Abraham Pov was born in the year 1927, just south of Povungniuk, and he was the son of Joe Talirunili. Talirunili’s work the Great Migration has the record for an Inuit artist work at auction. The record price was $290,000. Below a short clip of this famous work at is record breaking auction.
Abraham took Pov as his last name from the town’s name.
Eventually Pov relocated to Inukjuak, Quebec, Canada where he raised a family.
Pov did an awesome job of capturing details and adding twists in the body and sculpture to show the movement of the figure.
Abraham Pov passed away in 1994 at 67 years of age.
Price range info: Abraham Pov’s work range from $1,000 to $4,000.
Abraham Pov is included in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada.
Speedy Graphito is the nickname of Olivier Rizzo, a pioneer in the street/ graffiti art movement. Rizzo was born in Paris, France in 1961. Graphito is renown for mixing commercial advertising with famous cartoon characters. Rizzo got his start by joining a street collective in 1983.
Speedy was exhibiting and building a great reputation and by the mid 90s was very successful throughout Europe.
Faile is a great example of an up and coming collective working with street art. Below an example of Faile’s work, they are baesd out of New York City. In this clip we check out an installation work done by Faile.
Graphito worked as a graphic designer for a short time.
The artist is based out of Paris, France.
In this clip we visit a show given for Speedy in London, England.
As a viewer I enjoy how he makes a strong statement using symbols everyone knows. In the gallery you will notice it seems the world is being over taken by consumer brands (based out of the United States.) Another well received work was of Snow White being tainted by an Apple product! What a great idea to combine the two. It seems Speedy is negative on the consumer and loves to show how much the consumer is always being tempted to buy the newest item.
Cai Guo Qiang is one of the most famous Chinese artists known for his abstraction and performance art. Cai Guo- Qiang was born in Quanzhou City, China in 1957. His performance art is what attracts me most of his art, he uses gunpowder to create spectacular explosions in the sky. He sells tickets to the event and people gladly take pictures and cell phone videos to mark the event.
His father was an artist and enjoyed painting and calligraphy. His father worked at a bookstore so the artist was exposed to Western and Eastern ideas of art from an early age.
For his artistic education Cai Guo-Qiang attended the Shanhai Theater Academy where he studied stage design.
The artist has been listening to sounds of gunpowder and gunshots his entire life. He even participated in some cultural uprising and explosions and violence was common. Its great to see the explosions and gunpowder now bringing people together!
Acted in two martial arts movies.
Much of his work involves gunpowder. In the gallery above the 5th picture down from the top, what might look like a trail of a snake or eel is actually what is remaining after Cai laid a trail of gunpowder and lit it off.
Price range information: The artist has completed works in wood, ink, oils. He is right up there with Ai WeiWei for sought after Chinese artists with works ranging from $25,000 to over one million dollars.
In this clip from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, we visit one of Cai’s spectacular gunpowder shows!
And this great clip is a career retrospective titled I Want to Believe. The show was held at the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain.
In this clip we watch as the artist blows up a 40 foot tall pine tree.
The artist lives and works out of New York City. As you can tell his art is a fixture at many museums featuring contemporary art.
David Hammons is an American artist born in Springfield, IL in 1943. Over his career Hammons has worked with sculpture and assemblage, installations, and performance art. For his collegiate studies Hammons attended the Chouinard Art Institute and the Otis Art Institute both located in Los Angeles, California.
I enjoy Hammons work for his use of unconventional materials. In the gallery above check out the piece with elephants walking around at the base. In the middle is painted elephant dung/ poop. You might not notice its dung as its painted! Very cleaver!
Another series done by David Hammons that received much critical acclaim was a series done called body parts. Hammons used body parts that were greased and then made an imprint on paper. The piece in the gallery above a black man is titled Spade. Spade was a term used by the “in” crowd in the 1970s for an African- American.
For his performance art Hammons loves to push boundaries and try very unique ideas. Among his first efforts was to stand outside during a snowstorm and sell premade assorted snowballs of various sizes.
In the late 1980s his work caused a great deal of anger among African Americans. He painted the religious leader Jesse Jackson with blonde hair and blue eyes. On the billboard it was written, “How you like me now?” The piece was violently destroyed by angry African American men.
price range information: Sorry none available.
Another performance type of art took place when he took 20,000 feet of display area at a gallery that was very dark and the viewers job was to navigate their way through the area with only some flashlights. Very unique in his ideas! Below we get a viewing from this show. I don’t recommend to watch the whole thing, I hope you have some art to work on after you finish reading this article, but you get a great idea for Hammons’ level of creativity.
David Hammons received the MacArthur Fellowship award in 1991.
In this clip we catch up with our art lover friend James Kalm (yeah!) to check out a show featuring the work of David Hammons.
I find the artist very interesting not only for his unique performance ideas, but also because he attended prestigious art institutions but doesn’t really like to show in galleries, preferring to show his art on the streets.
In this last clip we see a great mix of unique ideas, text and Kool Aid!
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