In his artistic career, the ‘70s are known for his renewed interest in social events and portraits, moving progressively away from his commercial subject matter. In Warhol's iconic Myths series, he depicts famous fictional characters like Dracula and Superman from American history, film, and culture. 

It is this interest in appropriating pop culture and Warhol's trivial things that I am exploring in my project, reinterpreting images that already exist and giving them a new meaning.

In order to gain a better understanding of which images to use, I should also explore how can I represent represent something through objects or images looking at a historical archive or old films.

Despite Warhol’s evident indifference, Marsha’s glamour and generosity of spirit clearly shine through in his portrait of her. In 1970, she joined her friend, the trans activist Silvia Rivera, in founding Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) to fight for the rights of transgender and queer youth. She was also an HIV-positive organizer with ACT UP, and an important figure in the Stonewall Riots. That same year, she helped organize the first-ever Gay Pride March. Throughout her life, Marsha pushed for greater visibility and acceptance of the trans community, inspiring the generation of activists who came after her.

The series was commissioned by an Italian art dealer, Luciano Anselmino, who suggested Warhol a series of  anonymous pictures to represent this community. During this time, they boldly embraced their sexuality, being well-known members of the gay and trans’ New York scene.

The subject, New York Black and Latinx trans women and drag queens, were recruited by Warhol’s friends, many from a bar on Manhattan’s 8th Avenue. At the time (and still today), transgender communities were at severe risk of various forms of discrimination, poverty, and violence. Significantly, when Warhol’s series was first shown, he did not identify his subjects by their names, effectively objectifying them as “other.”
 He took a initial Polaroid photoshoot of over 500 photographs of 14 models. He often selected through the Polaroids of the sitter to find ones that worked well with other processes. A selection of them were then enlarged onto screen prints (silkscreen).

These people were not so well known to the world and for decades they stayed unlabeled and unidentified; it took till 2014 to uncover some of their identities and names. Hopefully, during the photoshoot some of the models signed off their photos and today we can identify thirteen of the fourteen depicted women. 

- He took their portraits with a Polaroid Big Shot camera and then transferred the image onto screen-print.

- The typical Warhol’s process of screen-print technique reflect not just the appearance and reality of his subjects but it adds colour and life into the composition, using bold blocks of paint. His intention was to depict the elegance and sexiness of these community, presenting them as they are into their community, removing them for their difficult realities.

-Anonymous Figures

-Unseen community

Consumerism
 - Pop Culture

First inspired for other Black American documentary photographers, as Roy DeCarava, she saw the ability to bring the present positive and realistic images of African American culture. 

Through his practice, she is mainly interested in themes related to race, gender and class issues, such as racism in Black American life, and police brutality and violence against Black communities, that led her to work with public engagement projects. 

Very often she give space to the black experience through her works, expressing concerns about the exclusion of images of the black community, specially the black women, from the media.

She intends to let herself and her audience immerse themselves in the work's subject. As a result of the work's very strong political convictions, neither she nor the audience are forced into the work, but they are allowed to locate themselves within their own ideas and relationships with the work.  

Carrie Mae  artist's constant conversation about the historical exclusion in her artworks is what inspire me to gain the knowledge of oppression of my predecessors and expose injustices of our Society as an artist, and have the capacity to educate other people through History and empower the next generation.

The work she has created has been an inspiration for institutions to include marginalized voices, and ultimately she envisions a future in which art is enriched by the diversity of its participants.

My intention is to challenge stereotypes about race and gender using the image of the Black woman having a similar approach as the artist that confronts the viewer with powerful works mixing photography, video, and installation.

The installation is made up of appropriated photographs of slaves in America as well as other 19th- and 20th-century photographs of Africans and African Americans found in museums and universities.

As part of her selection of photographs, she chose daguerreotypes commissioned by Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz in 1850, who photographed slaves throughout America. Besides preparing a taxonomy of slave physical types, Agassiz intended to use these portraits as visual evidence to support his theories regarding racial inferiority.

In viewing these images, Weems suggests, we see Anglo Americans' relationship with black people. She wants to intervene in that process by giving voice to an oppressed community.

Combining photography and text, Carrie Mae Weems explores the notion of a narrative that runs across her entire work, with images that lay out very specific development of history – Black American History within Photographic History in USA.

The text was added on the glass metaphorically creating a distance to original photograph, according to the artist, making clear that something was taken or lifted. It is a poem describing the complex Black American History, bringing awareness to the first intention of the photos and building an sense of humanity and dignity for these individuals that was originally missing.

