Pop Art on display at Woodbury Art Museum
Now it's quietly on display at Utah Valley State College's Woodbury Art Museum.
Pop Art focused on "objects, attitudes and imagery prevalent in consumerism and popular culture," said Robin DeSpain, assistant to museum curator and director Marcus Vincent. Pop Art also embraced the contrived America of Hollywood and emphasized contradictions in popular culture.
Much of the display is from Brigham Young University-Idaho, made available through special loan arrangements, DeSpain said. Included is art from Andy Warhol and other world-famous pop artists.
The collection of 39 pieces — mostly lithography or silk-screen pieces — includes five from Brigham Young University, two from the Springville Museum of Art and two from local pop artist Jean Clark.
The show opened Friday with a reception and will run until Feb. 4. Admission is free. Hours are Tuesday through Saturday from noon to 8 p.m.
Warhol popularized common consumer and mass media icons as art, including his well-known Campbell soup can collection and multicolor images of Marilyn Monroe's face. He took images from advertising and the media and presented them as a slice of life — he allowed people to look at life from different angles.
Fans of his work call his workplace a studio, but he called it a "factory," she said. His medium was the silk screen. While many of the artists of his era produced a certain number of pieces, then destroyed the silk screens, Warhol hung onto his, she said, in case he wanted to print a few more later.
Other artists include Robert Indiana, whose silk-screen creation of the word LOVE became a postage stamp in 1973. No. 241 of 300 of the silk-screen art is on display at the museum.
Another is Roy Liechtenstein, who popularized single comic book panels when he enlarged them to giant proportions, then reproduced them using the stone lithograph method. Each color was printed separately. One of his art pieces on display is No. 91 of 100.
While pop art often drew people into common images associated with city or industrial life, artist John Salt took it into a rural setting. His illustration of an abandoned car shows what happens next when city folks throw away items that are no longer useful, DeSpain said.
"They show nature retaking the industrial," she said.
Pop Art made it possible for artists working in a variety of niches to be successful, DeSpain said.
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