1960-now: learning resources

Making an icon, JFK and the power of media

Key points

• Television played a key role in the 1960 presidential campaign. After his nomination at the Democratic National Convention, John F. Kennedy appeared next to his Republican opponent Richard Nixon in the first presidential debate ever broadcast to a national audience. Many historians believe that the appearance and demeanor of the candidates as seen on TV had a direct impact on the election.
• Kennedy’s nomination represented a new direction for the Democratic party. While the establishment worried that his youth and his Irish-Catholic background would be liabilities in the general election, the 1960 Democratic Convention marked a shift toward a new generation of leaders and a more open nomination process.
• As a street photographer, Garry Winogrand used split-second timing to capture images that are both spontaneous and simultaneously dense with meaning. Here, Kennedy’s gesture recalls famous leaders of the past, while his appearance on the TV screen alludes to his status as a modern celebrity. Other details of the photograph took on symbolic significance following Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, reminding us that works of art are open to continued interpretation and renewed meaning.

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Homage to JFK, Rauschenberg's Retroactive I

Key points

• The figure of John F. Kennedy evokes the dramatic technological, social, and political changes of the 1960s. Elected to the presidency in 1960, Kennedy’s youthful vitality signaled hope and ambition for a new era of progress, epitomized by the U.S. space program. The devastating impact of his assassination in 1963 left the nation in mourning. It was the onset of the violence and unrest that would characterize much of the decade.
• Silkscreening provides an efficient method of duplicating images, and allowed Rauschenberg to incorporate photography taken from popular media directly into his artworks. Rauschenberg’s use of this technique challenged the idea that fine art should demonstrate an artist’s technical skill and focused attention on the power and multiplicity of images in mid-twentieth century America.
• Robert Rauschenberg’s use of recognizable imagery from popular culture signals a shift away from the Abstract Expressionist art of Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock and reconnected fine art with the actual world.
• While Rauschenberg wanted to show what was “outside my window,” the clustering of seemingly unrelated images incorporated in the painting remains more suggestive and open to interpretation than a straightforward illustration of the world.

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The Long History of Stone Mountain, Georgia

Key points

• The relief sculpture of confederate leaders Robert E. Lee, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, and Jefferson Davis at Stone Mountain Park, Georgia, is a potent symbol of white supremacy which has continued to define southern United States culture since before the Civil War. White supremacy also characterized the spirit of manifest destiny that obscured Native presence and history in North America.
• Under the leadership of Helen Plane, the United Daughters of the Confederacy originally commissioned a relief sculpture and memorial park on the site in 1915. Their effort to memorialize fallen husbands, sons, and fathers were part of a larger movement at the time to promote the myth of the “lost cause” of the Civil War and bolster the reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan.
• The sculpture took 55 years to complete, and multiple sculptors worked on it, each with their own designs. The commissioners and artists involved at each stage evoked visual models of power, honor, grandeur, and permanence — borrowed from both ancient Greece and Rome and American landscape painting.
• Still today, the site reflects an ongoing conversation in Georgia and across the United States about the history, legacy, and symbolism of the Confederacy and Civil War.

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Research project ideas

• The causes and results of the U.S. Civil War
• The display of the Confederate flag 
• Segregation and civil rights 
• Indian removal
• Visual symbolism of power and permanence

Faith Ringgold, Ben

Key Points

• In the late 1970s, social, political, and economic crises dramatically impacted many Americans. Economic stagnation coupled with oil shortages affected the economy, the Watergate scandal and Vietnam War eroded public trust, while activists in the Civil Rights and feminist movements struggled for equality.
• Faith Ringgold’s Ben captures the turbulent atmosphere of the late 1970s. Through his dress and accessories, Ringgold includes a constellation of references and associations that connect this figure to the central controversies of the day. At the same time, she gives the figure a sense of humanity and empathy that connects with the viewer.
• Using techniques and materials that were often dismissed as “women’s work,” Faith Ringgold uses the scale of Ben to establish it as a work of art. Larger than a doll, smaller than a human, it elevates its medium to the realm of high art and makes a feminist statement.