- By appropriating of photographic archive as the subject of their own, she re-examines and re-interpret the histories they convey. She construct a new narrative, revealing biases and the humanity of these people. 

- Research as a basis/start point for the artwork

- Conceptual work that resolves in the idea how we see the History, what we know about the Past and how it can affect us

- It is interesting how Carrie  Mae Weems used photography as a way to teach, inform and express how does these photos makes her feel, using a narrative to make them connected

It is from the graffiti that inspired him for a practice of destruction. It evolved him into a process of removing, decomposing, or destroying in order to work through the overlapping of historical and cultural layers that make up humanity, which he uses as a inspiration. Sculpting the walls directly was something he experimented with.

Site-specific work is part of his current practice, addressing issues such as identity or freedom, usually choosing the place where he sticks his art, but he has also been invited to make interventions in various places.

His work consists individuals’ faces, often-unknown beings within a community. He divides his carvings into layers of images and then begins by destroying to create. 

Sculpting the walls directly was something he experimented with, believing that destruction is a form of construction.

Site-specific work is part of his current practice, addressing issues such as identity or freedom, usually choosing the place where he sticks his art, but he has also been invited to make interventions in various places.

Among Vhils' works reflect current artistic themes, such as identity, representation, ephemerality, and the experience of the individual in consumer society. 

As the artist faces his art as a personal and subjective expression, he establishes a dialogue with the city that reveals all the layers that have been lost by the city over time as it evolves and flows.

With various tools and materials, including hammers, drills, etching acid, bleach, and explosives, he carves faces into public spaces-on the sides of buildings.

His work also includes serigraphy, installation, NFT’s, advertising posters,     and working in found-objects collected from the streets.

With a subtractive process, he delivers powerful and poetic visual statements from materials that city rejects, that marries elements of painting and sculpture, humanising depressed areas with his poignant large-scale portraits. 

 - His reflections on capitalism and consumerism lets him think on how we as artists, can apply more things that lets the viewer thinks about this same concepts. Working around the materiality of the work, how the subject appears in the surface and how the artwork can interact with the viewer.

- The artist sees how metaphorically Identity is merged and intertwined with the constant mutation and evolution of our Society. He reflects on the undergoing effects of globalisation and digitalization in our Society, and he sees the position towards abstraction in the faces on billboards and other forms of portraiture. His works is a testimony of our contemporary times and how we live in society now. 

https://www.escritoriodearte.com/artista/alexandre-farto-aka-vhils
 
 https://vhils.com/news/trace-monographie-solo-show-opens-22nd-june-in-paris/
 
 https://fluctuart.fr/en/event/trace%E2%94%82a-retrospective-exhibition-by-vhils/

https://www.streetartbio.com/artists/vhils/

 https://vhils.com/work/

https://vhils.com/exhibitions/trace-paris-france/

 https://boroughphotos.org/lambeth/vhils-artwork-cans-festival-leake-street-waterloo/

Her work is concerned in and how we treat and perceive reality, creating imageries that let herself and the viewer understand how we became so distant of it.

Maggie’s experimentation and way of compose her subject is what inspired me along with the way that I could relate my subject matter with the technique itself, in a sense of develop a environment or a sensation for the image. 

I felt inspired on how she plays with the sense of reality through the composition of her work, the use of different surfaces, techniques and  colours, the use of one image to end with different compositions simply initially playing with the time of exposure.

In Relations (2018) she uses old and new photographs as source to bring together an imagery to communicate the relationship of people with the natural environment creating new narratives with the different prints. She brings these concepts through the use of different textures, colours and surfaces, relating the subject with the form. These some of the many abilities that I wish to explore as well and ultimately achieve.

The use of colour is important to give this sense or creation of duality of reality and non-reality. The figures show a presence of humanity into the composition although the colours that she uses they are not the same as we can see in real life. The natural colours that she inserts; she dislocates the individuals and relocate them into a artificial space. 
 She wants to invite the viewers to “believe in the constructed spaces and scenes, the artifice of their construction is made evident.”

I also find interesting in the way that each print will be unique and a bit different from each other, due to the way the ink was applied into the plate or even how it was printed.

 Texture, this connections of time through the use of different colours

her montages are exuberating and they bring a sense of hyper-reality and 
 
I am interested in creating work which can be approached from various entry points. Hints of narrative trigger associations which may lead in different directions. Often photographic representation and figuration are used to encourage connection with the illusory space in the work. In some instances the illusion is further developed as an immersive installation. Processes reflect the conceptual basis of the work.

