Contemporary Voices and Issues Teacher Resources

Artists Respond to Pivotal Events

Lava Thomas on Requiem For Charleston

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Lava Thomas discusses her work Requiem for Charleston, which honors the nine men and women who died in a shooting on June 17, 2015, inside the Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. The artist explains her use of materials, including tambourines, black lambskin, black acrylic disks, and pyrographic calligraphy.

With Requiem for Charleston, Lava Thomas honors the nine men and women who were murdered on June 17, 2015, inside the Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.

Nick Cave on Soundsuit

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Artist Nick Cave discusses his work “Soundsuit.”

NICK CAVE: Hi, I'm Nick Cave, a visual artist, speaking at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

The first "Soundsuit" came about in '92 and it was in response to the Rodney King incident. It was a really, really difficult time for me. As a young, Black male, I was really questioning everything, and so feeling dismissed, discarded, viewed less than—I was just trying to process that. What does that mean? How does that relate to who I am and what it is that I'm trying to do?

I found myself one day in the park. I looked down on the ground and there was this twig. I just started collecting these twigs. I had no idea how they were going to be used, but then I brought them back to the studio and started to build this object.

Subconsciously, yes, I knew it was a garment of some sort, but I was not thinking about it in that way. I was thinking about it as a form, as this sculpture, building this surface and then I realized I could put it on. The moment I put it on and started to move it made sound.

I've made maybe 500, maybe even more, of this particular sort of form. Why do I continue this body of work? I think it's as simple as these issues still continue to be relevant in my life. At the end of the day, it's all about power and it's all about standing up. How do we confront and stand up to something?

The particular piece that's here at the museum, I was thinking about, in terms of getting to the form, was ideas of power. I started to think about the miter hat form, the Klan uniform, the head of a missile, head of a condom. I put all of that together and that's how this form came about.

There's two parts of that piece that are relevant. At the lower right-hand side there is this doily that looks like a pretzel, that's somewhat large. It's that kind of object that determines how the rest of the piece is going to be handled. It's really about where do I place that to where it really becomes a real signifier within the rest of the development of the surface. Also, the bottle cap doilies that are on the back of that particular piece. Being able to collect a collection of maybe 20 of those, and that just offers a different kind of surface application. It's almost sort of like a form of body adornment. There is this raised surface that happens within that piece.

I think when I looked at the piece today—I hadn't seen it in a long time—it’s always interesting to come to the museums and see a piece. I looked at that particular doily and thought that was the reason why this piece happened. It's nice to be able to know the starting point within a work and how that dictates how I'm going to treat the rest of the surface.

Nick Cave created his first Soundsuit in response to the 1991 beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles County Police Department officers. The Soundsuit in SAAM’s collection is one of approximately five hundred Soundsuits the artist has made over the years.

Alredo Jaar on Life Magazine, April 19, 1968

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When Chilean-born artist Alfredo Jaar moved to New York in 1982, he was troubled to discover that racial tensions still ran high long after the civil rights movement had passed its zenith. In Life Magazine, April 19, 1968, he manipulated the iconic photograph of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s funeral procession to highlight the disparity between the number of black and white mourners. Jaar's decision to present the work as a triptych, a traditional format for Christian altarpieces, helps identify King as a martyr.

Alfredo Jaar altered an iconic photograph of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.‘s 1968 funeral procession to highlight the disparity between the number of black and white mourners.

Eric Fischl on Ten Breaths: Tumbling Woman II

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Born in New York City, Eric Fischl received his B.F.A. degree from the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia in 1972. Two years later he became an assistant professor at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, where he continued teaching until 1978. In the 1980s Fischl's large figurative paintings, aggressive in their confrontation with the viewer, began to receive substantial attention. Along with painting, he turned to photography and monotypes. His 1990 series of Beach paintings drew on photographic sources. Since the late 1970s, Fischl's work has been widely shown in solo and group exhibitions in the United States and Canada. Solo shows of his paintings were presented at the Dalhousie Art Gallery in Halifax, Galerie B in Montreal, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Mary Boone Gallery in New York. In 1991 Fischl exhibited his monotypes at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College.

ERIC FISCHL: The way I would paint in the early paintings was I'd take a 3 x 5-inch snapshot, and I had a film loop, and I'd look at that figure, and I would like then try to paint and draw it onto the canvas. Then I'd be sitting there going, “Oh, I really wish it was turned the other way,” and then I'd have to erase it and sort of flip it around in my head, reversing what I was seeing. It became a very arduous kind of a process, and then Photoshop comes along.

