# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
If you're seeing this message, it means we're having trouble loading external resources on our website.

If you're behind a web filter, please make sure that the domains *.kastatic.org and *.kasandbox.org are unblocked.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
El Anatsui, Untitled (video) | 21st century | Khan Academy

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
(piano music) - [voiceover] We are in the museum of African Art part of the Smithsonian on the Mall in Washington, D.C. and we're looking at a spectacular wall hanging by a very well known contemporary african artist from Ghana.

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
Katsushika Hokusai: "36 Views of Mount Fuji". 1832

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
Eugène Delacroix: "Women of Algiers in their Apartment". 1834

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcaNYS1q4SY

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
Théodore Géricault: "The Raft of the Medusa". 1818-1819

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/becoming-modern/romanticism/romanticism-in-france/v/g-ricault-raft-of-the-medusa-1818-19

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
Pablo Picasso: "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon". 1907

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ap-art-history/later-europe-and-americas/modernity-ap/v/picasso-les-demoiselles-d-avignon-1907

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
'There is so much beauty in this world and it's hard to capture it all, but I can try.'

At 32 years old Sarrita King lives in Darwin, N.T where she spent most of her youth. The Northern Territory continues to be the source of much of her creative inspiration along with the stories her father, the late, William King Jungala, shared with her. She lives with her partner, Chad and her sons Steele and Grange and splits her time between family and working in the studio. Sarrita's new family has only strengthened her desire to share her culture and stories through her art.

The beginning...

In Adelaide South Australia, Sarrita King was born on March 5 1988. She is younger sister to artist Tarisse King and daughter of renowned influential indigenous artist, the late William King Jungala. Her combinations of styles, philosophies and pictorial story-telling have become characteristic of her work, resulting in acclaim and world-recognition as an iconic artist in her own right.

'My works try to capture philosophies and elements of life that everyone can relate to and feel a connection to. This brings the viewer into the artwork and helps... them to understand Aboriginal culture.' (Sarrita King)

Spending her formative years in the harsh and exacting Northern Territory, she was close to the spirit of her people, the Gurindji tribe and she daily felt the degradation, reparation, hope and beauty of a land that was in constant flux, turmoil and renewal.

At the age of 16 she began to paint. The sand hills, lightning, space, direction, mass, torrential rain, fire, rivers of sand - everywhere the inspiration was rife and plentiful. Representing these visually riveting and dramatic Australian icons on canvas was the challenge that Sarrita accepted and dominated.

William King Jungala - the influence and legacy

Being born as the second daughter to the great indigenous artist William King meant that Sarrita and older sister Tarisse were always in the presence of a seemingly omniscient artistic eye that brought even the most mundane of elements into a vibrant and visceral reality that could not be ignored.

When asked about William, Sarrita comments: 'His openness, life philosophy and storytelling compelled both of us to follow in his footsteps and carry on his legacy through the art.'

William and his daughters often shared great moments of philosophising, extrapolating on ideas and sharing artistic intentions.

'I think every one of my works has an influence from either an artwork of his (William King) or a story he shared with us.'

Developing a unique style

Sarrita is a self-confessed artist of today - she unashamedly combines methods and techniques from past and present times and is developing a future style for all generations to enjoy. She admits that 'dotting' is not necessarily a long tradition of indigenous artists and she uses it in amongst a variety of other methods, which combined; bring a driving and passionate energy to her contemporary work.

Sarrita, eloquent and descriptive in word as well as image, undertook a Bachelor of Journalism in Adelaide, but has returned to her deeper love of art and is currently in Darwin from where she often journeys deep into the lands that support and cherish not only her people but her talent and aspirations.

Her style is uniquely her own and is applauded not only in Australia but on the world-stage across Europe, Canada and elsewhere.

A modern day icon

Combining the rich traditional culture and methods of indigenous artists with contemporary attitudes and new techniques has seen Sarrita develop a new style of indigenous art. She has striven to remain faithful to the old whilst embracing the new, demonstrating that indigenous art is not just about what has been, but about highlighting the here, the now and the future.

'The new generation has a duty to share and continue the path set before us by the earlier generations. The motivation to create and share my artwork comes from the desire to involve the world with the rich Australian indigenous heritage.'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
'There is so much beauty in this world and it's hard to capture it all, but I can try.' At 32 years old Sarrita King lives in Darwin, N.T where she spent most of her youth. The Northern Territory continues to be the source of much of her creative inspiration along with the stories her father, the late, William King Jungala, shared with her.

