Table Of ContentAcknowledgments
A complex book such as this one owes its existence to the help of many artists,
art historians, gallerists, editors, supporters, friends, and family members. It
would be impossible without the artists discussed in it, and we are grateful to
each one of them for their outstanding contributions to global art and culture, as
well as their vision for a more just world.
We are immensely indebted to the authors who contributed to its pages and
oft en supported our research in a collaborative and intellectually stimulating
manner. We also want to acknowledge their patience and professional
commitment during the unprecedented diffi culties of the Covid-19 pandemic.
We would like to extend special thanks to Manthia Diawara, who allowed us to
reprint his now canonical essay. So much has changed since its promise during
Documenta 14 in Athens in 2017, adding signifi cant layers to the resonance of
this book and the intersecting inequities and injustices it oft en contemplates
through Pop.
We thank all of the artists who gave us and our book’s contributors permission
to reproduce their art and, in many cases, granted in-person interviews or
answered our many queries through telephone calls and email exchanges. Th ese
include: Rosalyn Drexler, Art Green, Jann Haworth, Deborah Kass, Glenn Ligon,
Gladys Nilsson, Claes Oldenburg, Martha Rosler, Eli Stein, Herv é T é l é maque,
and the late Idelle Weber.
We are grateful to the galleries, museums, archivists, studio and estate
representatives, and collectors who oft en helped with both research and images:
Marc Arranaga, Maggie Birnbaum at Hollis Taggart Galleries, Olivian Cha at
Corita Art Center, Rachel Garbade at Garth Greenan Gallery, Garth Greenan,
Florence Half-Wrobel, Jasna Jakšić at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb,
Carroll Janis, Jean Fran ç oise and J é r ô me Lavantes, Catherine Lhost at Galerie
Louis Carr é & Cie, Corina Matamoros and the Estate of Ra ú l Mart í nez, Rebecca
Mecklenborg at Jack Shainman Gallery, Jelena Pazman Cverle, Lucie Pfeiff er at
Fondation Gandur pour l’Art, Sabina Pov š i č at the Museum of Modern Art,
Ljubljana, Josie Sommer at the Frank Bowling Archive, Simona Š uc, Maribor Art
Gallery, Jacob Vasa at Roberts Projects, and the estates of Glenn Ligon, Elizabeth
Murray, George Segal, and Tom Wesselmann.
xi
xii Acknowledgments
Family members of artists and authors have been invaluable for this book,
providing information and practical help in securing images and facilitating
communication. We wanted to particularly thank Alba Borrego, Vesna
Džuverović, Alex Johnstone, Makishi Tamiko, Tura Milo Gudmunsson, Frederico
Morais, Ana Š alamun, Elodie-Anne T é l é maque, Christopher Duva, and Suzanne
Weber.
While we name those we interacted with, we wish to equally thank all those
who helped our authors in ways oft en unknown to us. We thank as well all the
photographers who generously lent images and those whom, despite our best
eff orts, remained unknown to us.
For generous help with the book in multiple forms of support we acknowledge:
Andrea Applebee, Jo Applin, Maria Elena Buszek, Susanneh Bieber, Leila Brown,
Eddie Chambers, Edward Coppola, Fereshteh Daft ari, Miriam Deutch, Johanna
Gosse, Branka Hlevnjak, Jessica Horton, Caroline House, Anna Indych-L ó pez,
Agata Jakubowska, Nick Kastrinakis, Jonathan D. Katz, Liz Kim, Despina Lalaki,
Ellen K. Levy, Pely Lioupi, Michael Lobel, Jocelyn Marshall, Joan Marter, Jennifer
McCoy, Rachel Middleman, Annika Ő hrner, Eto Otitigbe, Antonia Papatzanaki,
Vanessa Parent, Sophia Petrides, Archie Rand, Gary Roth, Nadja Rottner, Sid
Sachs, Adrien Sina, Basia Sliwinska, Lindsay Smilow, Stephanie Sparling Williams,
Judy Sund, Robert Storr, Connie Tell, Krista Th ompson, Ellen Tremper, Allison
Unruh, George Vernardos, Katarina Wadstein MacLeod, and Leon Wainwright.
