Norm Magnusson | |
---|---|
Born | Illinois, USA | March 20, 1960
Nationality | American |
Education | Self-taught |
Known for | Painting, sculpture |
Movement | Culture jamming, Environmental art |
Awards | Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council grant |
Norm Magnusson (born March 20, 1960) is a New York-based artist and political activist and founder, in 1991, of the art movement funism; he began his career creating allegorical animal paintings with pointed social commentaries. Eventually became more and more interested in political art and its potential for persuasion.
This led him away from the canvas and into the public realm where he created short videos that ran on U.S. national television prior to 2004's U.S. general election, viral emails and roadside historical markers with contemporary social content. The markers are part of the artist's proposed "New York State Thruway Project". Scheduled for 2012, it will place one marker in each of the 27 rest areas up and down the length of the NYS Thruway.
In the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art (Franklin Furnace Artist's Book Archive), The Springfield Museum of Art, The Anchorage Museum of History and Art, The Museum of the City of New York Museum of the City of New York, The New-York Historical Society New-York Historical Society, The Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, The Pember Museum and numerous other public and private collections; he has exhibited at these museums and for many years before it closed, at the infamous East Village-born Bridgewater/Lustberg Gallery in NYC. His sculptures of historical markers were shown as the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum's 2007 Main Street Sculpture Project, a show entitled "On this site stood." [1] In his review of that exhibition for The New York Times, Ben Gennochio called Magnusson "The Michael Moore of the highways" for the very liberal "unsparing and pitiless candor" of his art, which focuses "our attention on pressing contemporary social and political issues."
He has also created a body of nature-based work entitled "Decorating nature" in which he paints on rocks and leaves and trees and photographs them in their environment.
He was honored with two Pollock-Krasner Foundation grants (in 2016-2017 for sculpture and in 1998-1999 for painting) and a grant from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council in 2008 for the realization of "On this site stood - lower Manhattan" a project to put 'historical' plaques with contemporary social content around lower Manhattan in summer 2009. (link below) In 2014, he received a NYSCA grant (through the Center for Sustainable Rural Communities) for a public art installation in Schoharie County, NY. In 2015, he was awarded a NYFA fellowship for sculpture.
He has acted in numerous feature length and short films (see imdb.com page below, in "References" section) and is currently the host of "Correct Me if I'm Norm", a once a week internet radio interview program on RadioFreeRhinecliff.org.
Chris Doyle is a multi-media artist who was born in Pennsylvania, in 1959. He is currently working and living in Brooklyn, New York, and Mexico City, Mexico. In his animation-based practice, he explores aspiration and progress, his main goal is to question “the foundation of a culture consumed by striving.” Through his work, he seeks to depict a world anxious in the shadow of a looming apocalypse, where environmental disaster and social inequities continue with increasing prevalence and complexity. To further drive his focus of restoration and conservation, his work often features industrial ruin, debris, and waste.
Kenny Scharf is an American painter known for his participation in New York City's interdisciplinary East Village art scene during the 1980s, alongside Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. Scharf's do-it-yourself practice spanned painting, sculpture, fashion, video, performance art, and street art. Growing up in post-World War II Southern California, Scharf was fascinated by television and the futuristic promise of modern design. His works often includes pop culture icons, such as the Flintstones and the Jetsons, or caricatures of middle-class Americans in an apocalyptic science fiction setting.
Kiki Smith is a German-born American artist whose work has addressed the themes of sex, birth and regeneration. Her figurative work of the late 1980s and early 1990s confronted subjects such as AIDS, feminism, and gender, while recent works have depicted the human condition in relationship to nature. Smith lives and works in the Lower East Side, New York City, and the Hudson Valley, New York State.
Environmental art is a range of artistic practices encompassing both historical approaches to nature in art and more recent ecological and politically motivated types of works. Environmental art has evolved away from formal concerns, for example monumental earthworks using earth as a sculptural material, towards a deeper relationship to systems, processes and phenomena in relationship to social concerns. Integrated social and ecological approaches developed as an ethical, restorative stance emerged in the 1990s. Over the past ten years environmental art has become a focal point of exhibitions around the world as the social and cultural aspects of climate change come to the forefront.
Teresita Fernández is a New York-based visual artist best known for her public sculptures and unconventional use of materials. Her work is characterized by a profound reconsideration of landscape and issues of visibility. Fernández’s practice generates psychological topographies that prompt the subjective reshaping of spatial and historical awareness. Her experiential, large-scale works are often inspired by natural landscapes, investigating the historical, geological, and anthropological realms in flux. Her sculptures present spectacular optical illusions and evoke natural phenomena, land formations, and water in its infinite forms.
