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The Bobbys of Pop Art
105 Plays4 years ago
In this week's episode we talk about two works from the Oklahoma State University Museum of Art's permanent collection. Love by Robert Indiana, and An American Alphabet Series, Letter H by Robert Cottingham. We introduce the Pop Art movement and talk about these two Bobbys. Then we interview two former colleagues from the OSUMA and how they're using these works to cultivate community dialogue and discussion.
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Transcript
Gianna's Wisdom Teeth Journey
00:00:35
Speaker
Hello, hello, and welcome to Art Pop Talk. I'm Bianca. And I'm Gianna. How's it going, Gianna? How are you feeling? Gianna had a little surgery this week. Oh, god. I feel fine. Sorry, this is a lot of information that you guys probably don't want to know. But I got my wisdom teeth taken out, no big deal. But I'm sorry if my voice sounds a little bit weird, just because I'm still
00:00:58
Speaker
in recovery a little bit. Yeah, so try not to make me laugh too much today, because I'm sore. No promises. I am super funny. You're just so funny, so I'm just going to be writhing in pain this whole episode. Oh, god. So do you want to talk about what we did this week? Yeah.
First Impressions of Hamilton
00:01:16
Speaker
So we watched Hamilton, the Hamill film, on Disney+. And it was the first time that both of us watched
00:01:25
Speaker
Hamilton because neither of us had seen it on stage, unfortunately. I surprisingly really really enjoyed it. I don't know why. You were surprised? I think because of the hype of Hamilton. There's something inside me when things get really really hyped up.
00:01:43
Speaker
that I start to feel like a little bit of skepticism creep in because for so long I haven't been able to make that decision for myself. I just hear so many different things. But Gianna and I, I don't know that we've talked about it that much, but Gianna and I love musicals.
Musical Memories and Controversies
00:02:00
Speaker
I think we are a huge musical family. We grew up watching old musicals. My favorite movie for the longest time was Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.
00:02:10
Speaker
which is such a weird movie. It's so problematic, but it's so good. It's really messed up. It's bad. It's an interesting film because it's the first movie musical where music was written specifically for a film, which is really interesting.
00:02:29
Speaker
Definitely problematic, but a really important piece of film when studying film history. Maybe we can watch that tonight. There's that whole song about kidnapping women. Yeah, but you know what? They all fell in love. They did. And it has What's His Face From West Side Story in it. Gideon. Gideon.
00:02:49
Speaker
There's this scene in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers where he pretends to be a cat so he could kidnap his girlfriend. Please just watch this movie with caution, but with much caution. But if you have seen it, you know what to expect. Yeah, super weird. Anyways, we do love a good musical.
Moulin Rouge Obsession
00:03:10
Speaker
And I also really liked Hamilton. I've never been able to see it. And I just I guess I never listened to the soundtrack because
00:03:19
Speaker
maybe I just like to experience that in person first. So it was nice to hear it all and sequential order and see it. I think it's really cool that they were able to do that. It was nice to watch. Yeah. Well, and I also don't know how many of you all still have
00:03:36
Speaker
basic TV or I don't know, we grew up watching a lot of PBS and when I'm home at Moms I end up watching a lot of PBS and sometimes they do have recordings of other musicals. Yeah, like Jesus Christ Superstar. Yeah, sometimes they just randomly come on. I feel like it's always on. Yeah, and a play that we actually saw for, I think it was my graduation trip when we went to New York, we saw She Loves Me, which is one of my favorites. What is your favorite musical?
00:04:05
Speaker
I would say movie or stage production. Okay, well I feel like I can't even say this because I didn't get to go see the musical but you did. Don't say mine. I'm gonna say it. Moulin Rouge. You gotta talk about Moulin Rouge. Oh my god guys. First of all Moulin Rouge is my favorite movie.
00:04:27
Speaker
of all time. I stan Baz Luhrmann. I freaking love all of his work. Moulin Rouge is just oh my god it's so good. I cry every single time but I just for me it's the perfect movie. It's funny, it's sad, it's a musical, it's beautiful, it's got glitter.
00:04:47
Speaker
and costumes and pop culture references mixed with art references. Yeah, with art references. It's literally, it was made for me. Just hanging out. It was made for me. But almost a year ago now, last August, my best friend and I, we went to see Moulin Rouge on Broadway in New York for our 10 year friendiversary.
00:05:11
Speaker
And I can't even describe, if you get the chance when it reopens to go see Moulin Rouge on Broadway, just, it's worth every penny, I promise you. I think it was one of the best days of my life, one of the best things I've ever seen. The cast was incredible, the songs, the set, it's everything I needed from the movie but it was like you're there and they really
00:05:35
Speaker
play on that aspect of audience interaction. They want you to feel like you're actually kind of in the Moulin Rouge watching a play, but you're part of it. And you just like shoot, they shoot glitter out into the audience, which is glitter is one of my favorite colors. So it was just so
00:05:55
Speaker
So fantastic. So that's that's my favorite. Yeah, I saw on the town one time I love on the town to mom and one of my dear aunts and I Really liked that play because it was very dance-heavy. Yes, and I've never seen a Broadway show like that. I am very I
00:06:18
Speaker
I was talking to Bianca about this earlier. I am like a sucker for that cliche, just pure joy, Broadway humor that's just really silly, which is why I love She Loves Me so much. To see dance like that was so cool. And I love that movie too. Oh, I know. It's so sweet.
Moving Back to Pennsylvania
00:06:40
Speaker
So today is kind of bittersweet all around. Today is really bittersweet. Oh, I'm actually getting kind of sad thinking about it. Oh no. I know. So we are feeling a little sentimental today because today is one of our last episodes that, well, is the last episode that
00:07:01
Speaker
Bianca and I will be recording together in Oklahoma. Yes, I am returning to Pennsylvania. We have two really exciting exhibitions coming up at work for the fall, so those are about to be installed and we're doing a lot of prep work for that and getting everything set up to go virtual and hopefully integrating a lot of virtual tours and things like that.
