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1970-now: learning resources

Duane Hanson, Executive, originally titled, Another Day

Duane Hanson, Executive, originally titled, Another Day, 1971, polyester resin and fiberglass, oil paint, mixed media with accessories, life size (Toledo Museum of Art, © estate of the artist)
Duane Hanson, Executive, originally titled, Another Day, 1971, polyester resin and fiberglass, oil paint, mixed media with accessories, life size (Toledo Museum of Art, © estate of the artist)

Key points

  • Amid rapid social changes, Vietnam War protests, debates on gender roles, and civil rights, the stability of middle class American life during the 1950s gave way to a period of disillusionment and uncertainty by the 1970s.
  • In this highly realistic sculpture, Duane Hanson creates an archetypical businessman, physically rooted in the dress and style of the early 1970s, and uses his posture and body to conjure the mental and emotional turmoil of the period. It is both a highly specific and universal image of midlife burdens and exhaustion.

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More to think about

Duane Hanson’s Executive was originally commissioned for the lobby of an office building. How do you think seeing the work in that space would be different than seeing it today in a museum?

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Trade (Gifts for Trading Land with White People)

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Trade (Gifts for Trading Land with White People), 1992, oil paint and mixed media, collage, objects, canvas, 152.4 x 431.8 cm (Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia) © Jaune Quick-to-See Smith
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Trade (Gifts for Trading Land with White People), 1992, oil paint and mixed media, collage, objects, canvas, 152.4 x 431.8 cm (Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia) © Jaune Quick-to-See Smith

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“Smith, Jaune Quick-to-See” in American Indian History Online
Lawrence Abbot, I Stand in the Center of the Good: Interviews with Contemporary Native American Artists, University of Nebraska Press: Lincoln, 1994.
Carolyn Kastner, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: An American Modernist, University of New Mexico Press: Albuquerque, 2013.
Melanie Herzog, “Building Bridges Across Canada: Jaune Quick-to-See Smith.” School Arts (October 1992): 31–34.
Tricia Hurst, “Crossing Bridges: Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Helen Hardin, Jean Bales.” Southwest Art, April 1981, 82–91.
Tricia Hurst, ”Jaune Quick-to-See Smith,” January 17–March 14, 1993. Norfolk, Virginia: Chrysler Museum, 1993.
Joni L. Murphy, “Beyond Sweetgrass: The Life and Art of Jaune Quick-To-See Smith.” Ph.D. dissertation. University of Kansas, 2008.

Preserving Nam June Paik's Electronic Superhighway

Nam June Paik, Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii

Nam June Paik, Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii, 1995, fifty-one channel video installation (including one closed-circuit television feed), custom electronics, neon lighting, steel and wood; color, sound, roughly 15 x 40 x 4′ (Smithsonian American Art Museum, © Nam June Paik Estate)
Nam June Paik, Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii, 1995, fifty-one channel video installation (including one closed-circuit television feed), custom electronics, neon lighting, steel and wood; color, sound, roughly 15 x 40 x 4′ (Smithsonian American Art Museum, © Nam June Paik Estate)

Go deeper

Melissa Chiu and Michelle Yun, eds., Nam June Paik: Becoming Robot (New York: Asia Society Museum, 2014).
John G. Hanhardt and Ken Hakuta, Nam June Paik: Global Visionary (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2012).
John G. Hanhardt and Jon Ippolito, The Worlds of Nam June Paik (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2000).

The landscape remade, Thiebaud’s Ponds and Streams

Wayne Thiebaud, Ponds and Streams, 2001, acrylic on canvas, 182.9 x 152.4 cm (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, ©Wayne Thiebaud), a Seeing America video
Wayne Thiebaud, Ponds and Streams, 2001, acrylic on canvas, 182.9 x 152.4 cm (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, ©Wayne Thiebaud), a Seeing America video

Key points

  • Wayne Thiebaud uses unnatural colors, strong contrasts, and an unconventional sense of perspective to paint a landscape that is beautiful, but also distant from the natural world. This modern landscape is man-made and artificial, but also presents us with a type of constructed beauty.
  • The Sacramento River valley is the most productive agricultural region in America, despite its naturally arid conditions. The landscape has been significantly altered and controlled in order to provide water to these farms. These interventions have led to episodes of water pollution in a heavily populated area. In recent years, drought has also become an important issue.
  • Landscape painting has a long tradition in the United States often characterized by a nostalgia for the landscape before its settlement and development.

Go deeper

View and read about this painting at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

More to think about

"Bolthouse [an industrial farm in the Central Valley] processes six million pounds of carrots a day. If you took its yield from one week and stacked each carrot from end to end, you could circle the earth. If you took all the carrots the company grows in a year, they would double the weight of the Empire State Building….At Bolthouse’s complex, carrots whirl around on conveyor belts at up to 50 miles an hour en route to their future as juliennes, coins and stubs, or baby carrots, which the company popularized and which aren’t babies."
— Mark Bittman, “Everyone Eats There,” The New York Times (October 10, 2012)
Given this reality, why do you think that so many Americans persist in imagining farms as quaint small family operations? Does Thiebaud’s painting make you think differently about the modern agricultural landscape?

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