Pop Art and Beyond was preceded by several panels with important scholars
in the fi eld, several of whom are authors in this volume and all of whom inspired
our thinking. Th e speakers who joined two sessions on Pop and Class that we
co-chaired at the 106th Annual College Art Association (CAA) Conference in
2018 were: Maibritt Borgen, Hannah Bruckm ü ller, Johanna Gosse, Sofi a Gotti,
Anthony E. Grudin, Hiroko Ikegami, Nadja Rottner, and Marine Sch ü tz; and the
panelists for Minioudaki and Allison Unruh’s 2012 CAA sessions on Pop Art
and Politics: Martin Berger, Grudin, Ikegami, Jakubowska, Seth McCormick,
Rottner, and Tom Williams. For a CAA 2020 session on women and stand-up
comedy, Hadler thanks panelists Paula Burleigh, Mette Gieskes, Katherine
Guinness, and Robert R. Shane.
W e have been very generously supported by our editors. We thank Lisa
Goodrum of I.B. Tauris, who began the project with us, and the staff at
Bloomsbury Press, in particular April Peake, as well as Barbara Cohen Bastos
and Merv Honeywood, for seeing this book to conclusion. We thank our copy
editor, our indexer Kate Mertes for her professionalism in this task, and Baillie
Card for her invaluable editorial input.
Acknowledgments xiii
For funding, we thank the Professional Staff Congress/City University of New
York (PS/CUNY) Research Foundation for two Research Awards and Brooklyn
College for awarding Mona Hadler a Tow Faculty Research Travel Fellowship to
interview the artist Herv é T é l é maque.
Both of us thank our families: Mona her husband and two sons, John, Daniel,
and Michael Vila; Kalliopi her husband Yiannis Delidimos, her mother Archontia,
her brother Alexandros, uncle George Maroulakis, and her summer writing
buddy Hermes.
And fi nally, we thank each other. Only having met once before the writing of
this book, we took a leap and embarked on countless hours of work, only to fi nd
in each other the kindest, most intelligent, and hardworking companion. We
proved collaboration to be not only an exciting, tireless adventure, but a
productive intellectual dialogue, fodder not only for our book but for a life
friendship.
Introduction
Mona Hadler and Kalliopi Minioudaki
Th is volume is driven by our complementary investments in the expanded terrain
of postwar art and visual culture that has come to be recognized as Pop, as well as
our distinct commitment not only to the voices of those whom our discipline and
society silence and oppress, but also to an art history that self-critically speaks to the
cultural histories of all. Meant neither to redefi ne Pop Art, nor to craft a new canon
through corrective additions, it began as an exploration of aporias with regard to
the roles of gender, race, and class in Pop’s production, meaning and reception. It
off ers new perspectives on the heterogeneity of Pop and its politics beyond—but
also within—its canonic contexts and builds upon important recent revisions of
Pop Art in light of queer, feminist, critical race, and postcolonial theories.
When fi rst called upon to write a book on women in Pop Art, we quickly
shift ed to a more integrative project. While drawing together essays on men and
women artists in Pop, within a global perspective, is not unique to this collection, 1
our authors privilege the intersection of gender, race, and ethnicity in critical
readings of Pop Art and culture, and fl esh out aspects of their intrinsic
relationship to class. Pop is examined through an inclusive lens that brings
together the work of women-identifi ed, queer, and ethnoracially diverse artists
along with radical youth subcultures and a short-lived collective. We, as editors,
further propose that in paradoxical contrast to the centrality of racial oppression
in the postwar era, and the indelible Black2 presence in pop and vernacular
culture, race and ethnicity have, indeed, played a conspicuously limited role both
in Pop Art and its discourses—a problem which this book begins to redress.3 For
this collection, we heed justifi able suspicions of tokenistic diversity, and look to
the literature on intersectionality4 and feminism(s), especially of women of color,
and critical race art history. 5 We and many of our authors are profoundly
indebted to Kobena Mercer’s groundbreaking study Pop Art and Vernacular
Cultures ,6 which fi rst cast Anglo-American Pop under a transcultural and
postcolonial lens, critiquing its racialized ideologies.
