Quarter 1: 6 kunstenaars

Krzysztof Wodiczko is Professor in Residence of Art, Design, and the Public Domain at the GSD. He is renowned for his large-scale slide and video projections on architectural facades and monuments. He has realized more than eighty such public projections in Australia, Austria, Canada, England, Germany, Holland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Mexico, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States. Since the late 1980s, his projections have involved the active participation of marginalized and estranged city residents. Simultaneously, he has been designing and implementing a series of nomadic instruments and vehicles with homeless, immigrant, and war veteran operators for their survival and communication.

Since 1985, he has held many major retrospectives at such institutions as the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Museum Sztuki, Lodz; Fundacio Tapies, Barcelona; Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford; La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Contemporary Art Center, Warsaw; de Apel, Amsterdam, and the Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw. His work has been exhibited in Documenta, Paris Biennale, Sydney Biennale, Lyon Biennale, Venice Biennale, Whitney Biennial, Kyoto Biennale, Yokohama Triennale, and in many other major international art festivals and exhibitions. He and the architect Julian Bonder have designed the Memorial to the Abolition of Slavery in Nantes, France, which is under construction.

Wodiczko was awarded the Hiroshima Prize in 1998 for his contribution as an artist to world peace. He is also the recipient of the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture, the Georgy Kepes Award, the Katarzyna Kobro Prize, and the "Gloria Artis" Golden Medal from the Polish Ministry of Culture. In 2009 he represented Poland in the Venice Biennale, developed the War Veteran Projection Vehicle in Liverpool, the Veterans' Flame project at Governors Island in New York, and presented the "Veteran Project" (an interior video-projection installation) at the ICA in Boston. He is currently developing new public art projects in Poland and France.

Krzystof Wodickzo

American conceptual/pop artist Barbara Kruger was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1945 and left there in 1964 to attend Syracuse University. Early on she developed an interest in graphic design, poetry, writing and attended poetry readings.

After studying for a year at Syracuse she moved to New York where she began attending Parsons School of Design in 1965. She studied with fellow artists/photographers Diane Arbus and Marvin Israel, who introduced Kruger to other photographers and fashion/magazine sub-cultures. After a year at Parsons, Kruger again left school and worked at Condé Nast Publications in 1966. Not long after she started to work at Mademoiselle magazine as an entry-level designer, she was promoted to head designer a year later.

Later still she worked as a graphic designer, art director, and picture editor in the art departments at “House and Garden”, “Aperture,” and did magazine layouts, book jacket designs, and freelance picture editing for other publications. Her decade of background in design is evident in the work for which she is now internationally renowned. Like Andy Warhol, Kruger was heavily influenced by her years working as a graphic designer.

Barbara Kruger

Gran Fury

Gran Fury was an activist/artist collective that came together in 1988. They took the name Gran Fury as it was the specific Plymouth model used by the New York Police Department, for unmarked police cars. The name was also meant to reference their anger about the AIDS pandemic. Gran Fury acted as ACT UP's (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) unofficial propaganda ministry, creating work that used the same strategies as advertising to reach a wider audience.

Gran Fury did a number of works representing their outrage towards the AIDS pandemic, as well as to point out the governments lack of action towards finding a cure or informing the public. Formed as an affinity group within ACT UP to create the New Museum installation, "LET THE RECORD SHOW", founding members continued working together as an art collective. The installation included a neon version of the Silence=Death Project's already existing symbol, SILENCE=DEATH, however, underneath the pink triangle there are silhouettes of what Douglas Crimp refers to as "AIDS criminals" - people who were perpetuating silence surrounding or misrepresentations of AIDS. At the foot of each silhouette is a quote from each person impressed on a block of cement that shows their view on AIDS.

Guerrilla Girls

Guerrilla Girls were formed by 7 women artists in the spring of 1985 in response to the Museum of Modern Art's exhibition "An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture", which opened in 1984. The exhibition was the inaugural show in the MoMA's newly renovated and expanded building, and was planned to be a survey of the most important contemporary artists.

In total, the show featured works by 169 artists, of whom only 13 were female. A comment by the show's curator, Kynaston McShine, further highlighted the gendered bias of the exhibition and of MoMA as an institution: “Kynaston McShine, gave interviews saying that any artist who wasn’t in the show should rethink ‘his’ career.”In reaction to the exhibition, the Guerrilla Girls staged protests outside of the museum.
The protests yielded little success, however, and so the Guerrilla Girls embarked upon a postering campaign throughout New York City, particularly in the SoHo and East Village neighborhoods.

Once better established, the group also started taking note of racism within the art world, incorporating artists of color into their fold. They also began working on projects outside of New York, commenting on sexism and racism nationally and internationally. Though the art world has remained the group's main focus, challenging sexism and racism in films, mass and popular culture, and politics has also been part of the Guerrilla Girl's agenda. Tokenism also represents a major group concern.