00:07:28
Speaker
Hopefully we'll be able to get back into the museum space with precautions, but I do, I am paying rent for an apartment there. That sucks. So yeah, gotta go back to Pennsylvania, but things to do, people to see. Places to go. Places to go, you know. I'm a business woman. I'm a business woman.
00:07:49
Speaker
The other reason why we are feeling a bit sentimental today as well is because for today's episode in the last half, we did an interview at the OSU Museum of Art with a couple of their staff members.
Introduction to Pop Art
00:08:04
Speaker
Bianca and I both started our careers at this museum. It was truly where it all began. It felt so good to be back there. This place was my home throughout college and Bianca and I have been
00:08:15
Speaker
really wanting to do recordings within gallery spaces since we started this podcast. And it really felt like a perfect place to start this kind of collaboration. Yeah, definitely. It was so nice to go back and one of the last things we're going to do here and see some old friends from a bit of a distance. And they were so accommodating. Thank you for letting us even come in at all and bringing out the works for us to see and interact with up close.
00:08:44
Speaker
So with that, let's art pop talk! So today we are not only talking about our up close look at two prints that were recently added to the OSUMAs permanent collection, but we are also going to be talking with two museum workers
00:09:07
Speaker
The Associate Curator of Education, Kristen Elliott, and the Marketing and Communication Specialist, Kristen Duncan. Two incredible staff members and former colleagues of mine that I can't wait for you all to meet. So, Bianca, I don't know about you, but I'm really excited to talk about this art movement today because I feel like it's really on brand for the podcast.
00:09:30
Speaker
totally on brand and it's one of my favorite art movements because I mean the satire and critique and no fucks given in this movement is just one of my favorite things. So I'm really excited to start talking about some pop art today. We have a few more little pop art conversations coming up for you all but today
00:09:56
Speaker
We are going to talk about these two pieces specifically in relation to the OSUMA art collection. We have got Robert Indiana, His Love, Red Blue, from 1991, which is an etching on paper. And then we've got Robert Cottingham, an American alphabet series, The Letter H, from 1997 to 2009.
00:10:21
Speaker
Before we talk about these two pieces in particular, I just wanted to give a little background on the pop art movement just so we can kind of situate what these two artists are doing within it. Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the 1950s and flourished in the 1960s in America and Britain.
00:10:43
Speaker
They were drawing inspiration from sources in popular and commercial culture and expanded globally throughout the 70s. So this kind of continued to evolve.
00:10:53
Speaker
early pop art in Britain was fueled by American popular culture viewed from that kind of distance, while the American artists were inspired by what they saw and that kind of lived experience within American consumerist culture. So if you are sitting in an art history class and it's the first day of your pop art lesson, you are probably going to start with the British artist Richard Hamilton. Of course. How could we forget? Yeah.
00:11:23
Speaker
really can't and so well you could but we're just gonna continue on that Western art history track. Richard Hamilton created this collage in 1956 that's called just what is it that makes today's home so different so appealing.
00:11:41
Speaker
And I think
Richard Hamilton and Pop Art Origins
00:11:42
Speaker
collage is also something that just, it's not only remained a form of contemporary art and contemporary pop art because you have that direct transference and critique of printed visual culture like magazines and advertisements. But I'm curious to kind of think about how this has evolved with social media with us seeing ads digitally so much more, how we think about pop art in a new context.
00:12:08
Speaker
But in the 50s, we have this critic, Lawrence Alloway, in conjunction with Richard Hamilton, who are probably credited with coining the term pop art. This was possibly in the context of that Hamilton's famous collage. So in this collage, it was actually made to announce the Independent Group's 1956 exhibition, This Is Tomorrow, in London.
00:12:34
Speaker
And in the image we see this kind of buff, muscular dude who's mostly naked holding this conveniently placed Tootsie Pop. So this movement generally comes as a contrast to the massive, performative, and very gestural paintings of abstract expressionism.
00:12:53
Speaker
Many pop artists created paintings and artworks that mimicked the industrial printing techniques of the time. And this kind of ironic approach is maybe best exemplified by Lichtenstein, who methodically painted the bende dots, which is a mechanical process used to print pulp comics.
00:13:15
Speaker
We have other artists like Andy Warhol who actually shifted entirely away from that mimicked industrial painted style, like individually painting those bendy dots, to actually using industrial techniques for mass production.
00:13:31
Speaker
So Warhol began making silk screens before removing himself entirely from the process, well almost entirely from the process, by having others do the actual printing in his studio named The Factory. Yeah, so this idea of mass production within art and the presence of the artist's idea but the removal of the artist's own hand
00:13:56
Speaker
is something that has continued since pop art and is a very common practice particularly amongst print studios and sculpture studios. Working in both these mediums myself and while also critiquing a contemporary consumer consumerist culture pop art holds a huge influence within my practice as well as just of movement and a topic of interest that I'm very drawn to and intrigued by. So taking someone like Jeff Koons for example and Jeff Koons Studios
00:14:26
Speaker
who is a contemporary artist influenced
Robert Indiana's 'Love' and LGBTQ+ Impact
00:14:30
Speaker
by pop art, I would recommend watching the R21 video on Coons. It's really funny, I think. They film the studio space and interview the artists actually working on the sculptures. And they say things like, oh yeah, Jeff hasn't been down here to make or fabricate his own works, you know, in forever. And this is all to say, this is not a secret at all. Like, everyone knows that.
00:14:56
Speaker
But I do find this like candid relationship between the artists and koons just kind of funny and interesting. So everyone has their own opinion on contemporary studios that function to mass produce art in this way. But it tends to be somewhat of a hot button issue. And I think just a topic of curiosity for those both in and outside the art world.
00:15:17
Speaker
We will talk about mass production in art more, but just to leave us with something to think about today is that collaboration and hiring other artists to work on your project is not as new of a concept as we think it is. We talked about this in Judy Chicago's work, The Dinner Party, and we know this is something that's been apparent when we look at very famous and historic artworks created by old classic masters.