1
2 Pop Art and Beyond
All moments of art history benefi t from integrative methodologies, but Pop is
particularly fertile territory as it addresses the fact of mass audiences, opens
itself up to minority and vernacular cultures, is touted for its role in the
“ ‘democratisation’ of art and culture,”7 and functions as an “agonistic” 8 space for
the airing of local, global, and postcolonial concerns. Broad statements about
“mass” or “popular” or “local” culture need to be grounded inclusively to ring
true and to take into account the politics and subjectivities of diff erence. Th e
essays included here all engage entanglements of gender, race, ethnicity, and
class (or several of these), although with diff erent weight given to the varying
elements. Pop, in their light, can resist, critique, or liberate; comment, subvert, or
protest. In most cases, they align with Jessica Morgan’s conclusion that in
addition to anti-imperialist critique, Pop’s global permutations include, “political
opposition, satiric critique, subversive appropriation and utopic explorations of
collective and individual identity.”9
Pop Art and Beyond includes fi ft een essays on art from fi ve continents that
thematically or monographically discuss the work of a large number of artists
from a variety of perspectives. Rather than parsing their varied focuses, the
chapters are organized alphabetically by author, leaving space for the eff ects of
their intersection to resonate across the rich intermingling of the book’s themes
and geographies. Gathering a multitude of artists, whose diasporic and
transnational situations make national identifi cations hard, if not impossible or
fruitful to secure, we range from, and occasionally through London, New York,
and Paris, to Chicago and Santa Fe, Guiana, Havana and Haiti, Brazil, Mali,
Okinawa, and Jerusalem. Even with the best intentions, one collection can
present only a sampling of case studies. However, the inclusion of chapters on
artists from multiple continents and the diverse (racial, ethnic, and national)
backgrounds of the authors and transnational perspectives of its editors
themselves1 0 anchors this anthology’s expanded geo-cultural focus, which
counters exclusive angloamericanism with a non-hierarchical bridging of
contexts, “eccentric”1 1 perspectives and manifestations. By looking at Pop both
from its traditional national bases and elsewhere, we contribute to a “horizontal” 12
exploration of centers and peripheries that in defying the latter’s subordination
continues to dismantle and critique mainstream Pop.
Our authors engage artists who participated in Pop’s rise, whether embracing
or disputing its rubric, or whose brief or lasting dialogue with it wars with their
identifi cation with other groupings such as F iguration Narrative , Chicago
Imagism, and “Indian Pop,” or their association with the Black Arts Movement
(BAM) or feminist art. Th ey deploy a multiplicity of media and modes of display
Introduction 3
that range from collage, sculpture, assemblage, photography, installation art, and
multimedia performance to painting or printmaking. Th e last encompasses
industrial seriality as well as hand-drawn design, as in Lotus Lobo’s installations
reproducing the lithographic trademarks of small rural industries in Brazil; and
the personal, as in Frank Bowling’s screen printing of his mother’s house in
British Guiana in a series of paintings made in London and New York.
