Who Arted: Weekly Art History for All Ages

For this episode, I talked to Janet Taylor, art teacher and writer for the Art of Education. She actually taught be about Njideka Akunyili Crosby, the contemporary Nigerian/American painter. Njiedeka Akunyili Crosby was born in 1983 in Enugu, Nigeria. Her father was a surgeon and mother was a professor of pharmacology. Her mother won the green card lottery allowing Njideka to come to the U.S. to study when she was 16. She spent a year studying and prepping for the SATs then went back to Nigeria to perform a year of service. After completing the year of service, she came back to the U.S. She took her first painting classes at a community college in Philadelphia then went on to Swarthmore. She was initially pre-med before deciding to pursue art. After Swarthmore, she went to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, then went on to get her MFA from Yale. A lot of her work focuses on straddling different worlds and her connections to Nigeria and the U.S. She uses painting with some collage methods like integration of fabric but particularly transfers. These methods not only integrate patterns and textures but also enrich the work through the connections to pop culture and other icons embedded as details to be discovered within her work. In 2017, she got the MacArthur genius grant which pretty much says it all right there. Her CV could make even the most accomplished among us question their adequacy. For this episode we looked at Predecessors from 2013. As always you can see the piece linked here in the show notes, or visit www.WhoArtEdPodcast.com to see this week‘s work as well as previous pieces and free resources for art teachers. If you enjoy the show, please help spread the word. Like, Subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Michelangelo is one of the most celebrated artists in history. He is known for having created some of the finest masterpieces in the world including the painting on the Sistine Chapel and the statue of David. As talented people become historical figures over the centuries, a lot of their humanity can be lost in historical accounts that feature only their highlights. I generally believe in giving people the generous edit and focusing on their good aspects, but going too far in mythologizing an artist or anyone else can be unhelpful. To focus only on their brilliance and ignore their struggles and shortcomings can be frustrating and cut short the growth of future generations of artists under the shadow of larger than life ”old masters.” With that in mind, I share that while Michelangelo‘s art was absolutely beautiful, the artist himself was kind of gross. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Charuvi Agrawal is a contemporary artist from India. She is tremendously talented as a painter, sculptor and animator. She is probably best known for two incredible works based on Hanuman. Shortly after finishing her Masters in computer animation, she opened her own studio Charuvi Design Labs and spent 3 years developing a 3D animated film about Hanuman which gained widespread critical acclaim. Following that project, Agrawal created a jaw dropping sound sculpture, a 25 foot tall sculpture of Hanuman consisting of 26,000 hanging bells. As always you can find images of the work being discussed and more resources for art lovers and art teachers at www.WhoArtEdPodcast.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For this week‘s fun fact friday, learn about how Robert Rauschenberg created a famous work of art simply by erasing another artist‘s drawing. The piece is called ”Erased de Kooning Drawing” from 1953.  This work is often misunderstood as an act of aggression or disrespect as Rauschenberg figuratively and quite literally erases Willem de Kooning‘s work, but actually this work was meant to be a celebration of de Kooning. Rauschenberg knew that the piece would only work if he were erasing a significant work by a great artist. De Kooning reluctantly agreed and gave a drawing for the younger artist to erase. Over the course of 2 months, Rauschenberg meticulously wore through numerous erasers until all that was left were a few smudges on an otherwise blank paper. Ultimately, we will never know what was originally on that paper, but de Kooning indicated it was a high quality piece and something he would miss. He felt that was important to the project. Now viewers are left to imagine what great drawing was once on that paper. The erased drawing creates an an absence or a loss that is somehow more empty than a new white page and in doing so it has elevated de Kooning‘s drawing to a space of legend freed from the page to now live inside the viewer‘s imagination. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jean-Michel Basquiat became a star of the art world in the 1980s. He grew up in New York and started making a name for himself through his collaborative graffiti project SAMO. In 1980, SAMO was dead and a young Basquiat was poised to take the art world by storm. His biography is the kind of story one would find hard to believe if laid out as the plot to a book or movie. He showed tremendous promise from an early age. He learned to read and write by the age of four. His mother nurtured his talents taking him to museums, providing him books to read to feed his appetite for more learning. Unfortunately, by his teenage years, while he was fluent in 3 languages, he was also struggling with his mother‘s mental illness and the need for her to be in care away from the family. He was a high school dropout and homeless in the late 1970s, but in the 1980s, he was painting in expensive Armani suits and throwing hundred dollar bills out of his limo to panhandlers on the street. In 2017, one of Basquiat‘s paintings set a record for the most expensive painting by an American artist when it sold for $110.5 million. In this episode of Who ARTed, we discuss the life and work of Jean-Michel Basquiat. As always you can find images of the work and other resources on the website www.WhoArtEdPodcast.com and if you like the podcast, please help spread the word, leave a review and all that. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