Berger, M. (2010) For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights. 
Yale University Press

In 1983, together with other graduates from London art schools, he founded the Sankofa Film and Video Collection, in response of intense social and economical events in the UK. Influenced by social theorists such as Stuart Hall and Homi Bhabha, their work explored new dialogues about black identity/culture within the British society and creating new narratives in British cinema. 

His multi-screen film installations and accompanying photographic works that incorporates different artistic disciplines, creates an unique visual language and poetic, with fractured narratives of memory and desire.

 Julien's open-ended narratives propose that spectators actively interpret the work through a physical and sensorial immersion. 

"Due to the nature of my practice," the artist has stated, "I do not produce my films using a standard filmic construction, which is mainly grounded in scriptwriting. I often work on multiple screens, which demands a montage technique specially developed for that purpose. I pay great attention to set décor, lighting, performance, mise-en-scène, as well as editing, sonic, and visual effects to create a space for meditation on political and cultural questions."

The film is arranged from his own footage, imagined scenes and dream sequences, and archive footage, tracing the relation between Hughes and Beauty, the object of his desire. 

It is a black and white film with multi-layered narratives recreating the poet’s private life, being a landmark for Cinema in the exploration of the black queer gaze and desire, that was expanded in some scene’s shots of the actual footage within Julien’s photographic work. It addresses daily struggles faced by queer community of colour that it is still present nowadays. The film has no connotations with time or place, although it is still an important way for the Black gay community be seen, since it was made at the height of the AIDS pandemic in the 80s. It created a conversation between the independent film and queer cinema, becoming a landmark for a new genre – New Queer Cinema. 

Julien works with his own archive and revisited questions around Black Lives Matter and Black queer visibility and see how it is still important to still work around the same projects and make it visible to other generations. It can be seen on how these same concepts have become both mainstreamed and at the same time there is a lot of antagonism.

It is fascinating the way Julien works with history, identity and some other concepts that are still present in nowadays (prejudice and discrimination), blending real characters with fictional ones. The construction of a poetic narrative within the movie creates an easy way of the concept be easily perceived.
 
He opens awareness about something that is still a problem nowadays, creating a conversation on how HIV infection and AIDS created terrible ramifications within the Black communities. That is my same approach with my work, appropriating of videos, films and documentaries to relate the Black Woman Experience as a whole.
 
 Things I am interested:

-Creation of such a narrative that cause impact in the viewer because of the image. Being intimate and scenes of private nature, it provokes the viewer.

-He creates a vehicle which someone can be seen and visible, which became a touchstone for African-American Studies. 

- It transgress the way the subject is viewed and seen. 

-The focus in one character to exemplified and glorify one concept.

-The black and white aspect that increments a sense of old aspect and imagination

-The voice over that was added, in order to have a sense of temporality and  

-Sequential shots to create a narrative 

https://www.moma.org/magazine/articles/747

Jaffa questions the hybridity of these images and Black music, whether or not they were produced by Black Americans. He extends the practice of the visual media, with objects, static and moving images, to transmit the equivalent “power, beauty and alienation” embedded within forms of Black music in US culture.

The research into black culture led him to produce more than two hundred notebooks with images and stills, using them as sketches for his works. As it can be seen in the image, for Jafa these images reflect on a wider way to make the Black experience more visible to the World. Incorporating a visual hypothesis and subjectivity into the montage of these images to define a Black Aesthetic.

His video works help black film capture the same kind of action that black music had developed through its cultural prestige; using film to communicate Blackness as a visual art form as same way that music did. 

Arthur Jafa imparts a personal touch to imagery usually taken from news media, television and the Internet, from photographs of civil rights leaders watermarked with "Getty Images" to helicopter views of the LA Riots to a wave of people dancing, .

"Love Is The Message" embodies the artist's desire to create a cinema that "replicates the power, beauty, and alienation of Black Music.

It is also a remembrance that the collective multitude defining Blackness is composed of singular individuals, manifold identities, and their unaccountable differences.


-On my opinion, the message that Jaffa wants to transmit it is that this can be a way to understand how our experiences can be interconnected but at the same connected with other races. An understanding on how we are human beings and we should all bring a end to injustice.

- He use his practice as a tool to show the oppression, the injustice and oppression that makes part of the black American culture.

- Much of the work of Arthur Jafa revolves around a question which he described like a mantra: “how to make a black cinema with the power, the beauty and the alienation of black music?

- Jafa works around identity reproducing and documenting the Black experience through video.

