Contemporary Art Final Exam

Meaning: A scene about college life reimagined with Black masculine women at the center. The piece flips the usual “college movie” stereotypes and explores gender, identity, and group dynamics while celebrating people who break traditional gender norms.

Title: Pump
Artist: Nina Chanel Abney

Meaning: A smooth marble form that feels both organic and abstract, showing [ARTIST]’s interest in natural shapes and hand-crafted precision. The sculpture invites viewers to read it however they want, highlighting the beauty of simple, mysterious forms.

Title: Untitled
Artist: Alma Allen

Meaning: A bright, detailed quilt portrait of Harriet Tubman that highlights her courage and leadership. [ARTIST] uses symbolic fabrics like sunflowers for the North Star, a lion for strength, and a skirt that moves from darkness to bright sky to show Tubman’s journey from slavery to freedom. The piece celebrates her power, faith, and role in guiding others to safety.

Title: I Go to Prepare a Place for You
Artist: Bisa Butler

Meaning: A reworked American flag that questions national identity and who is included or excluded from its ideals. By showing only part of the flag, [ARTIST] highlights gaps in equality and asks viewers to think about whose voices and rights are still missing in the U.S.

Title: Partial Flag
Artist: Peggy Diggs

Meaning: A work centered on collective liberation and interconnected struggle. [ARTIST] emphasizes that justice isn’t individual and that true freedom depends on everyone being free. The piece highlights the idea that social change requires collective action.

Title: None of Us Are Free Until All of Us Are Free
Artist: Madalyn Drewno

Meaning: Shows a chaotic yet intimate house party, exploring themes of community, chosen family, alienation, queerness, and modern connection amidst technology. This is a shift from violent mobs to supportive groups finding belonging, reflecting the artist's own journey from outsider to feeling understood.

Title: Another Green World
Artist: Nicole Eisenman

Meaning: An immersive installation using bold colors, beads, textiles, and sculptures to explore Indigenous identity, history, and resilience. It combines tradition and contemporary art to reclaim space, celebrate culture, and confront historical oppression.

Title: the space in which to place me
Artist: Jeffery Gibson

Meaning: A line of metallic text along a wall that acts as a “portrait,” where meaning changes depending on its display and the viewer, making the work flexible, subjective, and participatory.

Title: Untitled (Portrait of the Magoons)
Artist: Felix Gonzalez-Torres

Meaning: The work spray-paints a bedroom, starting with the bed as a universal, shared object, to explore change, memory, and transformation. Familiar objects become chaotic, colorful art, turning personal space into a universal experience about life, dreams, and renewal.

Title: The Bedroom
Artist: Katharina Grosse

Meaning: Shows two Black men with lemons to explore history, memory, and power, questioning who is remembered or forgotten. Lemons symbolize labor, colonialism, and burdens, while the vibrant painting invites viewers to reflect on whose stories are told.

Title: Bitter Battles
Artist: Lubaina Himid

Meaning: A whale skeleton made from plastic chairs, exploring consumerism, environmental damage, and colonial history. It transforms trash into art, connecting modern waste to past industry and Indigenous ideas of spiritual power.

Title: Cetology
Artist: Brian Jungen

Meaning: A large sculpture inspired by traditional face vessels and cowrie shells, exploring Black feminist themes of resilience, self-determination, and reclaiming history. It transforms symbols of oppression into figures of empowerment and cultural continuity.

Title: Jug
Artist: Simone Leigh

Meaning: Uses the text from 1968 Memphis strike signs to explore race, Black identity, and history. The cracked letters highlight ongoing racism and how identity and recognition are shaped, visible, or erased over time.

Title: I Am a Man
Artist: Glenn Ligon

Meaning: Shows Black figures in a studio to explore art-making, artistic labor, and Black representation. It centers Black presence in painting, reflecting on history, genres, and expanding art beyond traditional Western norms.

Title: Untitled (Studio)
Artist: Kerry James Marshall

Meaning: Focuses on a Vietnamese-American family in New Orleans, telling interwoven stories of trauma, loss, and displacement. Presented like letters from the dead to the living, it uses music and dialogue to explore memory, grief, and the search for home. [1]

Title: Among the Disquiet
Artist: Tuan Andrew Nguyen

[1]

Meaning: Focuses on a Vietnamese-American family in New Orleans, telling interwoven stories of trauma, loss, and displacement. Presented like letters from the dead to the living, it uses music and dialogue to explore memory, grief, and the search for home. [2]

Title: Among the Disquiet
Artist: Tuan Andrew Nguyen

[2]

Meaning: A participatory art piece, a small box containing a mirror, designed to make the viewer smile by reflecting their own image, transforming sadness into happiness and activating them as part of the art

Title: Box of Smile
Artist: Yoko Ono

Meaning: A mixed-media work using layered patterns, textures, and circular forms to explore identity, memory, and the passage of time. It reflects [ARTIST]’s interest in repetition, process, and how personal and collective histories intertwine.

Title: Nautilus #1
Artist: Howardena Pindell

Meaning: A video where [ARTIST] alternates between herself and a white persona to show how Black women’s experiences of racism and sexism are dismissed. Bandages and peeling skin highlight race as a social construct and the struggle for identity.

Title: Free, White, and 21
Artist: Howardena Pindell

Meaning: Depicts [ARTIST] and her daughters on a bleeding American flag to critique racism and violence. The painting shows how racial injustice wounds the nation’s promise to freedom and reflects fears for her children amid ongoing racial tension.

Title: The Flag is Bleeding #2
Artist: Faith Ringgold

Meaning: Reimagines the Statue of Liberty as a Black, non-binary trans-femme figure to challenge national symbols, assert trans visibility, and connect freedom to dignity for all. Flowers replace the torch, emphasizing inclusion and transformation.

Title: Trans Forming Liberty
Artist: Amy Sherald

Meaning: Transforms a removed Confederate statue into a disjointed bronze figure to critique white supremacy, historical trauma, and the myths of the Lost Cause (a myth that reimagines the Civil War as a noble fight for states' rights and Southern honor, not slavery). The work links drones to the persistence of violent ideologies, haunting American history.

Title: Unmanned Drone
Artist: Kara Walker

Meaning: Reflects personal sadness and privilege while commenting on the U.S. migrant crisis and housing injustice, linking private grief to broader social issues.

Title: I Cry in the Shower About You
Artist: Alexander Richard Wilson

Meaning: A large beaded work honoring Indigenous women and Lakota traditions, expressing gratitude and connecting Native and Western art histories. It celebrates resilience, spiritual connections, and the ongoing presence of Indigenous art.

Title: Wopila | Lineage
Artist: Dani White Hawk