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An unflinching memorial to Civil Rights martyrs, Thornton Dial’s Blood and Meat

Key points

• Under discriminatory Jim Crow laws, freed slaves had few options in the post-Civil War, agrarian South. Many became sharecroppers, entering into agreements that were little more than forced labor. Sharecroppers were at the mercy of the landlord’s recordkeeping, which left them frequently in heavy debt and subject to arrest if they attempted to leave their leased land. Sharecropping remained a widespread practice until the Great Depression of the 1930s.
• Thornton Dial combines multiple levels of meaning in this painted assemblage, which references the dangerous path taken by Civil Rights activists. The use of unraveled rope carpets evokes his childhood poverty, but also images of bondage and lynching. The tiger and the faces that are hidden throughout the work reference Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, Robert Kennedy, President John F. Kennedy, Emmett Till, and others. His goal is to confront the viewer with this history and remind us that these issues still need to be addressed in today’s world.

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The National Memorial for Peace and Justice

Key points

• The National Memorial for Peace and Justice was created to serve as a public space of remembrance and reconciliation for the history of racial terror lynchings in the United States from 1877 to 1950. These public acts of murder were intended to induce fear and submissiveness among Black Americans through a continued form of subjugation in the years after the U.S. Civil War and the passage of legal emancipation.
• Through gardens, text panels, sculptures, and an immersive experience that abstractly replays the act of lynching with a series of hanging and supine rectangles of inscribed corten steel, the 6-acre memorial invites remembrance and reflection in an environment of peace.
• The memorial was created by the Equal Justice Initiative, which seeks to address the denial of human rights to vulnerable populations and racial and economic injustice as manifested in mass incarceration, excessive punishment, and poverty. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice is specifically part of EJI’s Community Remembrance Project, which “collaborates with communities to memorialize documented victims of racial violence and foster meaningful dialogue about race and justice today.”
• The history of racial terror lynching as a widespread, entrenched perpetuation of white supremacy in the United States–and the resistance enacted against it by the Black community–has not been taught effectively, if at all, in schools. The legacy of lynching lives on today in police killings of Black people, voter suppression, and other political tactics of repression. A memorial such as this one is an essential tool for addressing the unresolved trauma of this history and for achieving justice.

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Kehinde Wiley, Rumors of War

Key points

• Kehinde Wiley created this equestrian sculpture in direct response to the Confederate memorials situated along Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia. He specifically repeated the pose and composition of the J.E.B. Stuart memorial, also an equestrian sculpture, replacing the uniformed Confederate general with the figure of a young Black man in contemporary clothing. 
• This is not Wiley’s first artwork featuring a Black male rider on horseback. Beginning in 2005, Wiley produced a series of paintings of this subject, also called Rumors of War. Like the bronze sculpture in Richmond, the large-scale canvases in the series recreate historic equestrian portraits of powerful leaders, supplanting the main figures with young African American men as a means of reclaiming Black representation and offering a vision of hope and empowerment. The title, Rumors of War, refers to a biblical passage from the New Testament book of Matthew, which speaks to the promise of rebirth for the downtrodden in the face of oppression.
• Reflecting on his own emotional reaction to Richmond’s Confederate monuments, as a Black man, Wiley intended for his sculpture to serve as a counter-narrative to the white supremacist ideals perpetuated by the city’s monuments, which had been in place since the decades following the U.S. Civil War (all, however, were removed in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020, less than a year after Rumors of War was installed in Richmond).

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Shan Goshorn, Sealed Fate: Treaty of New Echota Protest Basket

Key Points

• Shan Goshorn (Eastern Band Cherokee) produced baskets that innovatively blend traditional Cherokee techniques with storytelling and diverse materials to engage viewers with difficult history and topics. As an activist artist, Goshorn used the familiar form of baskets to teach about the trauma and impact of topics such as Indian removal, representation, and marginalization. Through her work, she also contributed to the longstanding history of female basket weaving, and the broader resilience and adaptability of the Cherokee people.
• Sealed Fate specifically addresses the history of the 1835 Treaty of New Echota, which precipitated the displacement of sixteen thousand Cherokee citizens from their homelands east of the Mississippi River to what was known as Indian Territory in Oklahoma. During this journey west, known as the Trail of Tears, one quarter of the relocated Cherokee people died. Goshorn created Sealed Fate from splints, or thin strips of material, made from reproductions of the treaty and the resulting protest documents submitted by over thirteen thousand Cherokee citizens.

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