Visual Art

Juan Sanchez explores his Puerto Rican heritage and the issue of Puerto Rican independence through his work as an artist and writer. Combining painting, photography, collage, and printmaking techniques, Sanchez’s art joins images of contemporary barrio life with memories of Puerto Rico and addresses a fragmented Latino community fraught with political resistance and cultural alienation. Interview by Bibiana Suarez.

A historical interview originally recorded in 1990.

Joseph Beuys was born in Kleve, Germany in 1921. After serving as a volunteer in the German military, Beuys attended the Dusseldorf Academy of Art to study sculpture, where in 1959 he became a professor. Much of his artwork reflects his attempt to come to terms with his involvement in the war. During the ’60s, Beuys became acquainted with the group Fluxus and artists such as Nam June Paik.

From his photo-text canvases in the 1960s to his video works in the 1970s to his installations in the 1980s, John Baldessari’s varied work has been seminal in the field of conceptual art. Integrating semiology and mass media imagery, he employed such strategies as appropriation, deconstruction, decontextualization, sequentiality, and text/image juxtaposition. With an ironic wit, Baldessari’s work considers the gathering, sorting, and reorganizing of information.

Joel Shapiro came to prominence in the early 1970s with his representational miniatures of everyday objects like chairs and houses. Since then he has become one of the most exhibited American sculptors. Shapiro’s vocabulary consists largely of rectangular volumes, with which he has created a body of work dancing on the line between abstraction and figuration. The human form has been a major theme in Shapiro’s geometric expression.

Joan Brown was born in 1938 in San Francisco, CA. She attended the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute) and received her BFA in painting. Brown has long been recognized as one of the most important artists to emerge from the creative milieu of the San Francisco Bay Area of the late 1950s. She created a body of work distinguished by its breadth and personal vision. Brown’s style incorporated abstract expressionism and figurative painting. One of California's pre-eminent figurative artists, she died in October 1990, at the age of 52, in India.

Jeremy Blake used digital media to create works that function on a flexible spectrum between being more painting-like or more film-like. He created continually looping digital animations with sound to be projected or presented on plasma screens. Blake often began by making the digital C-prints, which he conceived to be somewhat like paintings; if the imagery and idea of one of these works lent itself as such, he might extrapolate from and expand on it to begin creating a digital animation, which could range from 3 to 20 minute repeating loops.

Jack Tworkov was an important member of the first generation of Abstract Expressionist painters and was, for a number of years, head of the Yale University art program. Late in his career, his work became more geometric, as the mark and gesture was increasingly determined by isometric grid structures. This tape was shot a year before Tworkov’s death in 1982. “I came to the conclusion that the subconscious was banal. I began looking for some kind of form for constants that you could hold on to,” Tworkov says in this interview with Kate Horsfield.