Chilean-born artist Alfredo Jaar uses photography, film, and large-scale public installations to confront social and political ills, such as injustice, inequality, and oppression. Migration, exclusion, and violent conflict have often caught his attention. Usually meditative in temperament, his works raise such issues with restraint but no lack of urgency. Born in Santiago, as a child he moved for political reasons with his family to Martinique, where he came into contact with African culture and with writings by the island’s anti-colonialist intellectuals, such as Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon. After returning to Santiago 10 years later, he trained as an architect but also studied film and theater. “My whole concept of searching for the essence of a place or a space or an issue really comes from architecture,” he has explained. “I still consider myself an architect making art.” Since 1982, he has lived in New York. His best-known, if not subtlest work, A Logo for America, appeared on animated Times Square billboards in 1987 and, indicating its continuing relevance, was again shown in 2014. Protesting the linguistic arrogance of subsuming all of North and South America into the frequently used shorthand for the United States, he also drew attention to cultural hegemony exerted by the United States throughout the hemisphere. After opening with an outline of the continental United States emblazoned with the work’s title, the work then shows the country’s flag before flashing lights follow the transformation of “America” into a pinwheeling profile of the two linked continents.
Motivated by intense spiritual and theoretical leanings, American painter Alfred Jensen developed a personal and eccentric style usually featuring checkerboards of intense colors conceived on an enormous scale. Frequently, the little squares enclose letters, numbers, or other symbols. Despite his independent approach, he built on both Old Master and modern art, while also establishing an unusually wide acquaintance among contemporary artists, particularly abstract expressionists and their successors. Among his disparate interests, important sources included Goethe’s color theory, Mayan hieroglyphs, Pythagorean numerical doctrine, the I Ching, and arcane, parasensory implications of recent science. Jensen’s birth in Guatemala to a Danish father and mother of German and Polish ancestry augured his life’s unusual trajectory. Educated in Denmark from the age of seven, he then worked as a seaman, traveling extensively. During an intermittent shore leave, he enrolled in an art school in San Diego. In the mid-1920s, he headed to Munich to study at Hans Hofmann’s school, where he befriended such Americans as Carl Holty and Vaclav Vytlacil. Saidie Adler May (1879–1951) also numbered among them. A wealthy collector as well as a would-be painter, she offered to support Jensen as they painted and bought art while traveling widely in Europe and North Africa and then returned to the United States. After May died, he settled in New York, finally committing himself to work seriously as an artist. He soon formed a strong friendship with Mark Rothko and became acquainted with other leading artists, including Sam Francis. While painting expressionist works, Jensen also worked on diagrammatic drawings, which led the way in the late 1950s to the checkerboard works. These, in turn, fed interests in geometry, seriality, conceptualism, and mysticism among emerging artists. In 1963, he married Regina Bogat (1928–), who had studied at Brooklyn College. Her often brilliantly colored abstractions—hard-edge paintings and more intuitively conceived mixed-media works—respond not only to Piet Mondrian’s example but also to contemporaries ranging from Rothko and Ad Reinhardt to Eva Hesse.