To be accurate, this one is a little more of a ”Fun Speculation Friday” as we will never know for a fact whether he had ADHD. He was not diagnosed in his lifetime and no credible diagnostician would pretend that they definitively prove someone had a disorder 500 years after they died. Still to consider him as an artist with a disability makes Leonardo da Vinci even more inspiring. Leonardo da Vinci is one of the most talented artist the world has ever known. He is frequently held up as the ideal ”Renaissance man” because of his notebooks full of scientific study, observations and plans for different inventions. The thing is, he never got around to editing, organizing or publishing those notes in order to help others learn and build off of his study. He never got around to building his machines. The majority of his work went unfinished. While many great artists from history created hundreds or thousands of works, Leonardo only appears to have completed a few dozen and he was notorious for taking absurdly long to do so. It took him over a decade to complete the Mona Lisa. He spent 3 years painting The Last Supper and he only finished that work after his patron threatened to cut off his funding. That distractibility and constant thirst for knowledge on a wide range of topics likely made him frustrating to work with, but it is also what made him brilliant. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Pablo Picasso is arguable one of the most talented and influential artists of the 20th century. He is certainly one of the most famous and successful. The name Picasso has become synonymous with artistic greatness, but the reality is not always quite as great as the myth. For all of his undeniable skill and talent, Pablo Picasso was a deeply flawed human being. His legacy is tarnished to some extent by his terrible treatment of women and his own family. I was hesitant to do an episode on Picasso for a long time because I generally want this podcast to have a positive tone and focus primarily on the better aspects of art. I tried to cover a bit of his artistic legacy and brilliance while acknowledging but not getting overly bogged down in the depressing details of his personal shortcomings. For this episode we focused on Guernica from 1937. It was Picasso‘s massive painting created as a response to the horrific violence of the bombing of the town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. The German Nazis and Italian fascists were involved in the Spanish Civil War and Picasso painted Guernica at the request of Spanish Nationalists. He exhibited the painting at the Paris International Exhibition at the Spanish Pavilion. Nazi Germany had a huge pavilion at the same exhibition which had to make things a little awkward. Guernica was exhibited in other venues throughout the world to raise money for Spanish war relief and to convey his antiwar/anti violence political stance. As always, you can find the image linked within the show notes or look on the website www.WhoArtEdPodcast.com where fellow art teachers can also find numerous resources that can be helpful in the classroom. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The history of photography has some really interesting and surprising facts. For example, the camera is about 2000 years older than photography. The earliest known camera obscuras were documented as far back as the 4th century BCE in China, while photography didn‘t really come about until the 18th Century. In the early 19th century, Louis Daguerre was working hard to improve the photographic method. His innovations helping to develop a latent image drastically cut down on exposure times making photography much more practical. Of course while I say it drastically cut down exposure times, it cut the times down from hours to minutes, but it was still too long to be practical for most people to be captured in a photo. The first photograph of people actually happened by accident as one man‘s decision to get his shoes shined in 1838 led to his likeness being captured in an image that would make history. For images and more resources, check out www.WhoArtEdPodcast.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Wassily Kandinsky was a Russian artist and art theorist. He is known as one of the early pioneers of abstract art. Learn a bit about Kandinsky‘s background, his personal journey from a teacher of Law and Economics to one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. Wassily Kandinsky is said to have had a condition known as synesthesia in which sound and color were linked sensory experiences. As a child he described hearing the paint his as he mixed colors. As an adult, he spoke of visual arts in musical terms. We discussed his unique vision as expressed in the piece Yellow Red Blue, 1925. Who ARTed is an art history podcast for all ages. Kyle Wood has been teaching elementary art for well over a decade helping to break things down and explain art history in a way that listeners of any age can understand and appreciate. For more information and resources of particular interest to fellow art teachers, check out the website www.WhoArtEdPodcast.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For this week‘s Fun Fact Friday, I wanted to share a little bit about the Primary Colors. In Art class, we are traditionally taught that all the colors we see are a combination of just red, yellow and blue. This is true to some extent, but teaching that there are just three primary colors and that you can make any color you want using red, yellow and blue gives people an incomplete picture. The fact is there are actually different sets of primary colors depending on what colored medium one is working with. Also, if we are being technically accurate, whether using additive or subtractive color the optimal primaries are not red, yellow and blue. If you enjoy this podcast, please like subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you are listening. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices