SUMMARY:British sculptor Andy Goldsworthy has long been known for his unconventional approach to art. In an ongoing project at Kansas City’s Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Goldsworthy has created a “walking wall,” assembling and then disassembling the same limestone rocks, moving across the landscape of the museum’s campus. Jeffrey Brown talks to Goldsworthy about creating objects that won’t last forever.
SUMMARY: A “Wind Sculpture” by visual artist Yinka Shonibare MBE was recently installed in front of the National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C. It's the seventh in Shonibare's series of vibrantly colored and patterned public artworks that are made of fiberglass, but look like cloth. Jeffrey Brown talks to Shonibare about his interest in depicting globalization and what he asks of his viewers.
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): On a recent morning in Washington, D.C., this wind sculpture was lifted in and installed outside the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art. It's the latest in a series of public art works on display around the world by the artist Yinka Shonibare.
YINKA SHONIBARE MBE, Artist: It's a freestanding sculpture, but it's a very dynamic sculpture, and it's very colorful. And, also, it's deceptive, because, from a distance, it feels like it's actually soft material.
JEFFREY BROWN: Playful, deceptive, full of contradiction, the stuff of Shonibare's works, most of all the sculptures for which he's best known, colonial-style figures, some headless, some with globes for heads, in brightly colored African-style costumes.
YINKA SHONIBARE MBE: Actually, my work is really breaking down stereotypes, saying, you know what? What you see is not necessarily what you get. So, you might actually want to take time to find out more about something before you then start to make assumptions about it.
JEFFREY BROWN: Shonibare himself is a mix of identities. Born in London in 1962, he moved to his family's homeland in Nigeria at three years old, and then returned to London to study fine art.
At 19, he contracted a viral infection in his spine that left him partially paralyzed. He also began to see his way forward as an artist, through an unintentionally provocative question that came from a teacher.
YINKA SHONIBARE MBE: One of my teachers said, why aren't you making authentic African art? I felt that, actually, what's authentic African art, or what's authentic identity in a global, modern world?
And so those questions have been with me since. And I have explored those questions in many ways.
SUMMARY: Alexander Calder was one of the modern masters of art -- breaking the mold on sculpture in the 20th century. Nearly 40 years after his death, Calder's work continues to captivate. WGBH's Arts Editor Jared Bowen sat down recently with the Chief Curator of the Peabody Essex Museum near Boston to discuss Calder and his creations.
LYNDA ROSCOE HARTIGAN, Curator Peabody Essex Museum: The notion that you could stand in front of something and wait to see if it moves, how it moves, just automatically slows you down. It means that you have to take a lot of time to look carefully.
JARED BOWEN, WGBH: By working in movement, Calder near single-handedly changed the definition of sculpture—rejecting tradition and those carved masses for which his own prominent family of sculptors was known.
LYNDA ROSCOE HARTIGAN: Calder is one of these people who was in the right place at the right time.
I am Retired U.S. Navy (22yrs) and a Vietnam Veteran. After my Navy retirement I was in the computer related industry, now retired. In 2000 I was a registered Republican and voted for George W. Bush. Six months of having Bush in the Whitehouse forced me to re-evaluate my political stance. I had always thought of myself as a Moderate Republican, but was a Republican by "default" NOT because of close examination of the GOP. Due to what has happened in America since 2000, I now consider myself a progressive, and registered as a Non-Affiliated voter.
*Anti-First Amendment policies that attempt to turn America into a theocracy by enshrining ANY religious belief as law.
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