00:15:46
Speaker
And it's a it's an idea that presents itself I think with some hesitation. We so in our world think of things maybe as a scribe to one person. And I think it's not a bad thing as long as we're open about it and talk like being transparent about who's doing the work and what kind of representation and
00:16:07
Speaker
payment that people who are doing this work are getting. But I also think in terms of pop art, it's really interesting to think about that tension between the consumer and what we think of as this abstract idea of the artist. Yeah, for sure. So a lot to talk about there with mass production and also just the way that art studios are functioning today.
00:16:30
Speaker
Yes, so let's talk about Robert Indiana. One of the pieces we are looking at is his iconic print with the block letters love.
00:16:42
Speaker
Robert Indiana was born Robert Clark in Newcastle, Indiana in 1928. He was adopted as an infant and spent his childhood moving frequently around the state of Indiana. I'm going to use a quote from Indiana's website because I just think it's a pretty lovely description.
00:17:04
Speaker
A self-proclaimed American painter of signs, Indiana created a highly original body of work that explores American identity, personal history, and the power of abstraction and language, establishing an important legacy that resonates in the work of many contemporary artists who make the written word a central element in their
00:17:29
Speaker
So in 1954, he moved to New York and joined an artist collective with figures including Ellsworth Kelly, James Rosenquist, Agnes Martin. And Indiana, like some of his fellow artists, kind of were using the area's abandoned warehouses for materials, creating sculptural assemblages from wood, rusted metals, and other kind of found objects.
00:17:58
Speaker
His prominence as an artist grew throughout the 60s. And in 1966, we see this turning point for him with the success of the love image, which had been featured in a solo exhibition at the Stable Gallery. The word love, which is a theme central to Indiana's work, first appeared in the painting For Star Love from 1961.
00:18:24
Speaker
Love was a subject of great spiritual significance for the artist, illustrated by the painting Love is God from 1964, which was inspired by an inscription in the Christian Science churches that he actually attended growing up.
00:18:40
Speaker
So initially he started experimenting with different compositions of stacked letters in a series of rubbings from 1964 where Indiana turned this design into kind of that block traditional print that we see today, which was a departure from those other paintings where he's using that word. Indiana's love was selected by the Museum of Modern Art in 1965 for its Christmas card.
00:19:09
Speaker
quickly it permeated across popular culture and was adopted as an emblem of the love generation. It appeared as a best-selling United States Postal Service stamp in 1973 and reproduced countless actually unauthorized products were made with this artwork on them. Yeah, the appropriation of this piece is quite ironic. Yes.
00:19:36
Speaker
This kind of mass-produced image, again some of which was unauthorized, led to a lot of negative criticism of the artist where people started arguing or making the assumption that the artist was quote-unquote a sellout. However, the image's audience had had made him a kind of an icon of modern art.
00:19:57
Speaker
And the universality of the subject to which Indiana continued to return is further evinced by his translation of love into other languages. So he has statues of love in Spanish and Hebrew.
00:20:10
Speaker
Indiana found love through his art and adoration with the public. There's something about this work that is so uniquely transcribed to all of us when we see it. But according to Barbara Haskell, who was a curator of the Whitney Museum of American Art, recognized that quote, love for Indiana was a dangerous commodity that can die out and lead to disappointment.
00:20:36
Speaker
On one hand, he accepted that love became a symbol that brought him international renown. But for him, love has also had this element of fragility and precariousness." And although he may not have used this exact identification, I want to acknowledge Indiana's place in LGBTQ plus history as a gay artist.
00:21:00
Speaker
Art historian Robert Storer notes that to be an openly gay man in the 50s and 60s was practically impossible without putting on kind of a series of masks, if you will. He says, quote, Indiana never hid himself completely behind masks. Rather, he was using them as filters so that the thing that was important to him could come through.
00:21:24
Speaker
They would come through very clearly to people who understood and were sympathetic to his concerns." And Indiana actually just passed away a few years ago in May of 2018 and I started reading about some of this, I wonder what the outcomes of this case were, but one day before his death there was a lawsuit that was filed over claims that his caretaker
00:21:49
Speaker
had isolated him from family and friends and was marketing again unauthorized reproductions or even fakes of his works. It's horrible. It's just awful. I also want to make sure that we say Indiana was so much more than this love work, although that's what we're talking about today.
00:22:11
Speaker
please go look at more of his artwork. He was an incredible graphic designer and the way he utilizes text with more than just this word is really fascinating. Despite this most famous image, Indiana did become kind of recluse later in his life, which may have been because of the situation with his caretaker and art dealers, but he left New York and
00:22:36
Speaker
1978 actually and became kind of disillusioned with the New York art scene and because of those harsh and unfavorable reviews he received, he left the art world or left the art hub but really continued to make really interesting work
00:22:54
Speaker
The past two decades, he still has had a few different kind of retrospectives. I think one was actually about to open at the Albright Knox Gallery right before he died. In 1960, he also created these kind of diamond shaped paintings with the words eat or die, as well as works that were inspired by the Civil Rights Movement. So he is looking at kind of a broader context of American culture besides this symbol of love.
00:23:23
Speaker
Which I just wanted to yeah bring your attention to yeah, we have a really good conversation about this piece in the interview at the museum I still am very fascinated with this reproduction and appropriation of love that we see you know people have in their home use for home decor or bookends or random things and I
00:23:43
Speaker
I don't want the artist to be so far removed from this work anymore. That is so iconic. So the next artist we are looking at today is Robert Cunningham.
Robert Cottingham's Photorealism
00:23:55
Speaker
Cunningham has been known as a photo-realist artist despite his rebuttal of this characterization as he would define himself instead as a realist painter working in a long tradition.
00:24:08
Speaker
of the American vernacular scenes and landscapes like pop artists before him. So Conning Ham's well-known pieces depict mid-20th century signs, railroad boxcars, mechanical components, and other technologies
00:24:23
Speaker
and explore this fascination with tight face through interesting and dynamic perspectives or viewpoints, and through a very intensive use of vivid and flat color planes. So for me, Bianca, I'm curious if you agree, but it's this use of color and perspective that blurs these notions of photorealism and abstraction for me.
