12H x 5W x 1D inches; 10H x 4W x 1D inches
Martinez’s sculpture A meditation on the possibility… of romantic love or where you goin’ with that gun in your hand , Bobby Seale and Huey Newton discuss the relationship between expressionism and social reality in Hitler’s painting depicts the legendary Black Panther leaders Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. By using Carrara marble, a material usually associated with heroic public sculptures, Martinez casts the history of African-American revolutionaries into the artistic tradition of monumentality. Like the artist’s earlier work included in the 1993 Whitney Biennial, an interactive piece made up with pins that read, “I CAN’T IMAGINE EVER WANTING TO BE WHITE,” A meditation on the possibility… continues Martinez’s effort to expose cultural contradictions and increase public awareness.
For more than three decades, the Los Angeles–based artist Daniel Joseph Martinez has used every art medium at his disposal to investigate raw aspects of American culture, dipping adeptly into derangements of body and brain, individual and society. In one well-known piece that he produced for the 1993 Whitney Biennial, he replaced the text on the museum’s admission ticket with the phrase “I Can’t Ever Imagine Wanting to Be White.” Visitors held the sentiment in their hands and kept it in their pockets. In The House America Built (2004), he re-created in exacting detail the cabin in which the Unabomber penned his manifesto. While Martinez’s concepts are tight and concise, they leave ample space to implicate the viewer. His work prompts more than finger pointing; it catalyzes introspection, signaling the necessity of taking stock of one’s own role in perpetuating difficult yet ubiquitous images.
These hand drawn maps are part of an ongoing series begun in 2008 in which Gupta asks ordinary people to sketch outlines of their home countries by memory...
Ramirez’s The International Sail is the fifth in a series that features an upside-down worn out, mended and fragmented boat sail...
The Damaged series by Lisa Oppenheim takes a series of selected photographs from the Chicago Daily News (1902 – 1933) as its source material...
In this photographic series, Yto Barrada was interested in the logos of the buses that travel between North Africa and Europe...
These hand drawn maps are part of an ongoing series begun in 2008 in which Gupta asks ordinary people to sketch outlines of their home countries by memory...
Ramirez’s The International Sail is the fifth in a series that features an upside-down worn out, mended and fragmented boat sail...
Untitled (San Francisco) was made in Idaho in 1984 and was facetiously dedicated to Henry Hopkins, the then director of the San Francisco Museum of Art who added “modern” to its name...
Julio Cesar Morales’s watercolor drawings, Undocumented Intervention , show a variety of surprising hiding places assumed by people trying to cross into the United States without documentation...
For Untitled, Caesar encased recycled objects such as scraps of plywood, paper or cloth in resin and then cut and reassembled the pieces into abstract forms...
Memory Mistake of the Eldridge Cleaver Pants was created for the show Paul McCarthy’s Low Life Slow Life Part 1 , held at California College of the Arts’s Wattis Institute in 2008 and curated by McCarthy himself...
The five works included in the Kadist Collection are representative of Pettibon’s complex drawings which are much more narrative than comics or cartoon...
For I use to eat lemon meringue pie till I overloaded on my pancreas with sugar and passed out; It seemed to be a natural response to a society of abundance (1978), also known as the Bodybuilder series, Martinez asked male bodybuilding competitors to pose in whatever position felt “most natural.” They are obviously trained in presenting their ambitiously carved physiques, but their facial expressions seem comparatively unstudied...
Gypsy shows an ambivalent scene, in which broken blinds and its unsmiling subject are balanced with the stilllife plentitude of watermelon slices and the beautifully lit nudity of the sitter...
Her 2015 work Orión is a black flag-like cloth with glow-in-the-dark symbols embroidered in the shape of the constellation...