- I am also interested in explore how Black life is not documented in History and Art, with a compilation of images that together forms a narrative

- Use of the same approach of juxtaposition of videos and images

- As Arthur Jafa explore in his work, I will see how different images/videos can form a story, can shock the viewer, confront but with the main focus is to understand what they are trying to say – evoking a message. As Arthur explores in his video, Love lives in our community but what we have is Death.

- The Black Experience: culture; way of living; music; dancing; struggles; victories; Black personalities and celebrities; what we are known for; stereotypes; identity.

-A montage of moving videos from different sources which Jafa reflects about the power of the image to reflect the Black Experience.

https://www.artsy.net/artwork/arthur-jafa-untitled

A predominant subject matter that Parks chose highlights the honest and empowering reality of Black America life. 
As opposed to showing the demonstrations, brutality, boycotts that characterized the struggle for racial justice, his ability to create empathy through a focus on intimacy and shared human experience made his work particularly powerful. 

Gordon Parks' work demonstrates how photography (image) can be a powerful weapon against poverty, discrimination and racial inequality.
Through the use of a visual arsenal, photography is intended not just to document history, but also to change it by influencing public opinion, motivating political action, or boosting morale. 

- Most frequent archetypes of African Women in Western Society:

Mammy:  compliant; part of the family; motherly, but not sexual; typically a large bodied woman.   "the stereotype of the woman as the carer"
Sapphire: physical embodiment of maleness in black women; dominate the black male; sexless.
Jezebel: hypersexual black women; the seductress; has power only in sex ---she can’t be raped (meant to explain sexual violence)

This shows us how women feel about being alone in some environments, the apparent gender difference, and how they struggle as women on a daily basis.
It is interesting how some of the women still address the impact of the media and how much pressure it can cause to them. 

- She could only use her experience as a Black Woman, but she feels she must combine it with other Black women's experiences.

- Through music, viewers are guided to feel what they're seeing, where images change and build depending on the tone of the music.

With the video edition, Ja'Tovia invokes mixed feelings of provocation and serenity. Some of her images suggest more peaceful, day-to-day scenes, outdoor scenes in the garden; distressed images and abstract forms in her animated iterations.

- These are some key aspects that I should be mindful of in order to have black women's perspective and experience on my work.

I enjoy the way she edits her own films, putting together videos, images, and sounds to build a narrative. Her over-tonal montage and metric continuity in her work engages the viewers' attention and confronts them with disparate images instead of just one.

- This is a dialectical construction that she creates and it is something I wish to follow with my montage, in that I wish to create meaning and engage the viewer into my work.

Adrian Piper describes her art as a catalyst for change in a creative practice as a tool for political resistance. Often using herself as both object and object of her work she transforms her own body and physical presence into a site for critical intervention challenging essentialist to engage the viewer about notions about race, gender and identity.

It is also my intention to also engage the viewer with the installation in the same approach as Piper does, creating a conversational space and a space where are my work can gain another meaning.

The artwork it is positioned in a corner with behind a upturned table as a defence, with her father’s two birth certificates—one that identifies him as white, the other as black. While the artist speaks through a video directly to the viewer.

This conceptual piece inspires me on how art can be a tool of communication, to address issues of race, class gender and identity, and think about how the gallery space can be a space of inclusion. It can reflects how misogyny, racism and oppression controlled the main institutions of our Society, being this the key elements for my project. 

The video draws the viewer’s attention to his/her own biases and brings. She is having a conversation about race and she uses the television and the gallery as a metaphor for conversation.
Cornered is configured or highlighted in a way that represents an architecture of power, by the way the artwork is protecting itself for exposing the artist’s truth. 
Her broader critique of social and culturally entrenched institutions is underlined by this subtle and conscious orchestration of space.

Since my project consists in different artistic elements, an installation can be an engaging approach to have all my pieces together to create a narrative and connect the viewers to it.

Breaking down the barrier between life and art culminated with Andy Warhol, the Pop Art master who transformed journalistic photographs of movie stars as well as anonymous accident victims into cool but dazzling silk screens. Boltanski situates his practice between the irony of Pop Art and Fluxus and the pathos that Beuys reinscribed into his manipulated found objects. 

 “It’s kind of a cool process, people love it,” he said.

 It’s also a safe, environmental alternative to traditional etching.

 “Too many artists got sick from the traditional etching chemicals,” said Welden.

https://eu.wickedlocal.com/story/cape-codder/2017/07/21/for-artist-dan-weldon-nature/20107339007/

A central theme of the artist's research is slavery, remembrance, and legacy. As a means of presenting the gruesome truth of individual narratives and recording the lives of enslaved people, Brooks draws connections between the legacy of slavery and the ongoing fight for black rights. Considering the relationship between black life and black death as well as the sinister relationship with an enslaved person and commodified objects, the artist disrupt the archive through the acknowledgment of individual lives.

