Teaching Pages

The large sculpture Depression Bread Line by George Segal portrays the experience of many urban Americans who suffered from hunger during the 1930s Great Depression. During this difficult period, which affected the whole world, economies faltered in both industrialized and non-industrialized countries.

Ed Flood’s Aluminum Floater #2 is made from layers of Plexiglas in an aluminum frame. The artwork’s transparency causes its environment to be part of the composition. Organic shapes resembling seaweed, or perhaps amoebae or other microscopic life forms, seem to emerge from the edges of the frame and wriggle across the surface.

In Moonrise, an apparently festive occasion—people arriving at a brightly lit pavilion for a night of dancing—forms the backdrop for a potentially dangerous encounter. The action takes place in the bucolic surroundings of a lakeside resort.

El sueño (La noche de los pobres), or Sleep (The night of the poor), is a part of a series of lithographs created by Diego Rivera that were published in New York by the Weyhe Gallery in 1932. El sueño portrays a group of Mexican campesinos, or rural peasantry, sleeping huddled together for warmth and support.

What a lot of rhinos! As many as twenty-one rhinoceros are standing in a plaza surrounded by adobe walls not far from a big city—settings that are very different from the grassland territories of wild rhinos.

In his Portrait of Moisés Sáenz, artist David Alfaro Siqueiros has brought together several of his interests: modernist art styles that emphasized expressiveness; Revolutionary Mexico’s pride in its indigenous history; and post-Revolution governmental emphasis on universal education and literacy.

Tim House (In Green Pastures), the child-size sculpture by Rob and Christian Clayton, is a vibrantly painted wooden structure covered with words and images. The sculpture, with its cross bearing the name “Tim”, and its pointed roof and split door, is reminiscent of a clubhouse, a one-room schoolhouse, or a small church.

In Untitled Film Still #30, a distraught woman stares slack-jawed from within a dimly lit room. The setting is claustrophobic, with its dark windows, shallow depth of field, and blurred detail.

The flat picture plane of Christina Ramberg’s small acrylic painting, Untitled, is divided into a two-by-two grid of equilateral squares. Each quadrant foregrounds a shadowy, hard-edged form that appears to rest atop a delicate piece of pleated paper or ruffled fabric.

Nick’s Restaurant is a portrait of brothers Dino and Tom Christ in their long-established family restaurant. No customers or restaurant paraphernalia are in evidence, only the two owners.