This Arts Connected Set is meant to be used by teachers and students who will be visiting the Absentee Landlord exhibit, John Water's first foray into curating. It can be used to prep visitors for the tour theme, "Photography and Film".
The tour is designed for students in grades 4-12. The tour connects to benchmarks outlined in the Minnesota Academic Standards in the Arts. (Arts K-12, Visual Arts codes 4.1.3.5.1, 6.1.3.5.1 and 9.1.3.5.1.), each of which pertain to the personal, social, cultural and historical contexts for a work of art.
This Arts Connected Set contains a sampler of photography and film works from the exhibition. It can be considered a sneak preview of the kind of art students will see during their visit to the Walker Art Center.
It also includes questions from a technique called, "Visual Thinking Strategies", which will encourage critical thinking....both during the preview and during the tour itself.
As students answer the question set for each work, you might record their observations so the group can revisit the observations in aggregate and draw comparisons, discuss differences, etc.
On this slide you'll find an exhibition preview video included for teacher purposes. If you find it relevant and appropriate to your lesson plan, it can be included in the student preview presentation set.
Otherwise, you can start the preview on the next slide. The last slide in the presentation includes suggestion(s) for post-tour activities. Please note the set includes more than one YouTube video; if your school blocks access to YouTube, students could view them at home.
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John Waters (Amer, b. 1946) is a filmmaker, actor, comedian, writer, visual artist and art collector. He rose to fame in the early 1970s for his cult films and became perhaps best known among mainstream audiences for his film, "Hairspray" (1988).
As an artist, Waters makes photo-based artwork and installations that have been exhibited in museums and galleries, worldwide.
The Walker Art Center exhibit "Absentee Landlord" is Water's first foray into curating. Though a decidedly multi-media exhibit, Water's background in film and photography can be seen throughout.
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Artists working today use a vast array of images from our world as fertile subject matter for their art. Artists are interested in images for what they can communicate and how we, the viewers, respond to them. Artists also use cameras not only to make a record of our world, but to alter it, comment on it or to invent 'new' worlds.
Sometimes, artists appropriate others' photographs, images or films and alter them in some way to create a new artwork.
Today, and when you visit the Walker, you'll see photographs and films by contemporary artists. You'll use observational skills to uncover why they used the images they did. Is the artist trying to send us a message? To shock us? To change our point of view?
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Questions:
What's going on in this artwork?
What do you see that makes you say that?
What else can we find?
Title: "Sixteen Jackies"
Artist: Andy Warhol
Date: 1964
Medium: Paintings
Size: unframed 80.375 x 64.375 x inches
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Warhol created 16 Jackies in response to the November 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, an event whose mass-media coverage reached an unparalleled number of people.
The four images of Jacqueline Kennedy, each repeated four times, were enlargements of news photographs that appeared widely and continually in the media after the assassination. Taken from issues of Life magazine, the images depict, from top to bottom: Jackie stepping off the plane upon arrival at Love Field in Dallas; stunned at the swearing-in ceremony for Lyndon B. Johnson aboard Air Force One after the president's death; grieving at the Capitol; and smiling in the limousine before the assassination.
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Questions:
What's going on in this artwork?
What do you see that makes you say that?
What else can we find?
Title: "Untitled"
Artist: Cindy Sherman
Date: 2000
Medium: Photographs
Size: framed 31.125 x 24.1875 x 1 inches
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Cindy Sherman is not a photographer, per se, but an artist who uses photography in her work. Sherman emerged from the feminist art movement of the 1970s with her first major body of work, the Untitled Film Stills series (1977-1980). The series comprises an imaginative catalogue of female roles derived from Hollywood movies of the 1940s to the 1960s, all played by Sherman herself. With originality, wit, and intelligence, she used pop culture as a ready-made artistic vocabulary to map a particular constellation of fictional femininity that emerged in postwar America. For each photograph, Sherman created a specific mise-en-scène (props, costume, lighting, pose) evoking a generic type of female role, never a specific actress or film. At once evocative and frustrating, the stills hauntingly remain fragments without a whole, film stills without a film.
Title: "Untitled"
Artist: Cindy Sherman
Date: 1981
Medium: Photographs
Size: unframed 24 x 48 x inches
Title: "Untitled from OCTOBER PORTFOLIO ONE"
Artist: Cindy Sherman
Date: 1978/1993
Medium: Photographs
Size: 7.25 x 9.75 inches
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Questions:
What's going on in this artwork?
What do you see that makes you say that?
What else can we find?
Title: "Flooded McDonald's"
Artist: Superflex
Year: 2009
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Danish art collective Superflex painstakingly created a life-sized replica of a McDonald’s fast-food restaurant. In the film, a life-size replica of a McDonald's interior, without any customers or staff present, gradually floods with water.
The artists' choice to employ one of the most recognizable brands in the world offers a familiar point-of-departure for the viewer. The film also invokes issues of consumerism and all-too-familiar imagery from natural disasters, like recent flooding, in the news.
The artists wanted to ‘borrow the cinematic vocabulary of documentaries, ads, and disaster movies’. "Flooded McDonald's" is shown as a looped digital video projection, 21 minutes in length. The screen requires a larger-than-average gallery space to be on view at the Walker.
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