Announcement
Art created by ESL students
Photo: Karen Holmberg
Following a group visit to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), English students in the high beginner and intermediate class created artwork inspired by artists Enrique Chagoya and James Rosenquist with MoMA teaching artist, Shellyne Rodriguez.
James Rosenquist’s “F-111” series
Photo: James Rosenquist
Shellyne Rodriguez describes the essence of the two artists’ artwork as well as the collaborative piece created by the students thus:
Chagoya’s work addresses the contradictions present in American xenophobic hysteria about the US/Mexico border, American Imperialism, and pop culture. His series, Borderlandia, lays out an array of seemingly disparate images that address these themes in an accordion style layer of drawings and printmaking.
Rosenquist’s painting F-111, currently on view at MoMA, addresses the relationship between war and consumerism, mixing together seemingly disparate images to convey a message.
The differences between these two artists are scale and style. Rosenquist’s painting is 86 feet wide and encompasses a room while Chagoya’s is almost a fold out book.
The class at IRC in NY used disparate images and attempted to weave together narratives in a collective image that was small in scale like Chagoya but tied together almost mural-like in the style of Rosenquist.
A view of the controversial 12-panel lithograph by Enrique Chagoya, titled “The Misadventures of the Romantic Cannibals”
Photo: Enrique Chagoya