In the family portrait of the Clementes, the experience of photographing them was very funny because they were not wanting to be in the same moment with each other. They were, you know, skulking around in the background or they were coming in late and had to be sort of Photoshopped into that moment or, you know, whatever. They were moving in different spaces in different ways.

Literally pulling them together for the portrait was a collage, not a frozen moment. I wanted there to be a sense of that kind of pulling together and fragmenting, that collage effect has. You'll see that there's an irrationality to space and planes in it. The bench that the two daughters are sitting on comes in at an impossible angle. There's a shift in the speed of the background from a focused one side to a blurred other side. You know, there's a scale shift that takes place between the figures and the family. All of those things, I felt, were expressive of the experience that I had in trying to capture this family.

Sculpture I arrived at much later. I began making sculpture in 1986-87, something like that.

The tragedy and trauma of 9/11 was that 3,000 people died, but you saw no bodies, so it was a disappearance. It was hard to find closure for this trauma. The only thing that we really saw was the people who jumped or fell from the buildings, and that was censored very quickly. Anyone who saw those images or saw the actual thing—that was the indelible experience. That was the one that drove home the terror and the horror of that event. I was watching it on television the way most Americans were watching it, and at some point in the midst of this horror, this tragedy, I had this very strong feeling that if artists were ever needed, now would be the time that they were needed. That began my thinking process of how would I respond to this tragedy? How would I respond to this horror?

I had this very strong feeling that we had been thrown off balance in a profound way, that we were, in fact, almost like sagebrush. We were all in the state of tumbling along, and out of it I created this sculpture called “Tumbling Woman.” I made it purposefully a female but with a sort of masculine torso as well, so that it pulled both the male and female into a singularity because to me represented all of us. But I wanted it to be a female, because the female historically brings with it ideas of nurturing and vulnerability. You know, the need and desire in men to protect, things like that. So, I felt that added to the experience that I was looking for.

Eric Fischl’s sculpture calls attention to the human dimension of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York City.

Shifting States: Iraq by Luis Cruz Azaceta

SAAM Curator E. Carmen Ramos explains how artist Luis Cruz Azaceta responded to the series of uprisings across the Middle East in the early 2010s collectively referred to as the Arab Spring.

Lalo Alcaraz’s I Stand with Emma

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Join Claudia Zapata, curatorial assistant for Latinx art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum for a closer look. Learn how <em>I Stand with Emma,</em> an artwork that was created and distributed within the digital sphere, honors the traditions of Chicanx artists while also embracing new digital landscapes for printmaking and celebrating a new generation of activists, "guiding us towards a better tomorrow."

This video is part of the Smithsonian American Art Museum's ongoing series American Art Moments. Join a SAAM expert and go beyond the artwork label to discover the untold stories and rich connections represented in some of the museum's most iconic artworks.

Image: "L.A. Stands With Emma, Too"
February 19, 2018
Photograph by Robb Wilson
Robb Wilson Flickr
CC BY-SA 2.0

CLAUDIA ZAPATA: “I Stand with Emma” is a digital image created in 2018 by Los Angeles-based artist Lalo Alcaraz. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in editorial cartooning. He’s most well-known for his syndicated cartoon strip “La Cucaracha.” Lalo Alcaraz has this history of reacting to major news events.

On February 14th, 2018, seventeen people were murdered at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. And then, on February 17th, Emma Gonzalez gives the impassioned “We Call BS” speech. The following day, Lalo Alcaraz shares the “I Stand with Emma” image to all of his social media platforms and his personal website, because he wanted to support the cause immediately. Originally, it did not exist in an object form, so Lalo Alcaraz created this using digital tablets and image editing software.

The Never Again movement is a student-led organization that was created by the survivors from the Marjory Stoneman Douglas shooting, and they’re really a large group of people. And I think he chose Emma Gonzales because she does have a very iconic look. You see her from afar because of her shaved head. She does stand out. Even though she has this very unique style, she is really more of a symbol of a youth movement.

There’s this connotation of Generation Z, or Gen Z, being very active, and that’s true, but there’s also a legacy of teenage activists going back to, for example, 1955, with Claudette Colvin. She was someone who was challenging the bus segregation laws. Or, in 1968, the east LA Chicano walkouts, or the blowouts, were part of this student movement for better education in the public schools.

Emma is a legacy of student activists, someone who knows that oppression is ageless. No matter what age you are, legislation can affect you, and you can also react and demand a change to that. And even within the “We Call BS” speech, Emma Gonzalez mentions high school classes; she calls herself a kid and other people who are survivors kids, so that’s why the hashtag is “#standwiththekids,” because it’s very much about showing her age, but also showing the maturity despite her age. So, usually you see hashtags affixed to captions, for example, on social media. What’s interesting about Lalo affixing this to the actual composition is that it really showcases creating a community or a digital allyship.