Jenny Holzer

Holzer belongs to the feminist branch of a generation of artists that emerged around 1980, looking for new ways to make narrative or commentary an implicit part of visual objects. Her contemporaries include Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, Sarah Charlesworth, and Louise Lawler.
Holzer is mostly known for her large-scale public displays that include billboard advertisements, projections on buildings and other architectural structures, as well as illuminated electronic displays. The main focus of her work is the use of words and ideas in public space. Originally utilizing street posters, LED signs became her most visible medium, though her diverse practice incorporates a wide array of media including bronze plaques, painted signs, stone benches and footstools, stickers, T-shirts, paintings, photographs, sound, video, light projection, the Internet, and a Le Mans race car.

Holzer's first public works, Truisms (1977–9), appeared in the form of anonymous broadsheets that she printed anonymously in black italic script on white paper and wheat-pasted to buildings, walls and fences in and around Manhattan. These one-liners are a distillation of an erudite reading list from the Whitney Independent Study Program, where Holzer was a student. She printed other Truisms on posters, t-shirts and stickers, then carved them in the stone of public benches. In 1981, Holzer initiated the Living series, which she printed on aluminum and bronze plaques, the presentation format used by medical and government buildings. In 1982, the artist installed for the first time a large electronic sign on the Spectacolor board at Times Square, New York. Sponsored by the Public Art Fund program, the use of L.E.D. (light emitting diode) allowed Holzer to reach a larger audience. The texts in her subsequent Survival series, compiled in 1983-85, speak to the great pain, delight, and ridiculousness of living in contemporary society.

Holzer began working with stone in 1986. In her 1986 exhibition at Barbara Gladstone Gallery in New York, she introduced a total environment, where viewers were confronted with the relentless visual buzz of a horizontal LED sign and stone benches leading up to an electronic altar. This practice culminated in the installation at the Guggenheim Museum in 1989 of a 163 meter-long sign, forming a continuous circle spiraling up the parapet wall.

Klaus Staeck

Klaus Staeck grew up in the East German city of Bitterfeld. After passing the abitur in 1956 he moved to the West German city of Heidelberg where he lives down to the present day.
From 1957 until 1962 Mr Staeck studied law at Heidelberg, Hamburg, and Berlin before taking both state exams. He was admitted to the German bar in 1969.

Klaus Staeck is probably best known for his political poster art. He began to teach himself how to work as a graphic designer while pursuing his legal studies, creating posters, postcards, and flyers. In 1960, Mr Staeck became a member of Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). In the late 1960s he took part in local politics in Heidelberg. Over the years he created three hundred different motifs, drawing from current political discussions. He took sides for the poor, the environment, and for peace, urging his countrymen to join him and to interfere in political affairs. In his campaigns he employed claims such as, e.g., Deutsche Arbeiter – die SPD will euch eure Villen im Tessin wegnehmen ("German workers: the SPD seeks to take away your villas in Tessin from you"), or Die Reichen müssen noch reicher werden – deshalb CDU ("The rich must become richer yet, therefore vote CDU").

First he made woodcut prints, while from 1967 onward he changed to screen printing. Mr Staeck managed to finance his political actions by selling his artwork in Edition Tangente publishing house which later came to be known as Edition Staeck. He worked together with other political artists and writers, most notably Joseph Beuys, Panamarenko, Dieter Roth, Nam June Paik, Wolf Vostell, Daniel Spoerri, Günter Grass, Walter Jens, and Heinrich Böll who publicly spoke out in his favour. So far, Klaus Staeck was sued in 41 cases for his artwork to be banned from public, to no avail.

Since 1986 Mr Staeck has been visiting professor at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. In April 2006 he was elected president of Berlin Akademie der Künste, succeeding to Adolf Muschg who had stepped down from this position late in 2005.

http://search.atomz.com/search/?sp_a=sp10042f50&sp_f=UTF-8&sp_q=Krzysztof+Wodiczko&sp_p=all

http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/#/people/krzysztof-wodiczko.html

http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/feminist/Barbara-Kruger.html

http://search.atomz.com/search/?sp_a=sp10042f50&sp_f=UTF-8&sp_q=gran+fury&sp_p=all

http://search.atomz.com/search/?sp_a=sp10042f50&sp_f=UTF-8&sp_q=Krzysztof+Wodiczko&sp_p=all

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gran_Fury

http://search.atomz.com/search/?sp_a=sp10042f50&sp_f=UTF-8&sp_q=barbara+kruger&sp_p=all

http://genderandsocs13.wordpress.com/2013/04/07/the-guerrilla-girls-the-activist-group-of-female-artist-feminists/

http://search.atomz.com/search/?sp_a=sp10042f50&sp_f=UTF-8&sp_q=guerilla+girls&sp_p=all

http://www.artdiscover.com/en/artists/jenny-holzer-id50

http://search.atomz.com/search/?sp_a=sp10042f50&sp_q=Jenny+Holzer&sp_p=all&sp_f=UTF-8

http://search.atomz.com/search/?sp_a=sp10042f50&sp_q=Klaus+Staeck&sp_p=all&sp_f=UTF-8

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus_Staeck