Radical Art
5 provocative pieces in LA’s Broad Museum collection
Tony Oursler’s Underwater (Blue/Green) (1996)
Oursler is an American multimedia artist whose work often incorporates elements of psychology and technology. In this 1995 installation, Underwater (Green/Blue), Oursler projects a man’s head into a tank of water. Trying to evoke a sense of empathy from the viewer, the work depicts the head gasping for breath in a desperate effort to avoid drowning.
Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled (1981)
Brooklyn-born and of Haitian and Puerto Rican descent, Basquiat was one of the first graffiti artists to be embraced by the art world—including Andy Warhol, with whom he became close— in the late 1970s. The 1981 painting Untitled is considered a self-portrait, with elements of African masks that he developed into his own personal iconography. His meteoric rise took a toll on his mental health, and Basquiat died of a heroin overdose at the age of 27.
Janine Antoni’s Mom and Dad (1994)
Showcasing her knack for exploring the concepts of identity, Antoni’s photographic triptych captures her efforts to portray her parents as one blended unit by adding prosthetics and makeup to transform her mom into her dad and vice versa.
Robert Longo’s Untitled (Ferguson Police, August 13, 2014)
- Courtesy of the Broad © Robert Longo.
Throughout his career, Longo has focused on creating images that capture a pivotal cultural moment. First unveiled at Art Basel Miami Beach, this charcoal drawing depicts the Ferguson, Missouri, police force in riot gear during a protest over the killing of the unarmed black teenager Michael Brown.
Kara Walker’s Treesum (1998)
Walker is best known for her gigantic sculpture Subtlety: Or… the Marvelous Sugar Baby an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant, which took over the abandoned Domino Sugar refinery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in 2014. Racial and sexual themes infuse Walker’s work, including this coffee and gouache painting of a ménage à trois.
