American Israeli artist Andi Arnovitz recently made headlines in the New York Times with a new series of collages crafted in response to the perceived nuclear threat posed against Israel by Iran. The painter and printmaker, who has lived in Jerusalem since 1999 and works out of the Jerusalem Print Workshop, recently exhibiting the works at the city’s L.A. Mayer Museum for Islamic Art as … Continue reading Painting the Iranian Nuclear Threat
Operation Urgent Fury, the controversial US-led invasion of Grenada, concluded with a decisive victory for the United States on 15 December 1983. The Reagan administration claimed that this action, the country’s first major military operation since the end of the Vietnam War, was launched in response to appeals for help by Grenada’s neighbouring islands. However, it has also been widely argued that the campaign was … Continue reading The CIA Comic Book Airdropped Over Grenada
Perhaps the most celebrated American sculptor of the 20th century, Alexander Calder is especially well-known for his abstract and seemingly innocuous mobiles. These would become a common feature in official American exhibitions at world fairs and international art festivals during the 1950s – including at the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow. In this context they were presented as examples of ‘free’ art produced within a … Continue reading Featured Artist: Alexander Calder
Sean Snyder is a contemporary American artist living and working in Berlin, Kiev and Tokyo. Acclaimed for his unique ‘research-based’ art, Snyder works predominantly in film and video to explore the role of images in the global circulation of (dis)information. This fascination has repeatedly led him to engage with the politics of images produced during the Cold War. Using montages and cut ups of content … Continue reading Featured Artist: Sean Snyder
Is It Propaganda? Or Is It Political Art? is the latest exhibition to open at the Charles Krause/Reporting Fine Art Gallery in Washington, DC. Assembled from the personal collection of the veteran PBS and Washington Post foreign correspondent, the exhibition features political and poster art from Cold War USSR, Cuba, Ukraine, China, Poland, Germany and the US. Krause became a collector of art during his … Continue reading Exhibition of the Month: Is It Propaganda? Or Is It Political Art?
Sun Mu, as this painter is known, has a greater understanding of the ongoing repercussions of the Cold War than perhaps any other living artist. Born in North Korea, where he was trained to paint propagandistic posters and murals, Sun fled in 1998 during one of the country’s many famines, and today lives and works in South Korea. The artist’s real name and appearance are … Continue reading Featured Artist: Sun Mu
Walter L. Hixson. Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War, 1945–1961. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997. Despite its slim appearance, Parting the Curtain is a detailed and informative read. Its concise format makes it a good starting point for readers new to the topic of Cold War culture and the book provides a helpful overview of the central themes and stories. Hixson focuses … Continue reading Recommended Read: Parting the Curtain
Best known as the designer of the Barack Obama ‘Hope’ poster, created for the 2008 presidential campaign, American street artist and illustrator Shepard Fairey is one of the most influential artists of his generation. Fairey honed his skills in the skateboarding scene of the late 1980s before bringing his distinctive style to the walls of some of the world’s premier art museums. Although he is … Continue reading Featured Artist: Shepard Fairey
A group art exhibition in Dubai is currently exploring how present-day global politics continues to be dominated by unresolved issues from the Cold War. Statue of Limitation plays on legal terminology relating to the time limit on seeking justice to offer ‘an anti-monument to human will, with all its limitations’. The exhibition focuses in particular on the geographic and strategic importance of the Middle East in … Continue reading Exhibition of the Month: Statue of Limitation
The artist formerly known as Guðmundur Guðmundsson, who goes by the more pronounceable alias Erró, has been inspired by the Cold War throughout a long and varied career. Erró’s riotous canvases reflect his eclectic personal history, from his birth in 1932 in Iceland, to his travels across Europe and his current residency in Paris, Thailand and on the island of Formentera. Developing his artistic practice in … Continue reading Erró: Iceland’s Cold War Artist
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