Ellen C. Caldwell | ECLAIRE.me

Learn about the rich historical and inspirational archives in artists’ studios and homes, making them worthy of historical preservation.

Through her paintings and prints, Ellen Gallagher boldly challenges her viewers to reexamine that which they think they might already know.

Artist Betye Saar is known for creating small altars that commemorate and question issues of both time and remembrance, race and gender, and personal and public spaces.

Edgar Heap of Birds’ work blends European and Native North American artistic forms, practices, and mediums in order to offer a counter-narrative to many non-Native myths and stereotypes surrounding the history of indigenous American Indians.

In bringing the uncertainty of the past, present, and future together within one portrait, he simultaneously questions and asserts agency over the validity of the historical narrative. For the individual viewer, this might personally challenge viewers to question how their stories will be told and recalled. More largely and philosophically, his work might encourage us to do as Alcocer suggests in altering the history and ideology of both the present and future.

With a non-traditional mode, political poster artists inundate everyday viewers with high-contrast images that inspire, instruct, and instill something quite out of the ordinary. It is in these unexpected moments that commuters become viewers and artists become inspirations.

Over the course, we studied artists like Damon Davis and his #allhandsondeck project, Kerry James Marshall’s photographic collages of lynchings, Ken Gonzales-Day’s work with both protest photographs and erased lynchings, and Natalie Bookchin’s video collages.

Environmental art is an urgent call to action: visitors hopefully will be moved enough to both learn and change habits in order to decrease their environmental footprint(s) on earth. Reactions to Eco-art are often complicated, comprised of a juxtaposition of feelings — aesthetically pleasing, depressing, instructive, foreboding, compelling, informative, deeply moving, and hopefully deeply motivating.

Featuring prints from U.S. newspapers that quite physically depict the faces of the casualties of our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Emily L. R. Adams ties in the medium of the motor oil as an underlying commentary on both the human cost of and monetary investment in war.

Both Rodia’s Watts Towers and Purifoy’s assemblage sculptures remind us of the power of arts — to heal and learn through the creative process and to take inspiration from the mighty symbolism of altering abandoned trash into transformative treasure.