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The New York Public Library

 

presents

 

An Art Book Series Event

 

Pop Art

 

Thomas Crow and Catharina Manchanda

in conversation with

Milton Glaser, Josephine Meckseper, Gary Panter

 

Wednesday October 15, 2014

6:00 p.m. 

 

South Court Auditorium
South Court, Lower Level

 

The New York Public Library

Stephen A. Schwarzman Building

5^th Avenue at 42^nd Street

New York, NY 10016

917-275-6975

 www.nypl.org

(directions)

 

 Auditorium doors open to public at 5:30 p.m.
All events are FREE and subject to last minute change or cancellation

 

The authors of two new books on Pop Art, Catharina Manchanda and Thomas Crow, take a long and wide view of the phenomenon, including the decades before and after its 1960s heyday. Together they look at the continuing vitality of Pop in recent art. Crow discusses its deep roots in the revival of folk art and music, as well as the innovative graphic design that preceded and paralleled its success; Manchanda considers the ways consumer display and a fascination with celebrity culture have shaped artistic positions in recent years. Artists Milton Glaser, Josephine Meckseper, and Gary Panter join the discussion.

 

Thomas Crow’s paradigm-changing book, The Long March of Pop: Art, Music, and Design, 1930–1995, challenges existing narratives about the rise of Pop Art by situating it within larger cultural tides. While American Pop was indebted to its British predecessor’s insistence that any creative pursuit is worthy of aesthetic consideration, Crow demonstrates that this inclusive attitude also had strong American roots. Folk becomes Crow’s starting point in the advance of Pop. The folk revival occurred chiefly in the sphere of music during the 1930s and ’40s, while folk art surfaced a decade later in the work of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. Crow eloquently examines the subsequent explosion of commercial imagery in visual art, alongside its repercussions in popular music and graphic design. Pop’s practitioners become defined as artists whose distillation of the vernacular is able to capture the feelings stirring among a broad public, beginning with young participants in the politicized 1960s counterculture. Woody Guthrie and Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol and Bob Dylan, Ed Ruscha and the Byrds, Pauline Boty and the Beatles, the Who and Damien Hirst are all considered together with key graphic designers such as Milton Glaser and Rick Griffin in this engaging book.

 

Early Pop artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, and Andy Warhol adopted alternately critical, embracing, or ambivalent attitudes toward America’s rapidly proliferating consumer culture and its representations. In Pop Departures, accompanying an exhibition of the same name opening in October at the Seattle Art Museum, Catharina Manchanda shows how the movement’s influence continues to be felt more than half a century since its advent. Since Pop’s heyday in the late 1960s, new generations of artists have returned to the questions surrounding consumerism and media culture. During the 1980s and 1990s Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, Richard Prince, and others produced new visual strategies to address these issues in a vastly different political and social climate. Today the innovative work of artists such as Elad Lassry, Josephine Meckseper, and Ryan Trecartin demonstrates that commodity culture, display, and the cult of celebrity maintain a strong resonance. Manchanda’s engaging volume examines key works from the past fifty years and includes short texts by artists, curators, and art historians, including Josephine Meckseper, James Voorhies, Richard Meyer, and Hal Foster.

 

Thomas Crow is the Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.

 

Milton Glaser (b.1929) is among the most celebrated graphic designers in the United States. He has had the distinction of one-man-shows at the Museum of Modern Art and the Georges Pompidou Center. In 2004 he was selected for the lifetime achievement award of the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum. As a Fulbright scholar, Glaser studied with the painter, Giorgio Morandi in Bologna, and is an articulate spokesman for the ethical practice of design. He opened Milton Glaser, Inc. in 1974, and continues to produce an astounding amount of work in many fields of design to this day. 

 

Catharina Manchanda is the Jon and Mary Shirley Curator of Contemporary Art at the Seattle Art Museum.

 

Josephine Meckseper’s noted works meld the aesthetic language of modernism with the formal language of commercial display. She received her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. Her work has been shown in biennials and museum exhibitions worldwide and is in the permanent collections of numerous international museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the Migros Museum in Zurich, Switzerland; and the Kunstmuseum in Stuttgart, Germany.

 

Gary Panter is a painter, cartoonist, and designer whose awards include a Chrysler Design Award and three Emmys. His work has appeared in Time, The New Yorker, Esquire, Raw, Rolling Stone, Artforum, and Art In America, among other publications. His graphic novels include Jimbo's Inferno, Jimbo in Purgatory, and Invasion of the Elvis Zombies. He did the production design for Pee-wee's Playhouse. He lives and works in Brooklyn where he makes drawings, paintings, sculptures and comics.

 

In its sixth year the program series An Art Book, initiated and organized by Arezoo Moseni, is a celebration of the essential importance and beauty of art books. The events showcase book presentations and discussions by world renowned artists, critics, curators, gallerists, historians and writers.