We see Pop, untethered from its mythic Anglo-American eruption, as a
multifaceted phenomenon (rather than a movement or style), manifesting
postwar art’s return to contemporary reality, whether modernist or postmodernist
in its experimentation. Pop, in this framework, comprises constellations of
diverse, singular practices which variously unsettled the established hierarchies
of postwar culture and society—the most evident being of “high and low”—
through a disparate resort to everyday culture, extending beyond commercial
mass culture. Pop Art’s quick historicization and formalist defense in the mid-
1960s (mis)construed it as a homogeneous style, its criteria reduced to a
coincidence of commercial technique and subject matter, and an impersonal and
apolitical approach that opened the door for critiques of Pop’s “both/and” aff air
with capitalist spectacle. 13 Yet, Pop’s iconography, modes of production, sensibility
and politics are diff erently conditioned by an array of contextual, artistic, and
sociopolitical factors. Given this broad defi nition of Pop, we have allowed for the
inclusion of artists who stray far from canonical examples, and produced Pop-
infl ected work well into the 1970s. Indeed, in the title of our book, the phrase
“and beyond” provides the wide net requisite for our project of capturing Pop’s
heterogeneity beyond the limitations of its existing defi nitions and canons, or its
“fi ne art” confi nes.
Pop Art and Beyond: Gender, Race, and Class in the Global Sixties is a title that
enters fraught territory since each of its key words is open to interpretation,
from “Pop” to “Global” to “Sixties.” While the current consideration of the “global”
geo-cultural expanse of Pop was well represented by the exhibitions Th e World
Goes Pop at Tate Modern and International Pop at the Walker Art Center in
2015, 14 the word “global” preferred by the former has raised as much justifi able
critical suspicion as the blanket use of the rubric Pop. 15 Overall, this expanded
geo-cultural focus has productively shattered the Euro-North American
monopoly on Pop and opened the way for reconsideration of Anglo-American
Pop’s own diversity, both projects that this book advances. But the globalizing
lens of blockbuster curatorial projects can gloss over all kinds of diff erences that
characterize Pop in various contexts, countering the decolonizing of the
narratives of postwar art they purport.
4 Pop Art and Beyond
While the word “global” functions as a marker of our transnational perspective
within this moment of Pop discourse’s global turn, we, too, wished to problematize
its resonance and impact, by attaching it in this book’s title to “sixties,” rather
than to Pop. “Global” therefore imbues the postwar cross-cultural and
transnational encounters, exchanges, and “cosmopolitan contaminations”1 6 —
across, for example, borders of the First and Th ird Worlds or the Iron Curtain—
with connecting forces, ranging from mass media and wars to social movements,
that underpin the contradictory experiences and politics of the 1960s. While we
favor “global” over “international,” which is fraught with the Euro-North
American-centricism of postwar international art narratives, we at times use
“international” as a more historically grounded signifi er of the transcendence of
borders in this book that acknowledges their importance in this era’s art and
politics. We also welcome the diverse ways our authors further the problematic
in their choice of words.1 7
Our concern, however, lies as much with the specifi cities of each context and
manifestation, in all the interdependency of the local/regional with the global
that they unveil, and we favored close accounts that while not strictly biographical
do “personalise the global.” 18 From the infl uence of the Haitian Carnival’s bold
colors and comic sensibility on Paris-based Pop artist Herv é T é l é maque, to Ra ú l
Mart ín ez’s engagement with c ultura popular in Cuba, the local and the vernacular
join forces with Pop’s internationalism. Th omas Crow’s writing sets precedent
for this book’s exploration of folk, mass, and vernacular sources that cut across
music, local youth cultures and graphic design.1 9 Giulia Lamoni, for example, in
her comparative exploration of the practices of Judith Lauand, Lotus Lobo, Anna
Maria Maiolino, Wilma Martins, and Y ê damaria, carefully parses how
printmaking in Brazil accorded with both the radical left and progressive
supporters of Pop in their turn from folk art, while its craft aspect defi ed
Americanization during the US-backed developmentalism and dictatorship in
the 1960s.
