the occasional martini.
Looking for inspiration for your “Portraits of the Pandemic” exhibition submission? What about some inspiration from art history?
Featured Historic Self Portrait: Gustave Courbet
French painter Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) was the leader of the Realism movement in 19th-century French painting. Rejecting academic convention and the Romanticism of the previous generation of visual artists, Courbet’s work reflected the unvarnished truth of life as he saw it.
Gustave Courbet, Le Désespéré (1845)
Courbet made numerous self-portraits, both as a method off self-promotion and as a way of finding his artistic style. For an artist who espoused realism many of his self-portraits are decidedly romantic in nature. His self-portrait Le Désespéré (1845) nearly leaps off the canvas. It shows the wild-eyed 24-year old artist staring out at the viewer, his hands tearing at his unkempt hair. Courbet presents himself as the tortured genius struggling for recognition and something to eat.
The self-portrait meant a great deal to Courbet as he took it with him to exile in Switzerland and it remained in his studio until his death.
Misplaced by History: Artists Worth Knowing Gwendolyn (Gwen) Ann Magee
“The art flows through me but does not belong to me alone. It speaks for those who have no voices, whose voices have been ignored, whose voices have been silenced. It relates history and circumstances that must not be forgotten.”
Gwendolyn (Gwen) Ann Magee
Gwendolyn (Gwen) Ann Magee (1943 – 2011) was an African-American fiber artist. Magee learned to quilt in mid-life and quickly became known for her powerful abstract and narrative quilts depicting the African American experience. Her art was informed by her participation in the civil rights movement, careers in social work and business, and her experiences as a wife, mother, and grandmother.
Magee’s childhood in North Carolina was spent surrounded by art publications and visits to museums in New York with her adoptive mother, a schoolteacher. Fascinated with color, Magee recalled trying to dig into paper with crayons to achieve the depths and intensities that could match the brilliant hues in her mind’s eye. The power of color became a signature of her mature work.
Magee enrolled in the Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina (UNC) in Greensboro. UNC was in its fourth year of desegregation, and Magee was one of five African Americans in her class. Greensboro was a center of civil rights activities, and Magee became active in local demonstrations against segregation in the community, an experience that would later influence her artistic vision.
Following her graduation in 1963 with a B.A. in sociology, Jones continued graduate study in social science at Kent State and Washington universities. She married D. E. Magee, an ophthalmologist in 1969. The couple moved to Jackson, Mississippi, where they established careers and raised two daughters.
Wanting to make quilts for her daughters to take to college, Magee enrolled in a quilting class in 1989. That class lead to increasing interest in quilting, particularly as it related to other African American quilters. Initially working in traditional quilting methods, she soon moved into abstract designs, and then references to African culture using textile and design traditions. Her vision expanded to include her concern with social justice and African American history and culture.
Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Magee used her quilts to bring attention to racial injustices of the past and the present. Many of her quilts, including When Hope Unborn Had Died, narrate the impact of slavery in the United States. From 2000 to 2004, Magee worked on a series of twelve quilts inspired by the song “Lift Every Voice and Sing” by James Weldon Johnson. Through her textile art, Magee has also responded to contemporary events. In response to the state of Mississippi voting to keep the Confederate battle cross in their state flag, she created Southern Heritage/Southern Shame in 2001, with layered images of the Confederate flag,
Said Magee, “I see art as a form of communication, a conversation between me, the artist, and the viewer. Each viewer brings different experiences, interacts with the work differently, even if it is two friends standing side by side.” Magee felt her quilts spoke a language that everyone could understand. “My hope is that anyone, no matter what their race or culture, will relate to the work, find something that speaks directly to them. Hopefully, it will continue to speak to people years after I am gone.” She died in Jackson in 2011, age 67, after battling a long-term illness.
Magee’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Mississippi Museum of Art, the Museum of Mississippi History, the Michigan State University Museum, and the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, and has been exhibited internationally.
Let’s Talk About Art – Toyokuni’s “Geisha and Warrior”
Image Credit: Toyokuni, “Geisha and Warrior”, ca. 1860, Japanese Print, 14 1/2 x 9 3/4 inches, Collection of the Dubuque Museum of Art, N.D.14 (N.D.276). Open Access, Public Domain,
oking for inspiration for your “Portraits of the Pandemic” exhibition submission? What about some inspiration from art history?
Featured Historic Self Portrait:Kathe Kollwitz
Kathe Kollwitz (1867–1945) was a leading twentieth-century German printmaker and sculptor who explored the themes of motherhood, oppression, death, war and sacrifice. Much of her work is autobiographical and self-portraiture was one of her chief forms of expression.
From age 18, when she was an art student in Berlin, until she reached 76, two years before her death at the end of the Second World War, Kollwitz created more than 100 self-portraits. Kollwitz battled depression throughout her life, but it was the tragic death of her son at the onset of World War I that left an indelible mark on her spirit. Her self-portraits capture the depth of raw emotion of an artist who was tormented by great loss, grief and pain.
Berenice Abbott (1898-1991) documented the urban landscape of New York City with her with her wide-format camera in the 1920s and ’30s. Known for her signature bird’s-eye and worm’s-eye points-of-view, Abbott helped shape how others saw the evolving urban landscape. Abbott also redefined gender roles, unapologetically wearing ski pants rather than skirts and living with her life partner, art critic Elizabeth McCausland for decades. Abbott was a lover of cats, both real and in images. She was known to keep in touch with her friends by sending them cat postcards she found in museum gift shops.
