BGuthrie Photos: DC -- Donald W. Reynolds Center (Archives of American Art) -- Exhibit: Finding: Source Material in the Archives of American Art

DC -- Donald W. Reynolds Center (Archives of American Art) -- Exhibit: Finding: Source Material in the Archives of American Art:

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Description of Pictures: Finding: Source Material in the Archives of American Art
April 22, 2016 – August 21, 2016
In this exhibition, the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art reveals how artists find inspiration. The Archives’ collections hold a kaleidoscopic array of source materials; many of these materials are somewhat ordinary: comic- strip panels, newspaper clippings, and snapshots of mundane scenes. Yet the ways in which artists draw on them provides a glimpse into the twists and turns of their creative practices.

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Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. SIPGSO_160425_007.JPG: Finding Source Material Artists find inspiration everywhere. Even the most ordinary circumstances can prompt new ways of thinking about and making art. The artists featured in this exhibition collected, organized, and transformed a wide variety of source materials as part of their creative process: comic strip panels, newspaper clippings, snapshots of mundane scenes. Yet the ways in which artists draw on them provides a glimpse into the twists and turns of their creative practices. The collections of the Archives of American Art hold a kaleidoscopic array of source materials. Some artists gathered hundreds of photographs of carefully posed models and eye-catching objects. Others amassed news items and scraps of evocative ephemera about a single topic. The artists often filed their findings, pasting them into scrapbooks or piling them into portfolios. The items on view encourage imaginative exploration. Artists rely on source materials to form more cohesive ideas, engage with political subjects or aesthetic challenges, achieve technical accuracy, and even use as raw material. They can also evoke fleeting moments and moods, some of which are never fully realized in artworks. With this in mind, these materials reveal how artists find meaning in the world around them.
2. SIPGSO_160425_015.JPG: Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997) Roy Lichtenstein appropriated comic strips and cartoon images to create his iconic Pop art paintings, decontextualizing frames from the narrative and exaggerating facial expressions to satirize the sentimentality of plots. In 1963 he mailed curator Ellen H. Johnson the panels used for two of his paintings, I know how you must feel, Brad . . . and Girl at the Piano. Johnson wrote about these two sources in a 1966 essay in Canadian Art about how the artist cultivated his characteristic style. "A man of Lichtenstein's sensitivity and sophisticated humor could not be other than amused by the pretentious seriousness of comic romances," she explained.
3. SIPGSO_160425_019.JPG: Lichtenstein writes to inform Johnson of his completion of two paintings she had seen on a visit to his studio: I know how you must feel, Brad and Girl at the Piano. He includes the original source material of two comic-strip clippings. The source of I know how you must feel, Brad is a comic by Ted Galindo. Roy Lichtenstein letter to Ellen H. Johnson, 1963 Apr. 5.
4. SIPGSO_160425_033.JPG: Ray Yoshida (1930-2009) Ray Yoshida was a voracious collector of ordinary things. His paintings and collages incorporated images from popular culture, which he collated and rearranged to produce new meaning. He frequented the thrift shops and flea markets of Chicago in search of vintage catalogs and scrapbooks, as well as trade and medical supply catalogs, cooking magazines, and comic books. From these sources, Yoshida built an idiosyncratic archive of carefully clipped eye-catching shapes, some of which he piled into little boxes and bags and others he pasted into scrapbooks. Of particular interest are his collections of what he called "specimens," or snippets from comic books, as they illuminate the artist's eye for imagery and patterns. His process for creating order out of multiple sources provides an instructive sense of how his everyday activities were inseparable from his art.
5. SIPGSO_160425_045.JPG: Clippings from various newspaper comics. Date range based on the start date of some of the comic strips included such as Foxtrot, Mutts, and Dilbert (one clipping from Nancy is dated June-14-99).
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