I recently came across the South African artist Mary Sibande while on a field trip for my senior seminar to the VMFA. We were studying the Aesthetic movement, and the tour guide / curator showed us Mary Sibande's work as an example of "new Aestheticism." Personally, her work seems very intentional and political (not "art for art's sake"), but it was fascinating, as is the artist. She is a South African artist born in 1982, so apartheid impacted her childhood and directly impacted the lives of the women in her family. When she was applying to college, she was rejected from fashion school (her desired career), but was accepted and instead attended art school. All of this is evident in her series of photographs, in which she models different outfits of her own creation with maids uniforms on top. I thought her photography and design were fascinating, and was inspired by the structural aspects to her art.
The other piece I discovered recently is not necessarily traditional art, but we spend all of class discussing what actually constitutes art, and I love this, so I am making the executive decision that this is art. Last April, there was a contest amongst local students in Miami to come up with a mural / poem to greet fliers at the Miami International Airport. I love this for a number of reasons. Firstly, the poems seem very deep until you realize they are not deep, just simplistic because they are written by elementary schoolers (which does not make them bad remotely). I also really want to use text in my art, if I could ever figure out a way to integrate text in my artwork, and I love these and the messages they send!
The other piece I discovered recently is not necessarily traditional art, but we spend all of class discussing what actually constitutes art, and I love this, so I am making the executive decision that this is art. Last April, there was a contest amongst local students in Miami to come up with a mural / poem to greet fliers at the Miami International Airport. I love this for a number of reasons. Firstly, the poems seem very deep until you realize they are not deep, just simplistic because they are written by elementary schoolers (which does not make them bad remotely). I also really want to use text in my art, if I could ever figure out a way to integrate text in my artwork, and I love these and the messages they send!