00:24:45
Speaker
because the perspective is quite accurate. But when obscuring these flat planes of color, your eyes can't help but begin to isolate these and all these different blocks of colors when you stare at it for such a long time creating this whole other new image and experience for you as a viewer.
00:25:04
Speaker
Yeah, looking at the detail of his work is pretty incredible. But I love whenever you kind of see this alphabet series as a whole, and you do start thinking about not only language and detail of the image and the letters that you're seeing, but when you piece them all together, it is kind of like this compilation of color blocks as well. Yeah. So the piece that the OSUMA pulled for us is Cunningham's lithograph
00:25:31
Speaker
print H like Bianca said which is part of his An American Alphabet series printed through 1997 up until 2009. Before we go into talking about the visuals of the print I wanted to talk about the process of printmaking. You all know and I've mentioned how trippy the process of printmaking can be so this is a great opportunity to give a little description on what lithography is.
00:25:58
Speaker
And before I do that, Bianca, do you want to try to explain lithography? Yes. Lithography is prints. Guys, I don't understand printmaking. I'm sorry, Gianna, please, please help me. No, it's just, that is just funny just because I've said it before, I do printmaking and when you're doing it, you don't even know
00:26:23
Speaker
what is happening. So I'm going to try to explain it to the best of my ability here today, but the simplest way I can break it down is that lithography is based on the principle that oil and water don't mix. That's the biggest takeaway. Also, lithography breaks the idea of the traditional rubber or wood block carving
00:26:41
Speaker
that a lot of you are probably seeing on Instagram today which is known as reduction printmaking as you carve away your image as you are printing these different colors but with litho there's no carving instead you draw with a pen or sharpie on a flat plate and skipping over a couple other steps on how to handle this plate
00:27:03
Speaker
Essentially, when you are ready to print and roll your ink over this plate, you first spray down the surface with water or a water chemical solution beforehand. Bianca's laughing at me. I don't understand. I don't understand photography either, if we're being honest. I 1000% don't understand photography. How is that possible? Okay, we don't have time. Because going off of, again, this principle that water and oil don't mix your ink will only stick
00:27:28
Speaker
to where your Sharpie marks are or what you have drawn on the surface. So I know that this is still really probably confusing but after all these years it still doesn't even quite make sense to me as I said it. But as a printmaker I think it's really important to attempt to try to explain how it works because in my opinion you can't talk about printed works without talking about the process because for me
00:27:53
Speaker
I think print is process art. No, you're a thousand percent right. Thank you for doing the most work and trying to educate an art historian about how prints work because I feel like whenever I write anything it's like, ah yes, this is a print. Well, and that's what I've mentioned before that
00:28:11
Speaker
printmaking is highly revered, yet super not understood and I think misunderstood sometimes. So now getting back to the image itself, I love this series because just as the work itself can take on a different form because of the color play and the perspective, the individual print can be read differently when displayed by itself and with the rest of the letters, with the rest of the alphabet.
00:28:39
Speaker
And I want to note that the OSUMA has the alphabet series, which was displayed in their last exhibition, but today, again, we are only looking at that one letter. So this idea of playing with the composition of the series by choosing to separate the letters into individual works, I think speaks to this larger interest that Coddingham has in, again, typography and letters.
00:29:05
Speaker
but also the conceptual and psychological impact that creating certain isolated words or letters have. And an idea that we see throughout his career as well, in other works we might see a really dramatic or foreshortened perspective to where only a couple letters are legible, therefore creating a whole new meaning or a whole new word. And this piece we have a dramatic use of cropping and enlarging as the letter is pushed to the up-close foreground
00:29:33
Speaker
that creates this very enigmatic visual chemistry as our mind is going back and forth with interpreting this as a formal letter or as an abstracted form. Ooh, I love that. I love this work.
Nostalgia in American Culture Through Art
00:29:47
Speaker
So, in doing my research on Cunningham, I kept seeing this comment come up on all these articles or museum pages that I just wanted to address.
00:29:55
Speaker
It says, his crisp, often monumental canvases celebrate and accentuate the forms of his subjects while remaining devoid of nostalgia. And it's this devoid of nostalgia part that I'm not quite getting. And Bianca, let me know if I'm what you think about this, but I know that
00:30:17
Speaker
we need to consider the intent behind these works, which were simply recreating what Conningham was seeing around him and being fascinated with commercialism and places like Times Square. But as the American landscape has changed and consumerism has evolved, commercialism has evolved, I can't help but consider a 1960s urban American landscape
00:30:43
Speaker
Which was when conning him stopped doing commercial art and then became a full-time artist I can't help but feel nostalgic Yeah, because one of their super saturated colors and this is how to say that again This is just my interpretation, but I also can't help but think of old Hollywood Technicolor films we were talking about musicals earlier I can't help but think of singing in the rain which was a film done in 1950s
00:31:13
Speaker
in this one scene, it's the Broadway ballet scene, where Gene Kelly is surrounded by all those light up Hollywood signs and everything is so, so saturated. So I don't know, personally, I think it's hard not to look at his work and not feel nostalgia at all. Yeah, I think this is a really interesting concept because the letter itself, as an individual,
00:31:41
Speaker
doesn't seem nostalgic when you think of a letter as an abstracted form, that even though we know we've been taught that this letter makes a sound, that this letter means something, that when you see this letter it's representative of language, but when you look at the letter B, it's just a shape, it's just an abstracted form that we have been told means something. But I see what you mean because it's interesting to think about
00:32:11
Speaker
word and image in the context of nostalgia because for us like singing in the rain and you know, we were not born in the 1950s but many of his letters for me do recall this kind of old Hollywood or
00:32:25
Speaker
like golden age America quote unquote I'm you know not calling it that but you know what I mean I do right because the letters are architectural yes they're very structural and it does kind of remind me of like a diner or like night hawks or something like that which feels very nostalgic even though it's not a nostalgia that we ourselves have participated in it's in fact fabricated right exactly so
00:32:50
Speaker
I think looking at his other works as well, I'll make sure to list other images on the resources page. And I think when combining all of that together, again, just my perspective. No, I love this. So up next, we have a lovely interview with our friends at the OSUMA. When you listen, just a disclaimer, we were able to physically be in the space and look at the two artworks in person.
