Week 10

 

Amy Sherald on Making Breonna Taylor’s Portrait

“I wanted this image to stand as a piece of inspiration to keep fighting for justice for her. When I look at the dress, it kind of reminds me of Lady Justice. I wanted this image to stand as a piece of inspiration to keep fighting for justice for her. When I look at the dress, it kind of reminds me of Lady Justice.”

“Then she hit on blue, a shade that echoes Taylor’s March birthstone, the aquamarine. “The color that I chose almost had a resemblance to it. The monochromatic color allows you to really focus on her face. The whole painting really becomes about her.”

Amy Sherald made this piece which is so beautiful in representation of advocacy for her and for social justice. The attention to detail that she created resonated to Breonna’s family and loved ones. My favorite part is when she added the ring as a symbolic reference of Breonna’s boyfriend who was about to propose but never got the chance to do it. 

The Amy Sherald Effect

“When art changes in the present, it changes in the past, too.”

“Her style is a simplified realism, worked from photographs that she stages and takes of individuals who interest her”

Taking pride was what Amy wanted to create with her Artwork. She wanted her Art to be a reflection of what she found intriguing. She explains how we interpret and understand art is constantly evolving and changing with time. As our cultural, social, and political contexts shift, we may perceive a work of art differently than the way it was understood when it was first created. Therefore, when art changes in the present, it also alters our understanding of its place and significance in history, as our present perspectives affect how we view and interpret the past.

The Exquisite Dissonance of Kehinde Wiley

“... I remember being as nervous as I’ve ever been. I think I’m pretty good at representing what my work stands for. But when you’re sitting down with the head of state and discussing how he fits within a history of representation, how he specifically can interface with your aesthetic—that’s a pretty high bar to cross”

“... there was this real sense of representational work taking on the ego. It’s, like, O.K., I can make a car or Bart Simpson—or whatever it was that we were drawing at that time—better than you can. Realistic representation became a sense of self-worth.”

This pursuit of realism may have been linked to a sense of personal value and worth for Kehinde. His ability to create a realistic representation was seen as a demonstration of skill and talent. In essence, making art to create a representational art became tied to his sense of ego and self-esteem.

This is from when I visited The Red Rock Canyon  National Conservation Area in Nevada. The landscape was just breathtaking while I was there, you could just turn in a ny direction and it was always picture perfect. Reading Mirzoeff’s chapter 6, I was dishearten but also alarmed at the rate of ecological destructiveness, us as humans do to nature. While part of the country still protect famous landmarks like this, there are many that have been destroyed and reconstructed for industrial use.

“How to see the World” by Nicholas Mirzoeff, Chapter 6

“There is an inverse relationship between the countries responsible for carbon emissions and those that suffer the consequences. Sub-Saharan Africa emits very little CO2 but stands to lose many people as a result of climate change because of drought and other disruption to already precarious lives.”

 I found this very interesting because I never thought that the countries that did not use up CO2 would affected.the countries that contribute the most to the problem of climate change are not necessarily the ones that will be most affected by it, whereas those who contribute the least are often the ones who will suffer the most from the consequences of climate change.

“The transformation is astonishing seen in the longer time frames of extinction by means of natural selection. The background extinction rate (meaning the number of extinction that would occur in the absence of human intervention) is very low. It would take four hundred years for a single species of bird to become extinct without human involvement.”

Human activities such as deforestation, pollution, and climate change have significantly increased the rate of extinction, causing many species to become endangered or extinct much more quickly than they would under natural conditions. Mirzoeff argues that the concept of the anthropocene challenges traditional ways of seeing the world by foregrounding the role of human agency in shaping the environment around us. He highlights the urgent need for collective action to address the environmental crisis facing planet Earth. Mirzoeff maintains that visual and cultural practices can still play a vital role in raising awareness and inspiring action around environmental issues. He suggests that new forms of visual representation, such as data visualization and virtual reality, may offer more comprehensive and immersive ways of understanding environmental systems, and that collaborative, transnational approaches to cultural production can help to challenge the structures of power and inequality that underlie environmental crises.