Heralding the advent of pop art, American painter, sculptor, and printmaker Jasper Johns came to attention in the mid-1950s with paintings based on commonplace objects of daily life. However shocking to eyes accustomed to abstract expressionism, these works nevertheless remained manifestly within the realm of art. Johns may have used non-art subjects, “things the mind already knows,” as he put it, but he neutralized their function by subjecting them to art’s handmade techniques. The first in a series of American flag paintings, Flag (1954–55; New York, Museum of Modern Art) represents an American flag co-extensive with the painting’s surface and executed in encaustic, a fluid, wax-based medium suitable to his painterly touch. Newsprint underneath shows through in irregular patches, lending a contemporary gloss and emphasizing the work’s nature as a work of art that can be fully appreciated only upon personal inspection. (In a photograph of the whole, this aspect remains invisible.) Target with Four Faces (1955; New York, Museum of Modern Art), representing another series, offers a circular shooting target surmounted by four cropped plaster casts of a single face tightly constrained within wooden boxes, creating an unsettling conundrum. Through the 1960s, Johns continued to interrogate the meaning and limits of art in paintings that feature irony, wit, and esthetic speculation. In one series, for example, irregular, painterly patches in a calculated abstract expressionist style bear incorrect stenciled color labels. An area of blue paint, for example, may be identified as “red.” In another series, based on maps of the United States, Johns again used painterly brushwork and, for the state names, stencils, but now complicated meaning by applying colors so as to obscure the normal referential quality of a map. The viewer simultaneously perceives a map and an abstract painting that appears to contradict fixed geographical delimitations. After 1958, Johns also produced sculptures based on commonplace objects of daily life, such as flashlights and beer cans. By the 1970s, Johns had moved into new territory, playing with the possibilities of abstraction and symbolic representation in paintings that tease the viewer without revealing the artist’s full intention or meaning. Often these contain autobiographical allusions or references to historical works of art. His work since the 1990s has emphasized radical simplifications, often centering on such shapes as catenary curves. Since the 1960s, Johns has also maintained a prolific and expert career as a printmaker.
Born in Augusta, Georgia, Johns grew up in South Carolina. He studied for three semesters at the University of South Carolina, then moved in 1949 to New York. There he schooled himself in subjects that interested him, such as literature, art history, and philosophy, while remaining mostly self-taught as an artist. During U.S. Army service, he was stationed in Japan. Back in New York, around the beginning of 1954 he and Robert Rauschenberg became romantic partners. During their six years together, the two spurred a period of intense creativity, as they also traded ideas with John Cage and dancer/choreographer Merce Cunningham. Marcel Duchamp and, more generally, dadaism also encouraged Johns’s sly wit, which suggests as well parallels with René Magritte’s less subtle painted enigmas. From 1967 to 1980, as Cunningham’s artistic director, he collaborated on important projects, including the 1973 theater piece, Walkaround Time. Since the 1960s, Johns has worked much of the time in relative isolation, outside the hothouse atmosphere of New York. He maintains residences on St. Martin in the Caribbean and in rural Connecticut. See also ; .
In addition to using several sculptural media, African American Sargent Claude Johnson also worked as a ceramist, painter, and printmaker. Born in Boston, he was partly brought up in Washington, D.C., in the household of his aunt, May Howard Jackson, a sculptor who addressed African American themes. He moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1915 and studied at the California School of Fine Arts (now San Francisco Art Institute). Although he sometimes addressed other subjects, the professed aim of his black subjects, he explained, was to show the “natural beauty and dignity” of the race “not so much to the white man as to the Negro himself.” He drew on the example of African sculpture, as well as art deco stylization, and later expanded his interests to Mexican precedents. In his final few years, he created some purely abstract works. See also .
Born in South Carolina, painter and printmaker William Henry Johnson arrived at 17 in New York. In 1921, he entered the National Academy of Design (now National Academy Museum and School), where he studied with distinguished figurative painter Charles Hawthorne. Before leaving for Paris in 1926, he also worked with George Luks. (Both artists contributed substantially to the funds that enabled him to travel.) Abroad, he absorbed modern art but also became interested in Northern European expressionism and in forms of folk art that emphasize flat, patterned design. Particularly taken with Chaim Soutine’s example, as well, he developed a sophisticated expressionist approach, mainly for landscapes. Except for a single sojourn in New York, he remained until 1938 in Europe, where he lived for most of the 1930s in Scandinavia. Following his repatriation, he took up African American life as his main subject, creating vividly colored, lively scenes that dispense with the techniques of optical realism in favor of a style that suggests the techniques of untrained painters. After the mid-1940s, however, illness and a series of difficult setbacks permanently curtailed his painting career. See also .
The versatile African American Lois Mailou Jones served on the faculty of Howard University in Washington, D.C., for 47 years. Born in Boston and trained as an artist mostly at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts there, she also did graduate work at New York’s Columbia University. In 1937, she headed to Paris for a year’s study on a fellowship. Much of her work integrates African motifs into cubist structures, although she sometimes also painted relatively straightforward figure studies and landscapes. Frequent visits to Haiti from the mid-1950s brightened her palette and energized her art as she interpreted its people and landscapes. Later, she found inspiration also on an extended visit to Africa and frequent return trips to France. See also .