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ap-art-history/global-contemporary-apah/21st-century-apah/a/yinka-shonibare-the-swing-after-fragonard

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Yinka Shonibare MBE | Exhibitions | MCA Australia

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The artist's first major survey in Australia presented twelve years of the artist's career, encompassing painting, sculpture, large-scale mixed media installations, photography and film.

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.kentmonkman.com

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Since the first discovery in May, Monkman's painting has been shared widely, in posts reflecting the country's collective rage, grief and a sense of urgency. Thanks to social media, and the Covid-era practice of museums putting their collections online, images have never been more accessible to the public, to the point where they're often becoming symbols for the voice of moral outrage against atrocity.

It was while looking at Old World paintings at Madrid's Museo Prado about a decade ago that Monkman, one of Canada's most esteemed contemporary painters, began to see their emotional power. The artist purposely appropriated Western artistic traditions of history paintings (and bright colours) to tell the story of The Scream: this is a shared history, he seemed to be saying. (The painting was dedicated to Monkman's grandmother, who was a survivor of the Residential School system; the first time she spoke about her experience at the school was on her deathbed.)
Putting it in context
This information about the painting, like so much else, including context, and scale (the painting is a huge two metres by three metres) is likely to get lost when it's viewed on Facebook. "They were showing this image all over the internet and a lot of these places they weren't even saying it was made by Kent Monkman," says MaryLou Driedger, a Winnipeg author and teacher, who worked as a tour guide at Winnipeg Art Gallery when the painting was on display as part of a cross-Canada Monkman exhibition, Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience. She tells BBC Culture: "If you don't know that this painting was made by a Cree artist who spent the first five years of his life on a reservation, you are losing a lot of the story. It's important to know that. And that he listened to every single one of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's testimonies before he did the paintings and I think to just blast this picture over the internet you're not getting much context."

But The Scream is just one example of how, throughout history, artists' works have been used as tools of change. In some cases, the artists have made themselves proactive participants to effect social action and change, even hoping to drive policy decisions. Their work of art becomes a calculated creation, the artist abandoning allegory for activism. The artist hopes for a visceral impact so that the painting might raise an awareness of an injustice.

But how do artworks serve to interrogate an atrocity or an act of war? What happens when a painting goes from image to concept? And when the artist is asking the viewer not to be just the audience, but a messenger, to carry their outrage to the greater world, what does that do to the traditional relationship between artist and viewer? A more equal, or at least collaborative, relationship - partners in advocacy - has been suggested, one that reflects people's power when associated with an artist.

"Since photography is seen as reality, images of violence are off-putting for an audience," Cameron Deuel wrote in The Relationship Between Viewer and Fine Art, a 2013 paper for Western Washington University. Art can be helpful by opening avenues that photography, or a text, can't. As Bracha L Ettinger, a visual artist, philosopher, psychoanalyst and author, said in a 2016 discussion in The New York Times: "Art works toward an ethical space where we are allowed to encounter traces of the pain of others through forms that inspire in our heart's mind, feeling and knowledge. It adds an ethical quality to the act of witnessing. By trusting the painting as true you become a witness to the effects of events that you didn't experience directly, you become aware of the effects of the violence done to others, now and in history - a witness to an event in which you didn't participate, and a proximity to those you have never met."

And despite the limitations of social media, there is often greater impact when a work is seen outside of its most traditional home, the gallery or museum. It takes the perceived or actual elitism out of art, further empowering the viewer. A research project by the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid explores the impact of what one of its contributors, art dealer Tony Shafrazi, called "the greatest war painting in the world": Pablo Picasso's Guernica. The project, Rethinking Guernica, contains more than 2,000 documents, essays and interviews. Little wonder that the way in which art can serve to tell an atrocity is called The Guernica Effect.

In 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, Franco invited the Nazi Condor Legion to drop bombs over a small town, Gernika, that was a symbol of Basque independence. In Picasso's jarring iconic oil-on-canvas painting of the aftermath, civilians scream in anguish; scattered limbs are strewn throughout. Violence and pain scream from the canvas.

While art critics scrambled to unravel the meaning of each figure represented in the piece, it could be argued that was beside the point. As Picasso wanted, this painting went beyond standard art-analysis dialogue of aesthetic, technique and style. Though it was rendered in the Cubist style, as Shafri said, "It's beyond Cubism." Picasso called Guernica the "property of the people".