The red and black really reminded me of the United Farm Workers movement color palettes. It’s definitely this connotation with, like, labor activism. It’s meant to be very bold and striking and to catch your attention so that you can affix yourself to Emma Gonzalez and her advocacy when you’re wielding this poster in a protest.

“I Stand with Emma” is part of a legacy of portraiture that Chicano artists constantly come back to, because they’re often reclaiming the image of someone within their community, or oftentimes, someone they want to make sure is remembered, quite simply. So, Lalo Alcaraz is really interesting because he doesn’t put Emma’s full name, he just puts “I Stand with Emma.” And it reminds me, very similarly, of Barbara Carrasco’s “Dolores” screen print from 1999, where she just puts “Dolores” in hopes that this person should be renowned enough and remembered enough to where you know them by their first name. So, “I Stand with Emma” really thrust her into this historiography of changemakers.

What’s interesting is that instead of a man or a heteronormative family, a woman, a queer woman, is this symbol for change. It’s a young woman that’s going to guide us to a better tomorrow.

Artist Lalo Alcaraz created the striking digital portrait I Stand with Emma of Emma González after watching the high school senior advocate for stronger gun control in an impassioned speech days after surviving the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Learn how I Stand with Emma, an artwork that was created and distributed within the digital sphere, honors the traditions of Chicanx artists while also embracing new digital landscapes for printmaking.

Native Artists Creating during the COVID-19 Pandemic

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Join three experts from across the Smithsonian as they come together to look at protective masks made by Native artists during the COVID-19 pandemic. Anya Montiel, curator of American and Native American Women’s Art and Craft at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, is joined by Alexandra M. Lord, curator and chair in Division of Medicine and Science at the National Museum of American History, and Cécile R. Ganteaume, curator at the National Museum of the American Indian, for this engaging virtual discussion. Learn more about the medical history of masks and their use as well as the impact of COVID-19 on Indigenous communities in the United States.

Watch experts from across the Smithsonian come together to look at protective masks made by Native artists during the COVID-19 pandemic, including three masks acquired by the Smithsonian American Art Museum: Katrina Mitten's MMIW (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women), Vicki Lee Soboleff's Yellow Cedar Face Mask, and Marlana Thompson's Ononkwashon: a/Medicine Plants.

Artists Explore Identity and Representation

Mickalene Thomas on Her Materials and Artistic Influences

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Artist Mickalene Thomas discusses her use of craft materials, her artistic influences, and the importance of seeing oneself represented in museums. Read a web comic from Drawn to Art that illustrates the artist's words.

MICKALENE THOMAS: Hi, I'm Mickalene Thomas. I'm here at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

I guess my appeal to craft materials is also another historical reference to women making art. When I was in undergrad, I couldn't always afford oil paint. Because I was in a school and still had to make work, I had to figure out ways in which to still make my art and not limit myself to “I can't make my art, because I don't have oil paint or acrylic paint.” So I gravitated toward non-traditional materials that were considered maybe, for some, a low art, but also to others a high art, if you look at outsider artists, right? I began going to Michaels craft stores, because I could afford felt, and I could afford yarn, and I could afford these little bags of rhinestones or glitter. I could get an abundance of those versus a tube of paint.

I began to acquire these materials and find meanings and ways to use them in my own work as a way of identifying myself but also making an image. That's something that I also push forward with some of my students is not to limit yourself with what you can't do, but just try to think of what you can do and use those materials that are within your own environment to make something.

When I was living in Portland, Oregon I would go to this bookstore called Powell's Books. Within the stacks of their books, I would just go up and down the aisle pulling out books on African-American artists. I remember looking at a William H. Johnson monograph and thinking at that time, "Oh, this is catalogue raisonné" and thinking how his sensibility of his line, representation of his journeys, and the people in his environment, and depicting his world, and depicting African-American lifestyles was a direct representation of who I was. It's really important for me, as an artist, to have a representation of myself so that youth could see themselves in these particular environments like museums. When they see my work, with all the art history, whether it's from William H. Johnson, to someone like David Hockney or Matisse, that when they're standing here that they see themselves.

Mickalene Thomas discusses her gravitation towards non-traditional materials, her artistic influences, and the importance of seeing oneself represented in museums.

Kerry James Marshall on SOB, SOB

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An interview with artist Kerry James Marshall at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Kerry James Marshall is one of the leading contemporary painters of his generation. Over the span of his career, he has become internationally known for monumental images of African American history and culture.

