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(b Chatham, Kent, Dec 1, 1959).

English painter, poet, printmaker and musician. He studied for a short time at St Martin’s School of Art (1980–81) before being expelled. He was famously Tracey Emin’s partner before she achieved fame as a ‘Young British Artist’, his name featuring prominently on her infamous tent, Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–95 (1995; London, Saatchi Gal.) Indeed, their work shares a simplicity of execution and confessional frankness that links them beyond the divide Childish placed between them. A prodigiously prolific artist, he produced reams of self-published poetry, released many albums (through nine groups including Thee Headcoats), wrote novels and created a vast number of paintings. He clung to his outsider status, however, decrying what he saw as the egotism and commercialism of the London Art scene. His style of painting and printmaking was greatly indebted to German Expressionism, specifically to the work of Emil Nolde. Following the example of early 20th-century artists, Childish also published manifestoes, including the Stuckist manifesto of ...

French, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 2 October 1951, in Hanoi.

Painter (including gouache), watercolourist, sculptor (including bronze), engraver, poet. Artists' books.

Lettrism.

Born in North Vietnam, Albert Dupont came to France at an early age. He began to practise engraving and worked on collector's editions ...

(b Cleveland, OH, 1959).

American printmaker, film maker, installation and conceptual artist and writer.

Green, of African descent, has worked primarily with film-based media, and has published criticism and designed installations that reveal her commitment to ongoing feminist and black empowerment movements. She earned her BA from Wesleyan University in 1981 and also spent some time at the School of Visual Arts in New York in 1980, returning in the late 1980s to study in the Whitney Independent Study Program, graduating in 1990. At the age of 24 she began exhibiting her comparative compositions containing found objects, images, and texts that question recorded history.

Green’s work deals with issues of anthropology and travel. By undertaking projects via the methodology of the 19th-century explorer, she exposed the arbitrary and prejudiced nature of classification, as in Bequest (1991; see 1993 exh. cat.), an installation she made at the invitation of the Worcester Museum of Art to commemorate their 50th anniversary. Using the museum as a ready-made stage set, she installed works of art alongside 19th-century texts explaining stereotypes of whiteness and blackness. Green characteristically intervened in the history of her chosen site to produce a fiction that included her own responses as an African American woman to her findings. In ...

American, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 1948, in Ohio.

Painter, lithographer, art historian.

AfriCobra Group.

Michael D. Harris studied at Howard University, Washington DC, before earning a PhD from Yale University. He is a member of the group AfriCobra (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists), which promotes an art in the service and for the advancement of the Afro-American community. He began teaching at the University of North Carolina in ...

(b Cape Town, 1948).

South African painter, printmaker, curator, lecturer, and art critic. Jantjes graduated from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town, in 1969. Classified as coloured under apartheid and living a restricted life in South Africa, he accepted a scholarship in 1970 to study art at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg, graduating in 1972. A founder of the German anti-apartheid movement, Jantjes remained in Hamburg after his training. His artwork refers to the struggle against apartheid.

Jantjes’s best-known work, A South African Colouring Book (1974–5) is a vehement critique of apartheid. The series of 11 prints mimics a child’s colouring book as a means of criticizing apartheid’s race classification system. The print Classify this Coloured makes use of the artist’s own passbook, a required identity card for all coloureds and blacks. His hand-written text explains apartheid’s three racial classes—black, coloured, and white. The print Colour these People Dead...

Polish, 20th – 21st century, female.

Active in the USA.

Born 1946, in Cracow.

Painter, engraver, installation artist, writer.

Ewa Kuryluk studied in Warsaw until 1970 and had her first exhibition there. She moved to New York in the early 1980s. She has been executing installations using panels of fabric since the 1970s, including ...

Native American (Tongva-Acjachemen), 20th–21st century, female.

Born 1952, in California.

Painter, writer, tribal scholar, cartoonist, basket weaver, illustrator, indigenous language activist.

As cofounder of Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival, L. Frank Manriquez, a California Indian artist and activist, has become particularly associated with the movement for language revitalisation and recovery of indigenous knowledge in the state. A multi-talented figure with a gift for humour, especially in her cartoon works, she has exhibited nationally and internationally, and is a board member of the Cultural Conservancy, supporting indigenous rights, self-determination and the protection of native lands. She also makes and teaches about baskets and is a board member of the California Indian Basketweavers Association. As the author of ...

(b Najaf, 1944).

Iraqi calligrapher, painter, printmaker and writer, active in Paris (see fig.). He studied painting and calligraphy in Baghdad from 1960 to 1969, and in 1969 exhibited his work at the Iraqi Artists’ Society exhibition and at the French Cultural Centre in Baghdad. The same year he went to Paris and studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts until 1975. Thereafter he lived in Paris. Although influenced by traditional calligraphy, he developed his own calligraphic style, which incorporated painterly elements. In many of his works, for example Je suis le feu tapi dans la pierre. Si tu es de ceux qui font jailler l’étincelle alors frappe (1984; Paris, Inst. Monde Arab.), he employed proverbs and quotations from a range of sources. He also researched and wrote about Arabic calligraphy.

[MoMA](New York)

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) was founded in 1929 by patrons Lillie P(lummer) Bliss, Cornelius J. Sullivan and Rockefeller, John D(avison), jr. to establish an institution devoted to modern art. Over the next ten years the Museum moved three times and in 1939 settled in the Early Modern style building (1938–9) designed by Philip S. Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone that it still occupies at 11 West 53 Street. Subsequent renovations and expansions occurred in the 1950s and 1960s by Philip Johnson, in 1984 by Cesar Pelli and in 2002–4 by Yoshirō Taniguchi (b 1937). MoMA QNS, the temporary headquarters during this project, was subsequently used to provide art storage. In 2000, MoMA and the contemporary art space, P.S.1, Long Island City, Queens, announced their affiliation. Recent projects are shown at P.S.1 in Queens in a renovated public school building.