The artist, who painted the work in the immediate aftermath of the event to capitalise on news reports, sought to use the painting to influence changes in national policy, to galvanise world opinion, and to push viewers into being proactive participants in the outrage. Picasso toured Guernica in the UK and US, as a fundraising effort for Spanish Relief for Guernica in 1938. While still in exile in France, Picasso even used the painting as a bargaining chip for democracy. In later years, Franco's followers wanted the painting in Spain (perhaps owing to its celebrity), but Picasso decreed he would only allow it to hang in the country once democracy had been established.
The art of war
This idea of how well-timed art can shape the social narrative of war was explored by Nicole Dean, a US Army officer specialising in looted art. In a 2020 article, Dean proposed that Guernica could be used as a tool for leadership development: "This calculated creation of a powerful masterpiece should be examined and appreciated as part of a greater wartime narrative."

She even suggested that art could be used as a guide to the art of war. "The study of wartime art can be a valuable addition to the professional development of military leaders, generating options for professional dialogue about how societies see the victors, the vanquished, and the value of conflicts through the lens of artists and cultural patrimony."

Before him, Picasso's fellow Spanish master artist, Francisco Goya, was a graphic eyewitness to the atrocities of his day - and his painting The Third of May 1808 (part of a diptyque with the Second of May, held by the Museo Prado in Madrid) continues to shock almost two centuries after his death, as a ground-breaking masterpiece of art - and a political tool.

The painter was deeply affected by the disillusionment he saw during the Napoleonic invasion of Spain in May 1808, by widespread starvation among civilians and by their resistance - it was the first time the term "guerrilla warfare" was used - as well as their subsequent execution at the hands of Napoleon's troops. But it was the way Goya approached the painting that suggested the painter was focusing on a universal and timeless message. The troops, guns pointed straight at the masses, are faceless. Many of the civilians cover their faces. They could belong to any country, and any time. (The anonymity was radically avant garde, rejecting all the usual conventions of Baroque and Neoclassical history painting for its day).

And it did indeed transcend time and place. In the words of art critic Robert Hughes, author of a 2003 biography of Goya, The Third of May 1808 is "truly modern... the picture against which all future paintings of tragic violence would have to measure themselves... He speaks to us with an urgency that no artist of our time can muster. We see his long-dead face pressed against the glass of our terrible century, Goya looking in at a time worse than his." Later, Edouard Manet echoed The Third of May in tone and composition with his The Execution of Emperor Maximilian (1868-69).

Jacques-Louis David's Death of Marat (1793) might have been the first painting to shift public opinion in real time, or as close to real time as that day allowed. The painting depicts the murder of revolutionary leader and journalist Jean-Paul Marat who was stabbed in his bathtub. David one of the most prominent painters of his day, completed the work just several months after Marat's murder. Espousing academic techniques of the day, it's almost photographic in its simplicity. Art historian TJ Clark called it the first modernist painting, for "the way it took the stuff of politics as its material, and did not transmute it". This was calculated. David was an official artist of the Jacobins, and was asked to make Marat into a martyr to the cause. Marat was one of three "propaganda paintings" David painted.

Significantly, it was also turned into an engraving that was widely circulated among the public. (Its popularity only waned during the reign of terror but returned to glory by the 1820s with the help of a flattering essay on it by Baudelaire: "This painting is David's masterpiece and one of the great curiosities of modern art because, by a strange feat, it has nothing trivial or vile..."). Today, the painting is often used as a meme in response to contemporary conflicts, with a pepper-spraying policeman, for example, standing over the murdered subject in the bath.

German artist Käthe Kollwitz wanted her 1923 painting War (Krieg) to be seen through prints that were distributed, or shared, like pamphlets. The artist sought a suitable response to the "unspeakably difficult years" of World War One that saw the death of her soldier son, Peter, a loss she never got over. She began work on War in 1919, ultimately finding woodcuts as the right medium to give expression to the atrocities she experienced and saw. The finished work is seven woodcuts of unadulterated anguish - in one, a mother offers her baby up as a sacrifice to the cause; in another, a widow lies in anguish, near dead herself. "I have tried again and again to represent war. I was never able to capture it... These prints should be sent all over the world and give everybody the essence of what it was like," Kollwitz wrote in a letter to Romain Rolland in 1922.

