Schneider Museum of Art
Enrique Chagoya
Betye Saar
Ben Sakoguchi
Roger Shimomura
Welcome to the Schneider Museum of Art!
Current Exhibition:
Artist as Social Critic
April 25- June 28, 2008
Opening Reception: Thursday, April 24 5:00-7:00
Artist Talk with Roger Shimomura at 4:00 in the Meese Auditorium
ENRIQUE CHAGOYA
Enrique Chagoya, born in Mexico City in 1953, makes paintings, drawings, and prints that focus on social, cultural and political problems that have plagued humankind since time immemorial.
Whether he re-interprets Goya’s, Disasters of War, or appropriates images from American mass media, Mexican Folk art, religious icons or Disney cartoons, he chooses to add humor as he creates his own personal aesthetic as a satirist in the tradition of Daumier and Hogarth.
Chagoya questions and criticizes assumptions about history and ways in which it was written and interpreted; in contrast to ways in which 20th century artists have incorporated non-western cultural icons into their own work. Chagoya reverses the process by taking images from the dominant American culture and using them for his own purposes.
BETYE SAAR
Betye Saar’s distinguished work spans more than four decades in time, uses a variety of media on a broad spectrum of subjects including social and political commentary. Her trenchant series titled The Liberation of Aunt Jemima started in the early 1970’s and has resumed recently, using the stereotypical image of Aunt Jemima (familiar from pancake mix boxes) she transforms her into a militant rifle-toting, empowered warrior-woman.
In many of her paintings, drawings, assemblages, and installations, Betye Saar deals with civil rights, racial discrimination, and the fight against injustice in general. In less political work, she has explored mysticism of all kinds, mythology, superstition, voodoo, and other belief systems; the artist also reveals tender feelings for family ties, the powers of memory and nostalgia for times past.
BEN SAKOGUCHI
Ben Sakoguchi’s small canvases carry important messages on a global scale. The artist began the series in 1974 and continues to work on them to this day; stylistically they are painted in the language of “realism” and address a wide variety of issues focusing on social, cultural, racial or political matters.
In seemingly benign imagery they deal in a perceptive, trenchant, and often humorous way with weighty and frequently tragic problem, in the deceptively cheerful format of orange crate labels, known for their advertising like depictions of pastoral California with its sunshine-ripened oranges.
ROGER SHIMOMURA
Roger Shimomura’s paintings and prints, seen in this exhibition, are from his recent series titled Minidoka on my Mind. Award-winning sansei poet Amy Uyematsu, in her introduction to the exhibition catalogue, writes: “To view Roger Shimomura’s art is an exciting even dangerous experience-his work is provocative, jarring, and vigorously challenges our notions of history, ethnic images, popular culture and American ideals. In Minidoka on my Mind he takes us head on into the racial conflicts of World War II and the unjust imprisonment of approximately 120,000 Japanese-Americans (over 60% being American citizens.)”
In addition to the haunting memory—landscapes of the camp, there are some darkly ironic and powerfully evocative images such as Bad Dream and Shadow of the Enemy which subtly and ironically comment on man’s inhumanity to man.
Hours:
Tuesday-Saturday:
10:00 am - 4:00 pm
Closed Sunday and Monday
Suggested Donation: $3.00
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