Frequently regarded as the central artist and theorist of minimalism, American Donald Judd created refined, authoritative, and uncompromising three-dimensional abstractions, most notably box-like forms. He refused to call these works sculptures because, as he explained, they were not sculpted, nor even handmade, but rather fabricated at his direction from plywood, industrial metals, or plexiglass. Although they display an obsessive perfectionism in detail and finish, as well as the artist’s exceptional gifts as a colorist, his example proved important to the development of conceptual art, in which idea precedes physical substance. In his writings, Judd explicated perhaps more articulately than anyone else the nature and principles of minimalism.
Born in Missouri, Judd grew up in several locations as his family moved frequently. He served in the U.S. military during the Korean War before completing a degree in philosophy at Columbia University in 1953, while also training at the Art Students League. During the 1950s, he worked as a painter, gradually withdrawing from the prevailing abstract expressionism of the day toward a more rationally organized, non-metaphorical art. He also pursued graduate work in art history at Columbia University, where Meyer Schapiro numbered among his teachers, and, from 1959 until 1965, he supported himself by writing trenchant art criticism that favored such artists as Lee Bontecou, John Chamberlain, Claes Oldenburg, Frank Stella, and others who searched for alternatives to the New York School. In the early 1960s, he began making pared-down, three-dimensional works that forecast his subsequent development and exemplified the point of view put forth in a seminal 1965 article, “Specific Objects.” Here, eschewing metaphor and symbol, as well as representation, he posited a new class of objects, neither painting nor sculpture, and explained that these works exist as physical objects that embody meaning only in their material specificity. Grimly artless though this formulation may seem, Judd subsequently achieved great purity of expression with stacked, wall-mounted, box-like elements that offer an optically weightless poise. As they articulate surrounding space with precisely engineered forms in variously colored, translucent, or transparent surfaces, they offer deeply sensuous experiences while, perhaps paradoxically, seeming to achieve magisterial independence from human touch.
Judd cared as much about context as he did about objects. To this end, he created display spaces at his home in New York and, from the late 1970s, in Marfa, Texas. There, the Chinati Foundation today administers Judd’s installations of his own work and of others he admired, including Carl Andre, Chamberlain, Dan Flavin, Richard Long, and Oldenburg. The artist explains his almost visionary intentions in the foundation catalogue: “Somewhere a portion of contemporary art has to exist as an example of what the art and the context were meant to be. Somewhere, just as the platinum iridium meter guarantees the tape measure, a strict measure must exist for the art of this time and place.” Also administered by a foundation, his SoHo residence and studio opened to the public in 2013.
In the 1970s and beyond, Judd expanded the range of his work to include environments, public sculptures, and architectural interventions. He also designed furniture and other household necessities along the lines of his purist esthetic. In addition, he designed dance performances and, over a period of several decades, remained active as a printmaker. See also .
Referring to art made from detritus, trash, or cast-off materials, junk art emerged as a popular tendency in the 1950s and 1960s. Lawrence Alloway coined the catch-all term in 1961. As a form of assemblage, junk art represented a revived desire among artists of that period to challenge conventions of fine art and to connect with everyday life, as well as industrial civilization, by recycling discards. The materials of junk art may be chosen for their formal or associational meanings. At first identified as neo-dada, the movement flourished within a context of happenings, the beat sensibility, and countercultural stirrings. Cubist collages and the work of such artists as Marcel Duchamp and Kurt Schwitters offered precedents. The transformation of the worthless into saleable works of art commented ironically on modern throwaway culture. In New York, Richard Stankiewicz and Robert Rauschenberg pioneered the post–World War II movement, which was paralleled in Europe by such artists as Alberto Burri and Antoni Tàpies, as well as arte povera. The California version of the tendency acquired the name funk art. Since then, junk art has remained a recurrent interest.