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Artist Spotlight: Ai Weiwei
“If a nation cannot face its past, it has no future.”
“If a nation cannot face its past, it has no future.”
By Payton Ware
Ai Weiwei is a controversial Chinese artist and activist born May 18, 1957, Beijing, China and his father Ai Qing was a renowned poet but Chinese officials accused him of being a rightist an exilable offense. The family was exiled to remote locales before moving around a few times before being allowed to go back to Beijing in 1976 at the end of the Cultural Revolution.
In his youth Weiwei became interested in art, and in 1978 he enrolled at the Beijing Film Academy. He became inspired by an artist known as Xingxing “stars” in Chinese. To escape China's monitoring, he moved to the United States in 1981 and settled in New York City where he attended the Parson School of Design where he shifted his artistic focus from painting to sculpture. After graduation, Weiwei collaborated on three books that encouraged avant-garde Chinese art that became staples in the Chinese underground art community.
Soon after he created a design company called FAKE to publish his art with an emphasis on using common materials and supporting simplicity. He continued to publish his art and opinions to a blog and support the underground art community for years. He mostly stayed out of the mainstream until 2008 when the Sichuan earthquake happened. The earthquake took the lives of around 70,000 people, many of which being children who were crushed when their schools collapsed.
Weiwei reprimanded the Chinese government for not releasing the true death toll and details on the fatalities. This encouraged his blog community, which only started growing after
the incident, to investigate. This caused the blog to be shut down, and Weiwei was placed under surveillance for his part.
After this, Weiwei continued to make art addressing the earthquake including Remembering in 2009, where 9,000 coloured backpacks were arranged on a wall to form a Chinese quote saying "She lived happily for seven years in this world” from an earthquake victim’s mother.
In 2010 one of his most famous pieces is “sunflower seeds,” located in Tate Modern, London which is around 100 million handmade porcelain seeds produced by around 1,600 Chinese artisans. The exhibit had visitors walk on the seeds of the sculptures representing criticism of China's Communist Party which commonly uses the sunflower as a symbol. The task to create the seeds was monotonous and represented China's labor practices.
Due to Weiwei’s public way of displaying his art the Chinese authorities began to more heavily track him and on April 3, 2011 authorities arrested Weiwei at the Beijing airport right before he was about to board a flight to Hong Kong. There was no original explanation for his arrest. The government later stated that his arrest was due to “economic crimes” referring to tax evasion. He was detained for 81 days before being released and as part of the terms of release Many of Weiwei's friends wanted to get in contact with him after he was released but Weiwei was refusing interviews for fear of breaching his terms of bail. As part of Weiwei’s release terms his passport was confiscated for several years. After this incident Weiwei fell silent in the art scene to avoid further detainment, once he received his passport again in 2015 he moved to Berlin and continued his activism and struggle for human rights. He lived in the UK for a couple years until he relocated to Portugal where he currently stays today. He maintains a studio in Berlin and his son attends school in Cambridge UK.
Weiwei is one of the most influential modern artists and his work has sparked action from many to push for an expansion on human rights in China. He continues to impact the art world with his work and he has continued to have exhibitions in the US and other countries such as Ukraine. If you have the opportunity to see one of his exhibitions I highly recommend seeing one of the most important artists of our time.
Past Artist Spotlights
Past Artist Spotlights
Artist Spotlight: Jean-Michel Basquiat
"I Wanted to be a Star, not a Gallery Mascot”
By: Payton Ware
In the 1980s, New York City was transitioning into the art capital of America. The boom in creativity was rejecting the minimalism of the previous decade and re-embracing vibrant figurative art with intense emotions. Here, some of America's most famous artists thrived such as Keith Haring, Julian Schnabel, and Eric Fischl. Possibly the most influential artist of that era was Jean-Michel Basquiat, but who was he and how did he become such an iconic artist?