According to founding director, Alfred H(amilton) Barr...

(b Trad, July 26, 1957).

Thai printmaker, installation artist, teacher and writer . Rasdjarmrearnsook studied at Silpakorn University, Bangkok, receiving her BFA in 1981 and her MFA 1986. In 1988 she went to Germany where she received an MFA from the Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Brunswick in 1990. Rasdjarmrearnsook’s early prints reflected melancholic poetries of childhood and her memories of being an Asian woman (see 1992 exh. cat.). Her works focused on illness and the death of members of her family, who had been the subjects of her early prints in the 1990s. When she moved to three-dimensional installations in the early 1990s, she started using sculptures of human body parts contextualized with poetry, to narrate stories. In The Lovers (1993), she rendered three classic Thai poems in leather and placed them on black chairs with three plaster torsos overlooking them (see 1994 exh. cat.). The idea of using body parts in her works could be traced back to her ...

German, 20th – 21st century, female.

Active in Italy.

Born 18 November 1955, in Baden-Baden.

Painter, draughtswoman, engraver, environmental artist, video installation artist, photographer, writer.

Alicia Schmidt-Hungerer studied sculpture and art education at the Kunsthochschule in Münster and Berlin from 1973 to 1979. She taught at the university of Giessen ...

Czechoslovak, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 22 March 1959, in Prague.

Painter (including gouache), watercolourist, draughtsman, illustrator, lithographer, writer.

Michal Singer was awarded a degree in philosophy at the University of Prague in 1984. He was a writer, journalist and illustrator of the weekly Respekt...

(b Nakornsawan, Oct 7, 1957).

Thai performance artist, printmaker, anti-war activist, musician, writer and poet . Sitthiket graduated from the College of Fine Arts, Bangkok in 1981. Sitthiket’s work focused on alienation and social issues, such as the decaying political system, the environment, prostitution, migration and poverty. He was most recognised for his exhibition Inferno (1991), in which he was inspired by Traiphum phra ruang, the ancient Buddhist text, portraying images of how sinners would be punished according to their sins in hell. Instead of depicting traditional Buddhist sin and hell, he appropriated sinful acts and redemption for modern Thai society. For instance, in The Punishment of Those Corrupted Politicians Whose Flesh Would Be Cut in Pieces, Being Fried and Fed Him Until His Death. In In Hell, the Bad Politician Will Be Reborn to Consume Himself Forever, Sitthiket employed bold colour, simplified his use of line and employed crude and iconographic figures in association with narrative text to emphasize the modern sins committed by professionals, such as soldiers, teachers and artists....

Native American (Muscogee Creek/Seminole and Diné/Navajo), 20th–21st century, female.

Born 1954, in Phoenix.

Photographer, filmmaker. Video, collage.

Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie is a member of the Bear and Raccoon Clans of the Seminole and Muscogee Nations, as passed down from her mother. Her Diné/Navajo father, Andrew Van Tsinajinnie (b. ...

American, 20th–21st century, female.

Born 1954, in Concord (New Hampshire).

Active in Ireland from 1997.

Artist, writer, photographer, editor, printmaker, bookmaker. Artists’ books.

Erica Van Horn studied fine arts at California State University, Hayward under the tutelage of printmaker Misch Kohn. She received an MFA in printmaking from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in ...

Culture of images and visuality that creates meaning in our world today. This includes media forms such as photography, film, television, and digital media; art media such as painting, drawing, prints, and installations; architecture and design; comic books and graphic novels; fashion design, and other visual forms including the look of urban life itself. It also encompasses such social realms as art, news, popular culture, advertising and consumerism, politics, law, religion, and science and medicine. The term visual culture also refers to the interdisciplinary academic field of study that aims to study and understand the role that images and visuality play in our society; how images, gazes, and looks make meaning socially, culturally, and politically; how images are integrated with other media; and how visuality shapes power, meaning, and identity in contemporary global culture.

The emergence of the concept of visual culture as a means to think about the role of images in culture and as an academic field of study is a relatively recent phenomenon, emerging in the late 1980s and becoming established by the late 1990s. There were numerous factors that contributed to the idea that images should be understood and analysed across social arenas rather than as separate categories, including the impact of digital media on the circulation of images across social realms, the modern use of images from other social arenas (such as news and advertising) in art, and the cross-referencing of cultural forms displayed in popular culture and art. It was also influenced by the increasingly visible role played by images in political conflict and a general trend toward interdisciplinarity in academia....

(b Waco, TX, Oct 4, 1941).

American performance artist, writer, draughtsman, printmaker and stage designer. He studied painting in Paris under the American painter George McNeil (b 1908) in 1962, before completing a degree in interior design at the Pratt Institute in New York from 1962 to 1965. After serving an apprenticeship in architecture to Paolo Soleri in Phoenix, AZ, from 1965 to 1966, he returned to New York and began to work as a performance artist, creating a range of theatrical productions that combine music, text, dance and design. He earned his reputation with productions such as Deafman Glance (first staged in 1970 at the University Theater in Iowa City, IA) and A Letter to Queen Victoria (première at the Teatro Caio Melisso in Spoleto, Italy, and extensively toured in 1974); many of these were large-scale, marathon extravaganzas in which a series of images, formed from the conjunction of actors, dancers and set designs, unfolded to the accompaniment of music. Abandoning traditional theatrical elements such as ordered narrative content and the compression of real time, he favoured an avant-garde approach influenced by composers, choreographers and artists active in New York from the early 1960s....