KERRY JAMES MARSHALL: Cornel West had a phrase that I was really struck by when I first read it. He said, "There are things that you cannot not know." When it comes to history, and in particular to the history of African Americans, or Africans in America, there are things that you cannot not know.

Really, in order to have a complete understanding of where you are situated in your own present moment, you have to locate yourself in relationship to some parts of history. That's a lot of what this picture is kind of about.

If you came to my house and looked through my library, you would see my wife and I have a huge concentration of books that are on African history, African-American history, American history, African culture. All of those different aspects of the history of Black people from around the world. If you look through the titles of the books, you'll see that the range of subjects that they cover relative to Black history, culture, and also the kinds of stories that Black people tell is really broad.

A part of the reason some of those titles are there is to introduce some of those authors and some of those books to the art viewing public. The painting is as much an invitation to also come to know as it is demonstration of the kind of conflicts in knowledge that somebody who has already arrived at this knowledge might experience.

Our conception of what constitutes the best that can be done in artwork still revolves around those paintings that are the foundation of art history, and those paintings all have a European origin. Our concept of what's beautiful and what's important operates within that realm, as well. For me, as an African American or a Black person going to the museum and looking at those works, even though I like a lot of things I might be looking at, there really is a limit to your ability to appreciate things that don't include you as a fundamental part of their value system.

For me, the only way to really come to terms with that is to introduce images that contain Black figures and not Black figures they were marginal in terms of their position in the narrative but central to the narrative. I committed myself to only making Black figures in my paintings because there are not enough paintings in museums anywhere, really, that have black figures as the central subject of those pictures.

One of the devices artists use to encourage people to think again about the importance of a thing is to change the scale of the object. If you have things that we're used to seeing in a really small format, if you double that size or increase it exponentially, then all the sudden it assumes a lot more importance than it would have if it remained at the scale that we commonly experience those things at.

I did make the frame. It's a way of kind of locating it amongst the kind of common, popular, vernacular approach. It seems like something that’s more familiar to people who often think of museums and artworks as really, really distant from their experiences. If you come up to a thing that has got this really ornate, gold frame and you look at the picture inside and you don't like it, then that becomes that thing where people say, “Well, I just must not be smart enough.” Those people don't come back to the museum, more times than not.

A part of what I was trying to do was to create a garment that didn't have a place in time—that couldn't be located as a kind of ‘70s fashion, or ‘80s fashion, or ‘50s fashion because there's nothing like that that has ever existed. It becomes a curious artifact of the picture. It's sort of this ambivalent zone, too, so you can't quite place it. You don't quite know what it is. It's odd, and it's sort of intriguing in a way. So that's a part of what I was trying to do. This is early on in the process. I had never really sewn a thing before in my life.

I wanted to try to convey, or at least give people access to, was a certain level of ambivalence in what the character or the figure was thinking after having read through and gone through some of those books. The thought balloons there and the phrase, “SOB, SOB,” those two sounds. Yes, it's, on the one hand, a kind of sad recognition of some sort of painful insight, maybe. But on the other side of it, it's a fairly powerful rebuke of some of the things you might have come to learn in history. I think that ambivalence, that place in between where you experience both a certain sadness and also a certain kind of anger about the things that you've discovered. This is really a part of what the picture is about. Then the question becomes after you began to know those things that one cannot not know, then what do you do with that information? What do you do with it? What do you do about it?

The most important achievement I can make, on the one hand, is to first have this work have arrived at the Smithsonian. The fact that it's here is a great achievement. Anybody who walks through the building can look at it or not look at it, but if it wasn't there, then they wouldn't have that option. Then by the extension from there, it becomes as much a part of the narrative what has value in art history as anything that had already been there. Those two things are more important for me than anything else that accompanies what people call success in the art world. That matters the most.

When I hear from some young person that they saw a picture of mine and that it had an impact on them, I feel that, well, I guess it's a good day and it's all been worthwhile.

Kerry James Marshall, creator of SOB, SOB, explains his commitment to making Black figures the central subjects of his paintings: "There are not enough paintings in museums anywhere, really, that have Black figures as the central subject.”

Ginny Ruffner on Her Work as an Invitation to Think

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From the elegance of fruit to the structural beauty of coat hangers and the evolution of the bra, Ginny Ruffner offers insight into the artistic decisions behind two of her painted glass sculptures, Inventing the Music of Beauty and A Girl’s Guide to Fashion Evolution.

From the elegance of fruit to the evolution of the bra, Ginny Ruffner offers insight into two of her painted glass sculptures that ask questions about the concept of beauty and the convention of gender.

