John Jay Cabuay is a New York City illustrator. His work has been seen in many aspects of promotion and art such as newspapers, magazines, and book covers. He has a MFA (Master of Fine Arts) degree which came from the Fashion Institute of Technology. He is also known for the artwork of the widely known book, “”Get Up, Stand Up” which is based on the song by Bob Marley. His graphic design is very illuminating and bold, creating a very beautiful masterpiece of saturation and texture. I found his book cover art amazing because with the book covers, he creates a very appealing image that people can almost tell a story behind. That’s the perfect area of art for a book cover with it being a story inside. He also flourishes in portraits and line art, layering vivid colors alongside bright and bold colors. He uses computer art, mainly photoshop in order to create a more professional and solid look for the pieces. With him being known to participate in many aspects of art, it shows how elusive he is with his talent and how he doesn’t limit himself from just one area in the art field. The reason why I chose John Jay is because him and I have a lot of resemblances when it comes to interest in the artist industry. I want to be able to do art in many different ways, from creating logos, to book covers and even museum paintings. I don’t want to be considered a “book cover artist” or a gesture drawing guru; I want to be known as the artist that goes above and beyond for each task he takes on. I’ve always doodled my own book cover images and wanted to create images that can be viewed by the public on a daily bases and what better way can someone’s art be viewed than being seen in a daily newspaper or top charting books. John Jay’s work is a simple art of beauty.

This picture is an example of Cabuay telling a story within his artwork without going deep into detail. When the viewer sees this picture, they begin to do the same thing the lady in the picture Is seen doing. In the piece, she is seen making a wondering gesture as to what the tanning machine may present to her. Once the viewer sees this, the proper support would be the several dangers of the tanning machine listed alongside the artwork. His artwork tells a story within a story. It creates the perfect coincide.

http://www.johnjayart.com

Carrie Mae Weems 

Carrie Mae Weems is a contemporary artist from Portland, Oregon. She was born in 1953. She trained in dance with the postmodern dancer Anna Halprin. She studied at the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, in 1981, where she earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts. She earned her Master of Fine arts at the University of California, San Diego in 1984. She then continued her studies in the Graduate program in Folklore at the University of California, Berkeley. Weems’ is best known for her photography creates art while working with text, video and audio installation, and digital images. Her first camera was given to her as a present from her boyfriend on her 20^th birthday. When she first picked up the camera, she thought to herself, “Oh okay, this is my tool. This is It.” She has always had a powerful desire to create images. 

Weems moved to Syracuse, New York in 1996 to be with her husband, Jeffrey Hoone, though majority of her family remains on the west coast. Weems’ mother, also named Carrie, her daughter faith, and many of her aunts and uncles appear in her early work. 

Through her work, she investigates relationships, family, sexism, political systems, class, and the consequences of power, along with her views on global struggles for equality and justice. African Americans are primarily her main subject, but a concept of universality is present. Weems has stated that she wants “people of color to stand for the human multitudes” and for her art to resonate with audiences of all races. Over the years, she has engaged and participated in various solo and group exhibitions at notable national and international museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Frist Center for Visual Art, Solomon Guggenheim Museum in New York, as well as the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo in Seville, Spain.  

Carrie Mae Weems has been presented with an abundance of grants, awards and fellowships. The Prix de Roma, The Anonymous was a Woman, The National Endowment of the Arts, The Tiffany Awards, and the Alpert have all been awarded to her. She was one of the first people to be given the US Department of State’s Medals of Arts in acknowledgement for her dedication to the State Department’s Art in Embassies program. She also was presented the MacArthur “Genius” grant, the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013, the Lucie Award for Fine Art, and the BET Honors Visual Artist Award. She was one of the four artists recognized at the Guggenhiem’s 2014 International Gala, and an recipient of the ICP Spotlights Award from the International Center of Photography. 

The Kitchen Table Series: 

This is one of her most well know photography projects. It is a story of a “self- possessed woman with a bodacious manner, varied talents, hard laughter, and multiple opinions.”This is the series that formed her career and inspired a new generation of Artists. The New York Time Style Magazine describes this body of work to represent the first time an African American Women could recognized her own self and experience in her art.  

http://carriemaeweems.net/galleries/kitchen-table.html

Frist Center for Visual Art: 

https://fristartmuseum.org/calendar/detail/carrie-mae-weems-three-decades-of-photography-and-video

Fun Facts: nytimes.com/2018/10/15/t-magazine/carrie-mae-weems-intervie(opens in a new tab)

Woks Cited: 

https://art21.org/artist/carrie-mae-weems/

http://carriemaeweems.net/bio.html

http://www.artnet.com/artists/carrie-mae-weems/

Nick Cave was born in Fulton, Missouri on February 4, 1959. He is known for his performance art in sculpture, specifically his sound suits. His Love for sound suits began as a response to the Rodney King beating. The sound suit that is worn is considered the second layer or skin on the body. This represented race, class, and gender allowing those who viewed Cave art work to view it without being influenced by the identity of the model in the suit. One thing about Cave that allows him to stand out among other artist is that he often executes his pubic appearances.

One of Nick Cave’s projects was Here Hear began in Detroit because he found it critical for him to expand his art career there. This project consist of 7 months of events throughout the city of Detroit. When this project was launched it was Caves largest series of events.

