Whitney Recut

WHITNEY SEQUENTIAL RECUT















Nancy Elizabeth Prophet created most of her work between 1923 and 1934 while living in France, where she was one of the first Black American sculptors to receive international acclaim. She carved Congolais after seeing African sculpture in Paris’s 1931 Colonial Exposition, an enormous display of the cultures and lifestyles in France’s territories meant to valorize the coun- try’s imperialist exploits. She was likely drawn to the subject by her friend W. E. B. Du Bois, an author and sociologist who urged Black American artists to look to Africa to develop a distinctive cultural style. The sculpture’s title notwithstanding, the bust’s distinctive braided coiffure references Maasai war- riors from parts of Kenya and Tanzania. By emphasizing the figure’s forehead and contemplative expression, Prophet im- bued Congolais with a strong sense of spirituality but also of melancholy and longing.



Thomas Ellis, Darrel Ellis’s father and an avid photographer, was brutally killed by intoxicated police officers in the South Bronx two months before Darrel was born. While Darrel was studying to be an artist—he took classes at Cooper Union and completed the Whitney’s Independent Study Program— his mother gave him a collection of his father’s negatives. To make this photo- graph, Ellis projected images taken by his father onto a sculptural form that he then photographed to create the distortions and dis- ruptions seen here.



Hedda Sterne (August 4, 1910 – April 8, 2011) [1] was a Ro- manian-born American artist who was an active member of the New York School of painters. Her work is often associated with Abstract Expressionism and Surrealism. [2] Contents 1 Early life and education 2 Early career and Surrealism 3 World War II and emigration 4 Arrival in New York



Judy Chicago (born Judith Sylvia Cohen; July 20, 1939) is an American feminist artist, art educator, [3] and writer known for her large collabo- rative art installation pieces about birth and creation images, which ex- amine the role of women in history and culture. Multidisciplinary artist Judy Chicago helped pioneer the feminist art movement in the 1960s and ’70s; for decades, she has made work that celebrates the multiplicity of female identity. Chicago’s practice spans painting, textile arts, sculpture, and installation and has explored the intricacies of childbirth (as seen in her “Birth Project” series, 1980–85), the possibilities of minimalist sculpture, and the relationship between landscape and the female body. Her most famous work, an installation called The Dinner Party (1974–79), is an homage to 39 influential fe- male figures from Eastern and Western mythology and civilization.



Memorial. Found cedar stump, found wood cut-off scrap, acrylic paint. Di- mensions 30 x 17 x 20 inches. For this piece I painted a troupe loiel memorial flag on a piece of wood scrap I found on the street corner outside the Whitney Mu- seum of American Art. I embedded this object on another wood scrap/stump I found in my father’s work shop in rural Florida. Re- sponding to the aggressive man-made gouges in the stump, and nat- ural voluptuous contours of the wood, I painted a nude female figure on the front, and a caricature of a topless Trump on the back. The two elements composed together, the memorial flag, and the painted stump, draw a tension between the archaic, hegemonic and hypo- critical democratic ideals of American democracy, and the gravitas of of an exploited system that oppresses and strips away the rights of those who are the foundation and support for it. Memorial expos- es the surreal and exasperated necessity to dismantle a system that claims to protect human rights, and reveals a gruesome imbalance between Life and Liberty under the rule of American democracy.