There's perhaps no better present-day example of an artist giving agency to a viewer than graffiti artist Banksy's 2016 "Les Mis" image, part of a series of works criticising the use of teargas in the refugee camp in Calais, France. The graffiti - featuring Cosette, the young heroine of the film and musical Les Misérables, with tears in her eyes from CS gas used to clear refugee camps - appeared overnight opposite the French Embassy in London. The artwork was interactive. Under the image was stencilled QR code that could link viewers to an online clip of a police raid on the camp.

Two other Banksy works on the theme appeared, including in Calais. They were critically well received (and even embraced) by political authorities, including the mayor of Calais - who was not known for her leniency towards migrants or those wanting to help them. Perhaps in the same manner as Franco in Spain, she was responding to the prestige, and tourist potential, of having her town "Bansky'd"; she promised to preserve the graffiti under glass while vowing to cover up or erase works by lesser-known graffiti artists. She even made it part of guided tours of the city. (Just as with political movements, political art has the potential to be hijacked.)

The question "What is art?" is certainly not just a question of aesthetics and technique. By giving form to outrage, art finds another purpose. But it has yet another: one of healing. As Ettinger said in the New York Times discussion: "When violence kills trust, art is the space where a trust in the other, and by extension of one's being in the world, can re-emerge."
If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our And if you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called The Essential List. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Worklife and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday. Facebook page or message us on Twitter.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Kent Monkman's The Scream: Images that define atrocities

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Some paintings have become the defining images of a social or political catastrophe. But can art really shape the narrative of war and atrocity, asks Karen Burshtein.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Since the mid-1970s, Dawoud Bey (b. 1953) has worked to expand upon what photography can and should be. Insisting that it is an ethical practice requiring collaboration with his subjects, he creates poignant meditations on visibility, power, and race. Bey chronicles communities and histories that ha…

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Painting overlooked stories from Kenya | Artist Michael Armitage | Louisiana Channel

# data[].attributes.headline
European art history in the work of Michael Armitage

# data[].attributes.subject
European art history in the work of Michael Armitage

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Context

Written by Alexandra Reißer,

In addition to artists such as Meek Gichugu, Sane Wadu, Jak Katarikawe and Theresa Musoke, who were active in the genre of East African figurative painting between the 1970s and 1990s, Michael Armitage's works also engage in a dialogue with works by famous painters of Western art history. Thus, Armitage's paintings may appear strangely familiar to the eye trained in European art history, prompting a feeling of déjà-vu.

The iconography of Titian, Francisco de Goya, Édouard Manet, and Paul Gauguin can be found in the artist's compositional elements, motifs, and color combinations. Raised in Kenya, Michael Armitage adeptly thematizes the European perspective and the associated exoticism of regarding the "other" while simultaneously heightening our awareness of the repercussions and legacy of colonial attitudes, particularly in the context of our own aesthetic preferences and viewing habits.

Francisco de Goya was an inspirational artist for Michael Armitage's execution of "The Fourth Estate," and Armitage has integrated the Spanish painter's pictorial concepts into his artistic practice. Both Armitage's painting "The Fourth Estate," and the old master's etching "Disparate ridiculo" (Ridiculous Folly, ca. 1820) depict a group of figures sitting on a large branch under which a crowd has gathered. In Armitage's "The Fourth Estate" several figures have taken their places in the tree's sweeping crown; here, however, their attention is focused on an event taking place in the background, off in the distance. Parallels can also be drawn in both formal and contextual terms between Armitage's work and Goya's graphic series "Los Disparates" (The Follies), which critically examines the political conditions in Spain in the early nineteenth century.

Michael Armitage executed his "Kenyan Election Series" between 2017 and 2019. The cycle comprises a total of eight paintings created by Michael Armitage following an election campaign event in Uhuru Park in Nairobi. Located in the heart of Kenya's capital, the park has been a site of major political events since the 1970s. During Kenya's 2017 presidential election, Armitage attended a rally organized by the opposition party, whose top candidate, Raila Odinga, was challenging the incumbent Kenyatta for the fourth consecutive time. Because Odinga questioned the legitimacy of the previous election's results, there were riots and protests throughout the country. Michael Armitage places these protests in the center of the painting with visual impact. Like the previous one, the 2017 election also went to the President Kenyatta. The mood in Uhuru Park and on the streets of the capital was chaotic and marked by unrest and mayhem. Back in his studio, Armitage transformed his observations into often puzzling scenes in which some people wear green wigs and, instead of political statements, larger-than-life toads are displayed on banners.

