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2008 Summer

That Was Then...This Is Now: Dreams

Lia Gangitano

Emory Douglas

Poster from The Black Panther

1969

Offset lithograph

Collection of Alden and Mary Kimbrough

The Dreams section that makes up one third of That Was Then…This Is Now highlights the political and social concerns brought forth by artists such as Emory Douglas, Lawrence Weiner, Sister Corita Kent, and Dan Graham—whose work from the late ‘60s and ‘70s continues to influence subsequent generations of artists including Michael Lazarus, Josephine Meckseper, and Carrie Moyer. The Dreams section includes future-oriented and activist art such as political posters and graphics, and addresses the legacies of utopia and protest in works such as Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ Untitled (Loverboy), 1989.

The artists Sister Corita Kent and Emory Douglas used graphics and signs to engage directly in the political movements of their time. Douglas’ graphic art has become the iconic representation of the Black Panthers’ civil rights message and Sister Corita’s serigraphs deployed popular cultural references to speak out against the Vietnam War. Both artists apply text and symbols amidst graphic lines with a bold palette. Carrie Moyer draws directly from the style of Sister Corita and the image reservoir of Douglas. In the center of Moyer’s painting, Burn a Bush (2003), a striking red fist dripping with washes of glitter acts as a distinct gesture to both Sister Corita and the women’s liberation movement. Moyer has a background in graphic design and her work often combines a language of overt symbols with abstraction. Michael Lazarus’s paintings also echo the graphic lines of Douglas’s posters (with patterns reminiscent of Constructivist political imagery that they share) while producing their own visual vocabulary of signs.

Against the repressive forces concretized in institutional architecture, for example, the wild futurisms of the past and the visionary authors who imagined them have always existed—with or without the actual technological means to realize their dreams. Not always explicitly oppositional, such projects were oriented toward a different future than the one we typically experience today. Dan Graham’s model, Pavilion/Sculpture for Argonne (1978), constructed out of wood, mirror and Plexiglas, is exemplary of his interest in design functioning as art and art as design. Graham suggested this model as a commission for an energy research facility near Chicago. Artists such as Graham have sought to integrate themes from popular culture and politics within radical intellectual frameworks to expand the fields of art and architecture, mainly through works made of paper, cardboard, and unaided by computers.

Paired with Weapons and Flags, Dreams provides a rich context that exemplifies innovative hopes, ideas, and tools from both past and present.

These works and many others in the Dreams section of That Was Then…This Is Now can be found in the Mini-Kunsthalle, Project Rooms and in the room adjacent to the Kunsthalle.