00:33:19
Speaker
But being in person, we did have to wear our masks the whole time. And when we were in the gallery, you know, it's not the most conducive space to absorbing sound for good quality podcasts. So it's going to sound a little bit different. It's still a great conversation. But you know, we just gotta, it's wild times got to be flexible. And hopefully you guys still enjoy it. Let us know what you think.
Upcoming OSU Museum Interview Preview
00:33:43
Speaker
Yeah.
00:33:43
Speaker
So we're going to take a little break and whenever you come back, you'll hear our interview with staff members at the OSU Museum of Art.
00:34:25
Speaker
Okay, welcome back everybody.
Meet the OSU Museum Staff
00:34:28
Speaker
So we are here at the OSU Museum of Art with two of my lovely former colleagues, Kristin Duncan and Christina Elliott. Welcome ladies to the podcast. Thanks for having us. Okay, of course. So why don't you tell listeners a little bit about yourselves and what you do here at the museum.
00:34:48
Speaker
Sure, I'll jump in first. My name's Kristin. I am the Marketing and Communication Specialist.
00:34:55
Speaker
So my job really is to run with what programming our education team has already created and how brilliantly they plan things out, as well as promote whatever exhibition we have going on here. So whether it be through our digital channels or through writing a press release, I really am here to promote the museum.
00:35:21
Speaker
Christina. My name is Christina Elliott and I am the Associate Curator of Education for Academic Initiatives and so I am very fortunate to be part of an educational team. We have two other members who are dedicated towards student staff and K through 12 so I get to focus on
00:35:41
Speaker
community and college engagements, and so I help manage tours, workshops, class visits, outreach, any aspect of our collection and exhibitions that's involved with OSU. Yeah, also out here doing the most. Of course. Oh my gosh. I know, it's so funny how Gianna and I have talked before on the show how
00:36:03
Speaker
the museum shaped so much of how we are going out into the world and talking about art. So I'm really excited to come back here and
00:36:12
Speaker
see how it's changed or especially during COVID too like how do academic programs change and how does marketing for an art museum change? What do those look like moving forward? Yeah and you guys have been doing it on the daily too with all the daily art activities and getting people engaged now making those uh interactive bags to hand out as well so. Yeah absolutely and
00:36:36
Speaker
I think you know everyone on the team, the museum team has a different perspective but one really interesting thing of working with all of these different components of the museum is that everyone comes with this great skill sets that complement each other and so I'm relatively new here on the team but it's been a blessing to come in with other members who have
00:37:06
Speaker
you know they just helped me to get my feet on the ground and you being one of them Gianna as a student intern here it was helpful to get that background knowledge of how things have been done in the past and what areas we needed to improve on in our communications and so it's always a learning process and
00:37:30
Speaker
you know, we should always be learning new things. It's been super, super helpful. Yeah, yeah. I mean, like you said, I was still here when we were just transitioning into COVID. And it was really crazy and not how I thought I would be ending my time here. But I was just so humbled by the way that our team was just
00:37:52
Speaker
This is it. This is the situation. How do we move forward? And we really hit the ground running. And I do follow a lot of other museum platforms, obviously, just as a person interested in what other museums are doing. But as someone in the industry, it's important to see what's going on.
00:38:08
Speaker
And I will say, you know, throughout the pandemic, a lot of times people don't find art or the arts as an important thing, but really the purpose of the museum is a place of learning and education. And we really feel like we want to be the glue that holds the community together and that provides opportunities for the community and for the university.
00:38:41
Speaker
Hopefully we're just transitioning into a more digital format to do that. And this is exciting too. I hope that people listening to the podcast can either engage with you online or hopefully if they're nearby can soon learn more and come and travel and see yourself. And we will make sure to drop all the links to the OSU Museum of Art, but definitely hop on the daily art activity train. Just do yourself a favor.
00:39:03
Speaker
to engage with art and learn and have fun.
00:39:08
Speaker
All right, well, yeah, we are sitting here next to two pieces of art, one by Robert Indiana and the other by Robert Cottingham. And I am a little bit more familiar with these works because I was still working at the OSUMA whenever
00:39:26
Speaker
we first had a show of works by the art collector George Kravis come in and we had the big lip couch set up in the middle of the gallery and it was a really really fun show that I actually got to help unpack some of the Warhols and the Lichtenstein's when they first came in. So I'm excited to be back and look at these kind of in a different way and hear a little bit more from you guys about
00:39:51
Speaker
what this collection has brought to the museum, how you're working with it online digitally, and how it shapes your programming
George Kravis' Collection at OSU
00:39:59
Speaker
too. Having all of this this huge number of works really brought into the museum. So do we want to get started with talking about George Kravis?
00:40:07
Speaker
I think so, and also the reason why I really wanted to touch on George Kravis is because the last exhibition you all had was called In the Mind of the Collector, so of course we can't talk about this work without talking about the collector himself. Christina, do you want to give us a little insight into George Kravis himself? Yeah, so, you know, his full title, George R. Kravis II, was a Tulsa-based broadcaster and collector.
00:40:36
Speaker
He was actually one of the earliest broadcasters to have a standalone FM radio station in Oklahoma, and he was one of the youngest as well. He started collecting at a very early age. His parents were passionate about the arts as well, and so it became a family tradition to sort of purchase art and gift it to each other, which I find adorable as a collector and maybe even a hoarder myself.
00:41:05
Speaker
he really he held on to these things and started to expand on his interests at a very young age and his early teens and it's not that often that you see someone grow passionate for the arts and design at such an early age and so the breadth of his collection is just incredibly dynamic. We are so fortunate to have it here and it does complement what we already have in the permanent collection. We
00:41:35
Speaker
have an incredible variety of things. Sometimes it seems a little scatterbrained because we have inherited different collections from multiple OSU departments and faculty members, and so there was no one curatorial force.
