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The Influence of Pop Art

 

            For Integrative Studio and Seminar: Avatar, we were paired with fellow classmates and tasked with selecting an art movement to summarize and reimagine as a 3D art piece. I was partnered by Melissa _________ and we both were inspired by the Pop Art movement of the late 1950's to the early 1970's. Before I left home to attend Parsons, I experienced a show of the work of later Pop Artist Tom Wesselmann at the VMFA (Virginia Museum of Fine Art). I was instantly inspired and amazed. The challenging idea behind the Pop Art movement was so incredibly intriguing to me: It was a brash, young, fun, artistic sensibility and I instantly identified with it. Luckily, Melissa had a similar experience, attending her own Andy Warhol exhibition, and we agreed that the Pop Art movement was what we wanted and needed to explore. .
             Via research, we learned the many nuances of the movement; its influences, inspirations, effect on society, and how no single Pop Artist was the same in technique, execution or concept. The Pop Art movement was a response to the ideas of Abstract Expressionism and radically changed the landscape of art. It did this by not only challenging the ways we as artists, and consumers, create and view art but also by conspicuously highlighting mundane parts of our own culture to influence meaning and creative expression. .
             Pop Art was the imagery of middle-class culture repurposed. "It was the visual art movement that characterized a sense of optimism during the post-war consumer boom of the 1950's and 1960's" (Pop Art - The Art of Popular Culture). The term was coined in Great Britain, where the Pop Art movement originated during a time of great economic distress. A group of British artists called the "Independent Group" began to assign romanticized images of American culture and lifestyle as a sort of commentary about their own society and its dire state of affairs.


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