The center of Michael Armitage's painting "Nyayo" is occupied by the figure of a muscular, naked man with a snake twisting around his right calf. This figure is immediately reminiscent of the famous Laocoön Group in the Vatican museums, an ancient sculpture group depicting the myth of the agony of the priest Laocoön and his two sons inflicted on them by snakes emerging from the sea. In art history, the representation of the pain in the marble group has been especially praised; while pain is evident in the muscles and tendons of the Laocoön's body, the priest does not exhibit this pain with a scream, but rather bears it silently.

The title of the painting "Nyayo" literally means "footprints." This word was used by the autocratic ruler Daniel Arap Moi as an election slogan. When he took office, a government and administrative building in Nairobi was named "Nyayo House." The building is now infamous for its underground detention cells, in which critics of the regime were imprisoned and tortured in the 1990s. According to eyewitness reports, the Moi regime had snakes brought into the cells in order to persuade political opponents to confess. The prisoners had little choice but to assume the snakes were poisonous.

The composition and coloring of Michael Armitage's painting "Pathos and the Twilight of the Idle" recalls a famous painting by the Venetian artist Titian. Born as Tiziano Vecellio, Titian had been a master of Venetian painting since the day his teacher, Giorgione, died in 1510. Titian completed his first recognized masterpiece "The Assumption of the Virgin" in 1518. The work, an enormous altarpiece measuring 690 x 360 cm, is still situated in its original location, on the high altar of the church of Santa Maria dei Frari in Venice. "The Assumption of the Virgin" made Titian a sought-after master of composition, bold colors, and high drama. In Armitage's "Pathos and the Twilight of the Idle," however, tear gas and billows of smoke rise into the heavens instead of angels and clouds.

In Armitage's animal paintings, monkeys appear as scrutinizing reflections of humans. As cross-border creatures, they embody the interrelationship and overlap of human and animal characteristics. In the painting "Baboon," one of these apes is presented in a seductive half-reclining pose that is vaguely reminiscent of Édouard Manet's provocative Olympia figure in his eponymous painting (1863). In the nineteenth century, the painting "Olympia" drew attention to the power of the gaze in an unusual and radical manner. In "Baboon," the animal's long, outstretched extremities appear almost human. Yet, in contrast to Manet's painting, in Armitage's work a lush banana tree, rather than a hand, covers the baboon's groin. With this, Armitage propels the clichéd images and sexual fantasies with which the black male body is still associated into caricature.

"The Promised Land" depicts a marching, roaring crowd, which recalls the chaotic and unmanageable scenes of violent demonstrations during the 2017 elections in Kenya. A flag stands out from the painting's background, revealing a reclining female nude. This figure inevitably brings to mind the painting "Nevermore" (1897) by the French painter Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin. Like many of Gauguin's works, it embodies an exoticizing aesthetic, in which the Western view of the (female) non-European "other" manifests the equally fascinating and disconcerting unknown. In Gauguin's work, the foreign, South Pacific island of Tahiti - the inspiration for so many of his works - is stylized as a colorful counterworld to the artist's dreary life in Paris. An exotic natural paradise, it is portrayed as a place of refuge, where one can break free from the constrains of bourgeois life. For Gauguin, the portrayals of the island, imagined as paradise and sanctuary, are, above all, images of his own projections embedded in a historically evolved power imbalance. In his artistic gesture of appropriation and reinterpretation of Gauguin's exotic imagery, Armitage reverses this relationship. At the same time, "Nevermore" - in the tradition of the female nude, which also embodies the power of seduction - explores the male view of the naked female body. In Armitage's painting, however, the recumbent female nude on the flag, the iconic female on display as an "object of desire," obtains a new meaning in the context of the artist's interest in the temptations that are integral to the dissemination of simple truths, seductive promises, and political ideologies prevalent in propaganda.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
European art history in the work of Michael Armitage

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Context Written by Alexandra Reißer, In addition to artists such as Meek Gichugu, Sane Wadu, Jak Katarikawe and Theresa Musoke, who were active in the genre of East African figurative painting between the 1970s and 1990s, Michael Armitage's works also engage in a dialogue with works by famous painters of Western art history.