00:41:51
Speaker
selecting our works and so the crevice collection helps complement and solidify that and that our collection is predominantly works on paper, prints, and objects of industrial design and the crevice collection helps fill in all of those gaps from 1900 to the early 2000s and so we can fill out all of the bowls chronologically and based on different art movements thanks to his donation.
00:42:19
Speaker
I really like that you guys are able to highlight some of that industrial design and home design within the works of or the context of an art museum and an art collection so when you think about someone who collects art on such a major scale it's I think one of the most interesting things is
00:42:39
Speaker
looking at what qualifies for someone's collection. How do you pick out those pieces and how do you showcase that? So within the context of an art museum, why are you highlighting a vacuum? You know, what are those household objects that are kind of worth merit and worth taking on?
00:42:56
Speaker
And this isn't the first time the OSUMA has done that too. I remember we had an exhibition here that was showing the history of cameras and it started all the way to the brownie and then it had an iPhone and at the end and when we led tours it was that idea of thinking about one day that iPhone or the device that you have in your pocket will one day be in a museum. So it goes back to the idea of
00:43:20
Speaker
art is an object and breaking it down to those fundamental roots. I think that we talked about a lot on the podcast. Yeah. So do you guys want to tell us more a little bit about the OSUMA's relationship with Kravis and how you were actually able to obtain a large portion of this collection? Yeah, absolutely. We, I know in
00:43:43
Speaker
2017 you referred to an exhibition that we had done that featured a lot of Kravis's collection and that actually took place when he was still alive and that exhibition was called Oklahoma and Beyond and our curator, our associate curator here at the museum, Arlette, had formed this
00:44:05
Speaker
relationship and friendship with George R. Kravis and when we hosted that exhibition it was really one of the first times that Kravis had ever had his works of art displayed for the public and he got a great kick out of sharing his collection and it being an educational purpose and so through fostering that relationship
00:44:31
Speaker
We became one of very few institutions that was able to get a part of his personal collection upon his passing. When he passed in 2018, I believe, we worked with his close family members who were deciding on where his collection was going to go.
00:44:52
Speaker
And so I think over, he had over 5,000 pieces in his personal collection, which is just mind-blowing. And we were so lucky enough to receive over 700 of those pieces. And so it's just been a huge asset to us and we are eternally grateful for the Kravis family and for George R Kravis II to have this mindset of sharing his collection and for it to live on and have a purpose
00:45:22
Speaker
of education. And so that was just a little bit of the genesis behind us and the relationship that we had. I don't know if you have anything to add, Christina. The fact that our chief curator of collections, Arlette Cleric, has a concentration as an art historian in industrial design and the history of graphic design was
00:45:46
Speaker
Her and George were two peas in a pod and they became really good friends actually. Our director Vicki Berry and Arlette went on numerous different trips to museums to New York with George to discuss aspects of the exhibition or his collection or loans or just to go see art and they became very close and I think he knew that not only was it going to a university museum but it was going to people who would really
00:46:16
Speaker
enjoy it and utilize it to its fullest extent. Absolutely. I sat in on a few of the tours with Arlette as the curator from this exhibition and it just reminds me of she has so many incredible stories about George.
00:46:36
Speaker
and about specific things in his collection and when he chose to collect them and why and his dog Zephyr and his dog yeah and his dog and um it just I one thing I was gonna probably have Christina talk about was just our lead's purpose behind designing each gallery in the show and her purpose behind um
00:47:02
Speaker
the title in the mind of a collector and how she kind of formulated that idea. That really leads me into the next question that I wanted to ask you guys because coming from an education background and being part of the programming we did for In the Mind of the Collector
00:47:18
Speaker
our relationship with the curatorial process was it's always essential education and programming obviously go hand in hand but the way that this exhibition was designed and how you moved through it really helped guide and informed how I made my tours so I just wanted to hear your perspective Christina on
00:47:39
Speaker
the educational program we did and I know that you were not here for the first exhibition we had but if you had anything to add on kind of the differences between how those two exhibitions were displayed and just the big ideas that can arise from a same collection of work but you can focus on so many different things I just think is so interesting.
00:48:04
Speaker
I think the first exhibition, which both were curated by Arlep, but obviously the 2017 Oklahoma and Beyond, George himself had a lot of say in the selection of those items. And like Kristin said, it was the first time he did have a warehouse that he, in a design center, he dubbed it and he had a private
00:48:27
Speaker
independent contractor curator who was helping him sort everything and acting as a registrar but nothing was fully displayed so it was the first time he saw a majority of it in one place on the walls and not in boxes but during that time I was here and I actually went with our PA Audrey Gleason we got to go to the design center and it was
00:48:51
Speaker
almost overwhelming. Is it magical? It was this kind of like almost like a cabinet of curiosity type environment when you see like big paintings you know in these shelves and holders and then when you turn the other direction there's like teapots and spoons everywhere so that kind of mishmash of objects not on the wall was also really interesting to kind of see in the flesh.
00:49:16
Speaker
Yeah, the whole warehouse was like, yeah, one giant cabinet chair. It's a great way to describe it. So I think the first exhibition kind of took on that feeling too. I think George was more enthusiastic about sharing the works of art. And, you know, we
00:49:34
Speaker
we have Stillwater Medical and OSU here, but Payne County is also a very rural area. And so being able to share these types of works that some people never see in their lives or have to travel to really big cities in order to interact with, I think that really got him pumped up. And it was more about focusing on the works of art and sharing those with the community was the drive of the first exhibition where the second exhibition
00:50:01
Speaker
It was still part of our motive. We had a lot of lessons and activities that were based on specific works and their background or associated artists or movements, but a bigger theme of the show was actually George himself and the act of collecting and a little bit of that sort of museum side of things. Why do we collect? What happens to collections?