Chitra Ganesh is a visual artist based in Brooklyn, New York. Ganesh's work across media includes: charcoal drawings, digital collages, films, web projects, photographs, and wall murals. Ganesh draws from mythology, literature, and popular culture to reveal feminist and queer narratives from the past and to imagine new visions of the future.
Claes Oldenburg was a Swedish-born American sculptor best known for his public art installations, typically featuring large replicas of everyday objects. Another theme in his work is soft sculpture versions of everyday objects. Many of his works were made in collaboration with his wife, Coosje van Bruggen, who died in 2009; they had been married for 32 years. Oldenburg lived and worked in New York City.
Duke Riley is an American artist. Riley earned a BFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design, and a MFA in Sculpture from the Pratt Institute. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. He is noted for a body of work incorporating the seafarer's craft with nautical history, as well as the host of a series of illegal clambakes on the Brooklyn waterfront for the New York artistic community. Riley told the Village Voice that he has "always been interested in the space where water meets land in the urban landscape."
Ronald Bladen was a Canadian-born American painter and sculptor. He is particularly known for his large-scale sculptures. His artistic stance, was influenced by European Constructivism, American Hard-Edge Painting, and sculptors such as Isamu Noguchi and David Smith. Bladen in turn had stimulating effect on a circle of younger artists including Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt and others, who repeatedly referred to him as one of the 'father figures' of Minimal Art.
Jim Radakovich is an American sculptor and painter living and working in New York City. He was a key figure in the East Village art scene in New York from 1982 to 1987 often showing together both Neo-Surrealist paintings and totem-like sculpture. He frequently exhibited with other artists who emerged at the time, including Kiki Smith, David Wojnarowicz, George Condo, Rick Prol, Peter Schuyff, Mark Kostabi and Marilyn Minter.
Mary Miss is an American artist and designer. Her work has crossed boundaries between architecture, landscape architecture, engineering and urban design. Her installations are collaborative in nature: she has worked with scientists, historians, designers, and public administrators. She is primarily interested in how to engage the public in decoding their surrounding environment.
Marion Wilson is an American artist whose mixed media installations have gained critical attention.
Jack Earl is an American ceramic artist and former teacher, known for drawing inspiration from his home state of Ohio to create rural pieces “with meticulous craftsmanship and astute details… to where you could smell the air, hear the silence and swat the flies.” Although his works hint at highly personal, intellectual, and narrative themes in an almost unsettling manner, Earl is “a self-described anti-intellectual who shuns the art world." He is known particularly for using his trademark format, the dos-a-dos : “This art form is like a book with two stories… the two seemingly incongruent images prompt the viewer to fill in the conceptual gap through poetic speculation.” His work often involves dogs or the character “Bill”, who is said to be a combination of Earl’s father-in-law, himself, and others. The titles to his pieces are typically lengthy, stream-of-consciousness narratives that suggest the folk or rural lifestyle. These are intended to add another dimension to the artwork. His work has received a notable response over his decades-long career, especially since he is regarded as “a master at reminding us that within the events we take for granted are moments of never-ending mystery and wonder.” Earl continues to live in Lakeview, Ohio with his wife, Fairlie.
Christy Rupp is an American artist and activist.
Kambui Olujimi is a New York-based visual artist working across disciplines using installation, photography, performance, tapestry, works on paper, video, large sculptures and painting. His artwork reflects on public discourse, mythology, historical narrative, social practices, exchange, mediated cultures, resilience and autonomy.
Lina Puerta is a Colombian-American mixed media artist based in New York City. She was born in New Jersey and grew up in Colombia.
Nyeema Morgan is an American interdisciplinary and conceptual artist. Working in drawing, sculpture and print media, her works focus on how meaning is constructed and communicated given complex socio-political systems. Born in Philadelphia, she earned her BFA from the Cooper Union School of Art and her MFA from the California College of the Arts. She has held artist residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and Smack Mellon. Morgan's works are in the permanent collections of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art and the Menil Collection.
Lee Brozgol was an artist, arts educator, and social worker, whose work addresses social, emotional, and cultural elements of contemporary life across the United States. Brozgol is especially known for his murals and public art, which are on permanent display in Downtown Manhattan.