Basquiat was born in Brooklyn, New York, on December 22, 1960. With a Haitian-American father and a Puerto Rican mother, Basquiat came from a diverse cultural background, which would become a common theme in this art. Basquiat began drawing as a child on sheets of paper from his fathers job and his mother strongly supported this hobby. She regularly brought him to the Brooklyn Museum which sparked his interest in art history and further encouraged him to chase his passion. Basquiant had a large adherence to self-teaching and never really took to traditional schooling. This, combined with his drug use, led him to leave school at the age 17 and he moved to the New York streets where his career blossomed.
In his teenage years and early 20s Basquiat was a wandering artist with strong ties to the new neo-expressionist artistic movement in New York. Basquiat and New York graffiti artist Al Diaz became an iconic duo in the street scene. Their tag “SAMO©” became famous in lower Manhattan and Brooklyn and the tag became one of Basquiat's many motifs in his artwork going forward. This duo quickly elevated Basquiat's artistic status with his first exhibition selling out in 1982. Later that year he held a show at the Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles. The Gagosian Gallery is owned by famous art dealer Larry Gagosian so in short this propelled him to country wide stardom.
Basquiant continued his career by befriending other famous artists of the time like Andy Warhol and Haring, with Warhol being his mentor. The two went on to create a series of paintings together.
Basquiat's works were centered around themes of race, anatomy, and power. He particularly liked emphasizing the divide between the rich and impoverished in America. During the 80s the three-pointed crown became his signature motif.
Unfortunately Basquiat's drug problems continued to plague him throughout his career, worsening after the death of his mentor Warhol. He passed away from an accidental heroin overdose on August 12, 1988 at the age 27, in his New York City apartment.
In his short career Basquiat became one of the most revered and influential artists of the 20th century. His estate is managed by his 2 sisters Lisane Heriveaux and Jeanine Heriveaux who took over after their fathers death. Basquiant’s messages are continuously used and referenced especially in today's political landscape. His impact on the contemporary art world can not be understated and he continues to be one of the most famous American artists.
To see more of his art check out his estate on Instagram! @basquiatofficial
Sources: source, source, source
Artist Spotlight: Kehinde Wiley
How Kehinde Wiley Challenges the Norm
By Payton Ware
Kehinde Wiley is an American artist most known for his famous painting of former President Barack Obama, but how did he get where he is today? Kehinde Wiley was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1977 to two loving parents. When he was eleven, his mother put him and his twin brother in an art exchange program in Russia where he took art-classes after school and on the weekends. This sparked Wiley's love for art and some of his most early work was photographing the young men of Harlem and then turning those photos in a renaissance style art. In 1999 he went to college for art earning a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Later in 2001 he received a MFA from Yale University. After his education he started his professional art career.
His work soon became very popular as he showed young black people, mainly black men, in ways they had never been portrayed before. He featured black subjects in brightly colored backgrounds often dramatic flowery. These paintings used classic techniques and referenced Old Master paintings. He blended elements of street culture, art masters, and contemporary compositions to create his pieces.
Wiley has been the recipient of many prestigious awards such as the 2014 National Medal of Arts, the Department of State’s Medal of Arts, Harvard University’s W.E.B. Du Bois Medal, and more. He is also the first and only black artist to paint an official presidential portrait which is displayed in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.
What's next for Wiley? Currently he's working on multiple projects such as “A Maze of Power”, which is an ongoing series of portraits of African state heads. He also currently has an exhibition called “Flourish”, his first showing in the Netherlands at Museum Van Loon, Amsterdam. This exhibition will be Wiley's first major solo show in the Netherlands and will feature some never before seen works of his.
Additionally he founded “Black Rock Senegal” in 2019. This is a transdisciplinary residency program in Dakar, Senegal that supports visual artists, writers, and filmmakers.
In short, Wiley is an important, decorated, and influential modern artist that encapsulates a lot of the art era we are currently in. Be sure to check out the links below to view some of his works and learn more about this incredible artist!
To see more of his art: source, source, source
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