00:50:25
Speaker
how do collectors influence museums or the art market or artists themselves and so a lot of the programming like well I have to give Gianna and Kat all the credit for creating cherished possessions because it was like right before I got here. That was like 10,000% all Kat like again just another queen at the museum like and a great way to get people interested in the idea of objects like in all ages too and
00:50:52
Speaker
I remember we had this gentleman come in and he just happened to have like all these cameras in his car and then he came in and he was like oh you guys are doing this thing let me pull out all my cameras for you and instead of bringing in one object we talked about his like 10 cameras together it was great yeah it was that was such a fun community project because really the prompt was uh bring in something that you cherish and that you love and
00:51:20
Speaker
will come and we'll take a picture of it and you can share your story. So
OSU Museum's Educational Initiatives
00:51:24
Speaker
I can't tell you how adorable it was to walk out here and see little three-year-olds with a tiny rock or with their stuffed bunny and then also it translated so well to other age groups and kind of hearing what people's
00:51:39
Speaker
personal story was. Oh yeah. Stuffed animals were coming from every age that we got. I think it doesn't matter. Everyone's got a favorite story. Oh, I still have a stuffed animal. What's your stuffed animal? Um, our older sister Adrienne made it for me. She gave it to me for my birthday when I was little. So it's like a little green bear. Cute. Yeah. I like
00:51:59
Speaker
having the public think about objects that they collect in a museum studies mindset without, you know, people do that naturally, but you only learn about it really in that academic context when you take an art history or museum studies class. So I really like the idea that you all were bringing in
00:52:20
Speaker
people from the community and having them just think about what the stuff that they have in their home or when you go out and you buy something you know i love thinking about how things in the museum connect to you outside of the walls of a gallery yeah i think that's a lot of
00:52:38
Speaker
where we start some of the prompts and some of the ideas for tours. When we did, we did a homeschool tour and it was a very large group of about 70 students and their parents from toddlers all the way up to teenagers. And so we broke them into roughly, you know, elementary, middle school, high school level. And even like the six-year-olds, we would stand in front of this wall
00:53:04
Speaker
filled with Kravis's radio collection and say, what do you collect? Is it rocks? Is it seashells? Is it pest dispensers? They all are jumping up with what they collect. Or do you have an uncle that collects hats or something and is always wearing a funny t-shirt? And then we can use that as a gateway, something that is incredibly familiar. It's something that's conversational to start to tease out more
00:53:33
Speaker
our theory and our historical term so we can say, oh well what's your favorite radio here? Will you like the green one and you like the blue one? Do you guys know the difference between subjective and objective? Do you guys know the difference? Do you guys know what aesthetic and what taste means? What does taste mean other than just tasting your food? You know we all have a different taste when it comes to works of art or to objects and so to teach, find a way to teach
00:53:58
Speaker
A conversation on aesthetics and taste to six-year-olds? I think that collector aspect is something we can all relate to, so we try to take advantage of those opportunities whenever we can. I also found that so interesting when I was leading tours here as well, and I think, again, when you break things down into the context of an object,
00:54:19
Speaker
that idea of art can be so intimidating. So it's, you ask them, it's approachable. So like your example of the radio wall, which I just loved. So you ask them, okay, this one is made out of plastic and this one is made out of wood. So which one do you think was made first? And you start getting them to think down these essential ideas like
00:54:40
Speaker
composition or materials, all that stuff. And then they start to tell you what it is without them not even knowing. And I'm like, gotcha. You can do this. Yeah, it's not, it doesn't become such a burden when you think about that personal and relatable component.
00:55:00
Speaker
Yeah, we try to trick people into doing formal analysis. If we walked in and said, okay, we're going to have a formal discussion about the qualities of this work of art, people would hightail it out of here. But when they leave, they don't realize they have actually had, you know, they've done some critical analysis of a work of art visually, even if they didn't think so. Yeah, so everyone listening to our pop talk, this has just been one big gotcha. Sorry.
00:55:25
Speaker
Okay, well I want to talk about from a programming standpoint you were able to implement these different thinking strategies and conceptual ideas when thinking of something as simple as the alphabet because I know you did so much and Kat did so much with this alphabet series in the exhibition. So it was just so cool. I just want the world to know about it. Yeah, sure. I guess I'll kick that one off.
00:55:52
Speaker
Kat came up with this brilliant idea of putting out this large magnetic board that we have. It's actually quite beautiful. It's got this metallic finish to it. And she created a crossword puzzle. And what we did was we just reproduced each alphabet letter in a tiny magnet form.
00:56:18
Speaker
so that you could solve this crossword puzzle on this interactive board. And it's such a brilliant idea of creating an activity that helps you engage with the artwork itself but then also having these prompts to appreciate these prints.
00:56:38
Speaker
whether it be a six-year-old or a 60-year-old of the detail that went into the creation of these Cottingham prints and the thinking behind why we kind of displayed them the way we did and it was such a fun activity. We had a lot of kiddos that really enjoyed it but even adults are
00:57:01
Speaker
I enjoyed this activity and so there's a lot of people taking selfies with the crossword word and so next time we have to have that more Instagrammable moment of the next exhibition. You know you've done good when you got the one here like taking selfies. And I think the another um
00:57:19
Speaker
inspiration or thought behind bringing that into the gallery and not just having it as a part of our educational space was having this relationship between education and fun and also the art and so bringing those activities and having that interaction right inside the gallery really is a huge part of our mission statement to
00:57:47
Speaker
you know, educate and have fun while we're doing it. And so we didn't want everything to be super stuffy where you're just, you know, come in, you look at art and you leave and you don't remember it two weeks from now. And so that is definitely something that she did a great job on. And that exhibition was fun. It was colorful. It was a treat to the eyes for kids and adults. So
00:58:14
Speaker
I'm a sucker for anything interactive but as someone who works in our art lab here which I believe I've talked about before which is the museum's creative space but the creativity doesn't only exist in the art lab and it's our job to try to bring that into the gallery space so and that was great and it was a whole space and it was a whole wall dedicated to this interaction which you just love to see it yeah that's all I'm saying
00:58:37
Speaker
Um I wanted to talk a little bit just since I was have been thinking about Robert Indiana in preparation for
Robert Indiana's 'Love' in Marketing
00:58:46
Speaker
this. One kind of because we're looking at the love print it's so recognizable but I think maybe there's a little bit more context behind the artist himself that we don't get a lot. So I wanted we had talked about queering the museum on a podcast before and how
00:59:04
Speaker
This love print might lend itself to something like the education department and clearing the museum.
