Kehinde Wiley. Oil wash on paper40 x 26 in.
Hello World!
I know its been a minute but I’m back like Arnold Schwarzenegger! Check out what I’ve written below.
Not many people grow and mature into tax paying adults with art on the brain. Time and time again, schools cut art programs, galleries close, museums beg for donations and every blue moon the local newspaper prints an article that brings into question the value of art to an economy. Don’t believe me? Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback eliminated all state funding for the Kansas Arts Commission and even Gov. Rick Perry has targeted federal spending on the National Endowment for the Arts during his bid for president.
We live in a society of ready-made, to go, and overall convenience that stresses the importance of a quick dollar. How to Stretch Your Money, How to make an extra buck and Are you broke? are a few examples of how we are bombarded with language that stresses our need for more and more money. Naturally when one graduates from a university/school with a degree in studio art or art history,he or she is the subject to questions such as, “ So…how do you plan to make money… I mean, what are you going to do with that?” Rarely is the graduate greeted with excitement and proclamations of future success such as “ WOW! Way to go, you’re going to make so much money and be incredibly successful!!!” But I digress.
Although we live in a culture that does not value art in the same regards as football, basketball, or Kim Kardashian and Kanye West’s love child, there are a few of us who would still spend our last dollar on art supplies. And there are even some who will buy the artwork we created in the wee hours of the night, broke and hungry because they believe in the work.
Every artist has had to defend their work and fight for it to be valued in some form or fashion. Some are lucky enough to be valued and incredibly successful in their lifetime and some are not.
Georgia O’keeffe. Oil on canvas
Overall: 48 x 84 in. (121.92 cm x 2 m 13.36 cm)
Works such as these from ancient to contemporary are on display at The Blanton Museum of Art in their new exhibition titled, Through the Eyes of Texas: Masterworks from the Alumni Collection. With over 150 works of art organized by theme (portraiture, landscape, etc), artworks from artists such as Claude Monet, Petah Coyne, John Singer Sargent,Luis Jimenez, Charles White, Edouard Manet, Andy Warhol and Kehinde Wiley are on display together without categories of race, art movements, or gender as dividers. In exhibiting these works together in the same space, viewers are able to experience the great range of experimentation, concept, art history and value. Not monetary value but the value art has to our society as visual markers of history, referencing conversations on beauty, love, structure, power, class, protest, peace, hate, death, life, and eternity.
Through the eyes of Texas:Masterworks from the Alumni Collection opens to the public on February 24, 2013 and closing May 19,2013.
Black Girl in Austin 