The installation consists of nine cowrie shell sculptures, tapestries, and a collaborative video.
Brook was able to identify 9 people enslaved by mention of their death which mostly occurring during insurrections. The 9 resin cowrie sculptures pay homage to these individuals. The two tapestries are digital collages including open access archival images, Brooks' personal notes while researching, text from the archive and rare images of black sailors. The collaborative video offers a movement response to the physical works drawing cross-cultural connections between South Africa and the UK.
 
The unveiling of artefacts, and the objects used in slavery are hugely important. Khaleb hopes to reimagine these objects in a positive and from a place of empowerment. 

  

https://walkerart.org/collections/artists/kara-walker

https://www.mprnews.org/story/2007/02/20/karawalker

Chosing a chair through three different registers, Kosuth asks us to try to decipher the subliminal sentences in which we phrase our experience of art.

 - what we see it is three representation of a chair, not a chair that we are allowed to sit
 - Contextualize - it is not a simple object; placing a chair in a Museum/Gallery it becomes Art. It shows how the power and status of the institution comes from the Art, not how power and status of the Art comes from the institution. 

McMillan's installation is inspired by the front room of a politically active single woman from the 1970s.

Each of the objects, from doilies to wall hangings, has been chosen with a specific time and character in mind. These are supplemented by larger items, such as soft and large furnishings, furniture, fixtures, and appliances. These items speak to migration, religion, status, identity, as well as transitioning from the colonial to the postcolonial eras.

What it means to be black?

What it means to be a black woman?

Which kind of difficulties was on the past to be a black woman?

Which kind of difficulties still exists being a black woman?

What is the Black Experience?

Photographs he produced include studio portraits, landscapes and ethnographic images, with an emphasis on portraits of Africans and Afro-descendants.

His studios possessed the latest equipment appropriate for the instantaneous portraits of children "who, never still, were the headaches of the photographers".

The new process referred to in the announcement was the use of dry slabs of transparent gelatin, used as an adhesive layer for the fixation of the silver salts over the paper.

He photographed all the different social classes of Brazil in the 19th century. Besides the Brazilian monarchy and black people, he also photographed the nobility, the rich tradesmen and their families, and the white middle-class.

Normally, black people were associated with domestic work, and their masters would take them to the studios for their family albums to represent them as normal slaves. In the "exotic" key, black people's photos were also sold as souvenirs to foreigners.



Image Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alberto_Henschel_-_Pernambuco_4.jpg

The series uses an allegorical mode of representation that takes advantage of historical precedent, the artist explores a diaspora aesthetics of ‘gathering and re-using’ and the ‘allegorical impulse’ as rescuing from historical oblivion what threatens to disappear. Fusing African and Western elements, each muse in Zabat series embodies a different area of creativity. ‘Conventionally presented in history of Western art as white women (…)’, they are portrayed by contemporary black women writers, activists, musicians and artists (Cherry, 2013, pp.160-161).

 

The portraits include a variety of dialects that reflect the Black Arts Movement, as well as the Lesbian and Feminist movements of the time.  It challenges the stereotypes made of Black women throughout history and the ways in which they are invisible in today's society, ‘(…) with the idea of how black women’s creativity is present then disappears, the notion of the disappeared creative person.’ (Haworth-Booth, 1992, pp.266).

Zabat is a critical revision of colonial heritage, a reflection on the European gaze on Black bodies in the past, and a creative engagement with images and visual patterns that impact contemporary neo-colonial culture. It also reveals how Black feminist readings revive the Black figure and reveal her presence, emerging as a challenge to the invisibility of Black women in the canon of what galleries and exhibition spaces portray.

Throughout history, there has been an 'endlessly repeated show of dominance', where the events of history have arisen as the result of the overlapping of multiple, competing forces.

It is based on the premise that power is more radically dispersed than conventional thinking admits. The theories of Michel Foucault also focus on the connections between power and knowledge and how that power is used as a form of social control in societal institutions. 

- Hall, S. (1986) Gramsci's Relevance to the Study of Race and Ethnicity. Journal of Communication Inquiry.

- Hall, S. (2005) The Deluge – and After in: Bailey, D., Boyce, S. and Baucom, I. eds. Shades of Black: Assembling the 1980s' Britain, pp.1-20. New York: Duke University Press.

https://theconversation.com/explainer-the-ideas-of-foucault-99758