Knowing what lied ahead of him, his mother told him that being a black male in America could work against him, he knew he’d have to develop tough skin.

Sojourn is located in the Denver Art museum. It features almost forty art works including twenty-four sound suits. Cave’s sound suits in this exhibit allows viewers to have a surreal experience. Are made out of buttons, found objects and short films.

Josephine Halvorson grew up in Cape Cod and is still based in Massachusetts. She is an oil painter based on real life observations based on real time perceptions. She first studied art on the beaches of Provincetown at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She attended The Cooper Union School of Art, Yale Norfolk, and continued her interdisciplinary education at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. Josephine Halvorson has taught at The Cooper Union, Princeton University, the University of Tennessee Knoxville and Columbia University

Both of Halvorson’s parents were artists as well. Her father taught art and made kinetic metal sculptures. Her mother studied painting and metal became her medium upon meeting her father. In her childhood, her mother inspired her and being the only child with no one to compare herself to- it became her mission to be as good as her mother. Josephine’s competitiveness with her mother eventually lead to her mother stopping art to allow her daughter to just be able to draw and not compare herself to her mother. Because Cape Cod isn’t far from New York City, she spent most of her childhood summers in art galleries and attributes this context of her childhood as a factor in her success.

Upon the completion of her interdisciplinary education at The Cooper Union School of Art, she spent a year in Austria, in which she described the experience to be a tremendous period of growth for her as an artist. She described her goal going into it as, “My proposal was to paint portraits in relation to both psychology and expressionism in painting. In other words, what’s the relationship of me, the artist, to a subject—whether it’s a person, an object, an environment, or whatever—and how can painting address this question in ways that other forms of art can’t.”

Halvorson often completes her paintings in a single session because she works on site. She finds objects in their environment that feels “look back” at her. Her process includes prolonged closeness and shared experience with her chosen subject matter and the human quality of their tools, their graffiti, their wear and tear. One could conclude that she practices art in its most basic form, which is highlighting the human experience and perception of the environment around us.

Halvorson’s work has been exhibited throughout the United States, Europe, and Mexico. Her solo New York exhibitions “What Looks Back” and “Clockwise From Window” at Monya Rowe were highly acclaimed.

Slow Burn is my favorite piece I came across. Upon discussing the selection, Halvorson described her process as, “My practice is one of understanding an object in time: its history, its function, its place in the world, its environment—and my own relationship to it,” the artist has said. The Southeastern Center for Contemporary art exclaimed that, “Halvorson’s twenty-three portraits of the inanimate world bear witness to a haptic encounter between herself, her subject, the material of paint, plus time.”

Taiwanese artist Han Hsu Tung focuses on creating intricately designed wood sculptures. Tung has been an artist for three decades, in which he has created over three-hundred pieces. He was educated at the prestigious National Taiwan University as an anthropologist. Since 2015, Han has worked under the nom-de guerre Donald Harn. His works are inspired by personal feelings and the observation of social evolution and the influence of digital culture. In his early career, he focused on historical contexts, reality vs. imagination, left vs. right, and light vs. dark.

Beginning in the beginning of the twenty-first century, Han introduced his modern artwork that features the well-known pixilated and ever dispersing forms in his artwork. His work has encompassed the use of line and contrast through “pixilating” that has parallels with contemporary social evolution. He is a “master of marrying old and new” according to Jessica Stewart of My Modern Met. He began to show the transition from historical thought and design to a more contemporary technological aspect. His pieces care successful through the use of great technique and detail. He utilizes line, color, and contrast to make his pieces more impactful on the viewer.

His unique style has made him widely popular by breaking the boundary of perfected wood carvings. His pieces are extremely well crafted yet interrupted by broken fragments of digitalization. For this reason, many of his works focus on a breaking was or disappearance of some sort. He does this to get people to understand the world we live in, and how over time, we are becoming more digitalized. With his works, he believes people are losing their sense of the past and are headed for a new fully digital and broken age.

Han’s futuristic take encompasses the use of pixilating wood carvings. He puzzles together different colored wooden blocks, making some of them indented and others protruding. He plays the contrast of raw wood and finished sculpture. Many of his pieces imply the disappearance of history due to the modern digital age we live in.

Many of Han’s works give off a sense of motion. For example, the piece “Catcher” shows the movement of the wood that seems as if you can see the ball hitting the glove.

His expertise in sculpture is evident in the piece, “Chess.”  The piece depicts a powerful horse standing for a knight on a chess board. The raw power of the horse is shown with intricate and smooth lines and curves, contrasted with the broken blocks of his digitalization.

With his piece, “Civil War” he reengages his 1994 “War Series.” This work shows the passing of time and shows a hint of melancholy for the man and woman in uniform. The gap shows the distance between people as well as distance between thoughts of this generation and that of the time of the piece.

The image of the influence of technology is shown through his pieces, “iFashion” and “Where is the Like?” Both show a man connected with a device, which shows the great impact that technology and social media have on people of this time and how technology shapes the way we look and think.

Han Hsu-Tung 韓旭東

Dynamic Wood Sculptures Carved to Look Like Pixelated Glitches

New Figurative Wooden Sculptures by Han Hsu-Tung Dissolve Into Pixelated Cubes