Art Outings

I had the best time today at The Andy Warhol Museum! Get this! 7 floors of Andy Warhol’s and Ai Weiwei’s works, side by side. Amazing! Whereas, the Ai Weiwei exhibit at Carnegie Museum of Art was just his Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads, the Warhol featured almost all of Weiwei’s works. I got to see two of his works which I shared in the my previous blog post about Weiwei: Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995) and Tea Brick (2006). However, the Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn wasn’t displayed as photographs. According to the description, Weiwei recreated his iconic work in legos, and in a pixelated form, to argue the distribution of images by digital technologies. It was really awesome to see Warhol’s and Weiwei’s works side by side. It allowed me to see how much of an influence Warhol was to Weiwei. Each floor “focus[ed] on the parallels, intersections, and points of differences between their practices.” I saw how one person represented the 20th century (Warhol), while the other represented this current century (Weiwei). I was surprised to see how their respective works on Mao were similar to one another. They both featured his face and his signature stance, except they were executed with different materials. Weiwei painted his Maos’ with oil on canvas, while Warhol used acrylic paint and silkscreen ink on linen fabric. At the end of my visit, I came to a conclusion. Ai Weiwei and Andy Warhol both produced work on controversial subjects during controversial time periods. If you guys have the chance, I highly recommend seeing Weiwei’s exhibit at Carnegie first, and then see this second exhibit at the Warhol!

Check out my post on Ai Weiwei for a refresher!

Check out my trip!

P.S. This got me annoyed! Can you tell what’s wrong? Also, I’ll put up captions later. I’m having some technical difficulties.

Yesterday, I visited the Carnegie Museum of Art for two particular exhibitions: Ai Weiwei: Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads and the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh (AAP) 105th Annual Exhibition. Ai Weiwei’s exhibit was so cool! These huge zodiac heads were erected on these bases and were placed accordingly to form a circle as the name of the exhibit suggests. There also was a little handout that told you the order of the heads and the meanings of that particular animal. All of these zodiac heads were so detailed! I was surprised by their height and the size of their heads. Their heads were bigger than mine! I have a selfie with my zodiac animal (rat) to prove it! Weiwei amazed me again!

The Associated Artists of Pittsburgh 105th Annual Exhibition was cool too! Once I entered the gallery, I instantly gravitated towards a rainbow colored piece of art. Upon further inspection, I found out they were all made of dyed phone books. Another piece I liked was Hand-Typed Check Shirt (2016) by Lenka Clayton. Clayton disassembled a cotton shirt at the seams into 21 parts, and then ran each of them through a typewriter. She created the pattern by pressing on the equals key over 30,000 times. After she was done printing the pieces, she hand-sewn each of the pieces back together again. I found that so creative and the tedious, as well. She has remarkable patience! All of the works in this exhibit were outstanding! There was a little of everything there. There were mixed media pieces, photographs, drawings, paintings, and sculptures. They were all so interestingly different!

I didn’t just see these two exhibits during my visit. I saw some of the works of the artist, Alison Knowles. This was the first time I was exposed to Ms. Knowles work. I found that her works were very hands-on, bright, and very different from one another. She did a lot of screen printing and collage work. I also visited the Scaife Gallery to see if there was anything new in there since my last visit in April (Art History and History of GD!). I saw some of the works of my favorite artists: Monet, Van Gogh, Klimt, and Munch. I was also delighted to see the Collection of Miniatures. I really wished that there were miniature people in these little settings!

Instead of putting all of my photographs from my visit altogether, I decided to divide them up into three sections: Ai Weiwei’s exhibit, AAP’s exhibit, and the rest of my trip. This was such a great trip! I’m planning on finally going to the Andy Warhol Museum sometime this weekend, especially now that I have a 25% discount off my ticket for Ai Weiwei’s exhibit there.