Jaune Quick-To-See Smith on Maps as Storytellers

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An interview with the artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith. Jaune Quick-To-See Smith grew up on the Flathead Reservation in Montana and traveled around the Pacific Northwest and California with her father, who was a horse trader. Smith decided she wanted to be an artist after watching a film on the French painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. She painted a goatee on her face with axle grease and borrowed a neighbor's beret so she could be photographed posing as the famous artist. In 1958, Smith enrolled at Olympic College in Bremerton, Washington. She had to take many breaks from college in order to earn money, however, and didn't earn her degree until 1976. She moved to Albuquerque, where she studied at the University of New Mexico and founded the Grey Canyon group of contemporary Native American artists. (Postmodern Messenger, Exhibition Catalogue, 2004)

Jaune Quick-To-See Smith, a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Nation, works to raise recognition of Native American art and peoples. The only names left visible in State Names are those that stem from indigenous sources.

Liz Larner on Bird in Space

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Three decades after creating Bird in Space, Liz Larner discusses her 1989 work—a sculpture made from nylon, silk, and steel—in reference to Constantin Brâncuși's sculpture of the same name from the 1920s. Finishing what Brâncuși started, Larner's sculpture is an ethereal work whose lines seem to float in space.

Liz Larner explains how her sculpture Bird in Space asserts a feminine point of view in dialogue with Constantin Brâncuși's sculpture of the same name from the 1920s.

Tom Nakashima on Sanctuary at Western Sunset

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Artist Tom Nakashima discusses the significance of the fish in this work, his relationship to Eastern and Western art, and his belief in the monumental importance of paintings.

Tom Nakashima discusses his relationship to Eastern and Western art and explains how the fish in Sanctuary at Western Sunset is a kind of self-portrait.

Mark Bradford on Amendment #8

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Artist Mark Bradford discusses his use of materials, his interest in abstraction, and his thoughts on having Amendment #8 in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

MARK BRADFORD: The materials that I use and have really always used have always been paper. The tools of civilization, how we build and destroy ourself, are the materials that I'm really interested in, and paper is one of the main ways in which information is displayed. Paper in itself is simply a bunch of fragments held together by a binder. I always saw it as pigment dried in a binder and cut into eight and a half by eleven blocks. Just in my head I thought, "Oh, well, you just have to wet it so that it can move like paint."

What constitutes a painting, and who are the gatekeepers of that?

I'm sure that me being a painter was a very political gesture for me. If you're Black and from South Central, you have a lot of identity stuff that you could just fall right into. I just thought I was going to do abstract work, but it was going to talk about race, class, culture, and all these things, but I was going to do it from an abstraction place, which gave me freedom. Then I was going to look outside. I wasn't going to do this kind of hermetic, interior, close the world off, which is historically what we understand abstraction as being. I was going to have a relationship with the world and with politics because I was interested in those things.

I was really starting to get very interested in the foundations of our country. The Amendments, or the Bill of Rights, are still what we go to. Interesting enough, it is on paper. I mean, it is one of our historical documents, one of our most important documents are on paper. We put paper in the photocopier, so it's both precious and not precious at all. It's both protected by security guards and shredded.

So "Amendment #8" is actually part of the "Bill of Rights" series. There are certain fragments that cling to the edges of the composition. Certain words flow in and out, they're legible and not legible, they hint, but in some ways that's how we really do understand the dense documents. We will never fully understand. They're so dense, but we pull, and we glimmer, and we dive, and we project onto these documents. At the time of the Constitution, certain people weren't even human, women didn't have rights, so we moved them forward as the country moves forward. We amend what we excluded in a way.

What better place than the Smithsonian to have an Amendment painting? It just fits; it makes sense. If you look at what's going on in the media at the moment with Black male bodies and me being a Black male and doing an Amendment painting and sitting in the Smithsonian—that's just super layered.

Mark Bradford creates abstract work that engages with questions of race, class, culture, and politics. Amendment #8 comes from a series of works inspired by the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution, known collectively as the Bill of Rights.

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Contemporary Voices and Issues Teacher Resources

Integrate the voices and works of contemporary artists into your classroom

Lava Thomas on Requiem For Charleston

Nick Cave on Soundsuit

Alredo Jaar on Life Magazine, April 19, 1968

Eric Fischl on Ten Breaths: Tumbling Woman II

Lalo Alcaraz’s I Stand with Emma

Native Artists Creating during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Mickalene Thomas on Her Materials and Artistic Influences

Kerry James Marshall on SOB, SOB

Ginny Ruffner on Her Work as an Invitation to Think

Jaune Quick-To-See Smith on Maps as Storytellers

Liz Larner on Bird in Space

Tom Nakashima on Sanctuary at Western Sunset

Mark Bradford on Amendment #8