00:59:12
Speaker
And I also wanted to think about love in terms of marketing and graphic design, how we're playing with this image not so easily recognizable, and it is a piece of art, but it's also something that seems very poignant socially, and how an art museum might wrestle with programming as well as social statements. That's a great question, honestly. Yeah, I think we've talked about this in the past couple of weeks, but really a huge
00:59:41
Speaker
thing that we're proud of here at the OSU Museum of Art is one of our value statements is diversity and inclusiveness. And we really want to provide an opportunity of learning and inclusiveness and diversity for everyone. And as you were talking, I kept thinking about some of our programming and how the exhibition kind of was at the perfect time of around Valentine's Day. And
01:00:10
Speaker
having that theme of love and
01:00:13
Speaker
that beautiful boca sofa, the lip sofa that you talked about earlier and just having these artworks that are very symbolic and how we market them and translate them and create an opportunity for conversation here at the museum. And what's great about it is now it's a part of our permanent collection. And so we have these opportunities forever and we can reference back to them
01:00:44
Speaker
because they belong to us and we're able to continue the conversation and continue prompting. Yeah, I think a big part of the museum is to provide connections between people and so having this Indiana print and being able to reference back to it as a conversation starter, whether it be socially or even just
01:01:09
Speaker
through a Valentine's Day post is such an incredible opportunity. So I think that's a great thing that you bring up. My answer was going to go completely a different direction. I love that. Multiple perspectives, but that's what we're all here to do. This is why this is dream.
01:01:28
Speaker
Yeah, I agree 100% with all of that. I think I guess as I was listening to your question, I went into the contemporary art historian part of my brain and started going into critical analysis.
01:01:45
Speaker
And so, but I think it folds over. My concentration is in modern and contemporary art, really focused on mixed media and collage, and I kind of just lump screen printing in with that too, because Robert Rauschenberg is like my bestie. Oh, of course, yeah. Oh, Bobby. But what I was going to say is a reason I love collage and printmaking so much and pop art
01:02:13
Speaker
um is that pop art really appropriated or reappropriated a lot of the contemporary or historic visual language that was happening and I think when we say
01:02:25
Speaker
You know, art can be a mode of activism, it can be a mode of education, you know, especially when we get into art that is incredibly graphic or representational. It can be propaganda, but it can be advertising for a good cause in order to really create awareness.
01:02:45
Speaker
part of pop art, you know, Andy Warhol and his factories, he was saying something conceptually, too, about things that are mass-marketed and the saturation of images and all of this, and it becomes a self-reflexive structure. And so I love art that is self-reflexive. Not only is it using a medium, but it's using a medium for a conceptual end. And so
01:03:10
Speaker
Not only is Robert Indiana sort of creating this image that has such a heartfelt motivation behind it, he is reproducing. He is reproducing in a medium akin to advertising. He is reproducing it in sculptures and prints and paintings and really saturating the market with this message of love. I think the first time I saw this image was when I was a child on Sesame Street.
01:03:38
Speaker
And so how much is that a self-reflexive moment in pop art when pop art is in direct connection and sometimes criticism of mass media streams? And so to show that art can really take advantage of these things on
01:03:56
Speaker
a very aesthetic level is something that you know we just find visually pleasing but something that can really move beyond that and infiltrate all different layers of our society even if it's a subliminal message we've all seen this love somewhere and it has become a very positive
01:04:15
Speaker
word in American visual language. I think that's so good. This is so poignant. And this is why I personally love pop art so much because I love that like saturation and that critique of culture that I myself am admittedly involved in. But I think what
01:04:34
Speaker
what the love represents in this moment is so fascinating because Gianna and I were just talking about that kind of fake allyship that you see and how companies and media participate in that aesthetic and that visual language of support but what and then to have Indiana do that in the context of pop art that is
01:04:57
Speaker
Critical, but that is also a you know, the message in itself if you take it by itself is a good thing So I love that kind of tension between the two And I love to I mean Christine as you pointed out we see love being Replicated, you know, we see them as a book ends. We see them at stickers and whether consumers are
01:05:18
Speaker
aware or unaware of who Robert Indiana was. We know about this love sculpture primarily is I think how people know it and I wanted to point out too that Queer Eye's season that just premiered was in PA and they have a love statue and
01:05:35
Speaker
on their cover on Netflix right now is the love statue that they have in the middle of Philly. So I love that they are using it because they are using it for the idea of inclusivity.
01:05:49
Speaker
It's interesting those other consumers purchasing this idea of love and not understanding what kind of love, what was the intent behind the artist. Well, that just gave me life. Thank you so much.
Staying Connected with OSU Museum
01:06:06
Speaker
So where can everyone follow you guys, the OSU Museum, keep up to date with anything, any updates with COVID, but also something like a reception if possible? Yeah, sure. So our social media
01:06:19
Speaker
channels are obviously a great way. You can follow us at OSU Museum of Art. Also our website which is museum.okstate.edu. That's a really great way. We're actually just revamping the website so there's going to be so many new things on it and
01:06:40
Speaker
We have a new virtual tour that you can still go back to to see in the mind of a collector. That would be super fun and we're hoping to do that as well with this next show. But yeah that's the two best ways that you can catch us. Perfect. Well thank you guys so so much for being here. I know and yeah obviously we'll just come back and bother you guys when the next exhibition is up.
01:07:08
Speaker
absolutely all right well thank you everyone so much for listening to this episode as always you can email us artpoptalk at gmail.com you can follow us on Instagram if you're not already if you're not I don't know what you're doing and you can listen to us wherever you find your podcast so thank you guys so much we'll talk to you on Tuesday bye
01:08:05
Speaker
you