Our authors also reveal the modernist language of celebrity formation
including seriality and image repetition. In this collection, we fi nd these Pop
strategies repurposed by artists in a way that problematizes gender, race, and
class through an oft en ironic language of iconic immediacy and mediatized
fame. From Ra ú l Martí nez’s subversively feminized depiction of Fidel Castro to
Tom Max (aka Makishi Tsutomu)’s portrait of T ō j ō Hideki, these new Pop idioms
were fodder for activist groups and politicized artists to celebrate their heroes, as
in Emory Douglas’s images of Black Panther leaders,2 0 or to question them,
further layering the politics of Pop appropriationism. Th e mass media circulation
Introduction 5
of collected LPs with memorable covers or iconic photographic portraits of the
musicians played a role as well.2 1 In Manthia Diawara’s essay on Malian
photographer Malick Sidib é , Th omas Crow’s on London’s style cults, and Hiroko
Ikegami’s on Tom Max in Okinawa—which singles out his installation Th e World
According to John Lewis , 1967 (fi gure 6.2)—such imagery, in particular the
visibility of Black musicians, allowed for agentic identifi cation that challenged
the notion of branded American objects and pop icons as solely tools of cultural
imperialism. 22
Th e artists within this volume not only refl ected the radical changes of the era
in their subject matter but also found agency in Pop’s aesthetics. Th ey are oft en
drawn to Pop as a contemporary language that in many instances produces
affi rmative identity positions through the use of current, cutting edge, variegated
aesthetic modes, at times through its narrative or fi gurative potential or use of
readily available mass cultural material. It allowed for a both/and approach to
fi guration and abstraction endemic to Pop that circumvents limiting mandates to
adopt forms of social realism from Communism, Maoism, and even at times
from the pressure to forefront ethnic identity.2 3 In addition, it off ered a way for
some artists to be modern in the face of a critical demand to render or be seen as
the “primitive” or “authentic.”2 4 Herv é T é l é maque’s practice and that of Aps á alooke
(Crow) painter Kevin Red Star can be understood in part in these contexts. In her
essay on “Indian Pop” artists, including Red Star, Kristine K. Ronan argues that
Native American manifestations of Pop unpack racialized and racist notions of
authenticity and primitivism endemic to racial capitalism, showing how by
intertwining vernacular and tourist production, individual works counter this
framework. In communist or former communist countries the contemporaneity
of Pop practices takes diff erent meanings but is still subversive. 25 Lina D ž uverovi ć
points to women’s experimentation with Pop Art techniques and everyday
material culture as empowering in the socialist context of non-Western
consumerism, within the multiethnic Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia of the
1960s and early 1970s, arguing that it harbored feminist “agency” and “articulations”
of the complex experiences of being female in Yugoslavia. Whereas, in her essay
on Ra ú l Mart í nez, Mercedes Trelles Hern á ndez reveals the propagandistic
instrumentalizing of Pop’s “modernity” in Castro’s Cuba, where Pop was serviced
as proof of Castro’s liberal approach to culture. Th is collection, in its expanded
scope, thus signals new ways that Pop Art’s wide embrace can be seen as an
experimentation with contemporary aesthetic practices.
Pop Art and Beyond illuminates the backdrop of the turbulent 1960s, with its
vast changes that impacted the very issues that are central to this book’s thesis. A
6 Pop Art and Beyond
Janus-faced decade, it witnessed massive shift s from the early part of the decade
through the rights movements of the latter half. In the beginning years, female
artists, for example, suff ered from the sexism of the times but oft en disavowed
identifi cation as women artists or as feminists. Concomitantly, Black artists
decried their experiences of racism yet at times shied away from the quest for a
Black aesthetic or considered integrationist strategies a fi tting riposte to racism.2 6
But the 1960s saw the rise of Th ird World liberation movements, Pan-Africanism,
Civil Rights struggles, sexual revolution, countercultural revolt, Women’s, Gay
and Lesbian liberation movements, Black and Red Power movements, and
students and workers’ uprisings that gave rise to identity politics and fragmented
the “monocultural consensus,”2 7 but also changed thinking about diff erence.2 8
Stuart Hall’s reminiscence on the postwar end of the essential Black subject and
the double inscription of creolization and multiple belongings endemic to the
1960s, resonates here: “Th e diasporic proved to be the moment when the politics
of class, race, and gender came together, but in a new, unstable, unstoppable,
explosive articulation, displacing and at the same time complicating each other.” 29
Understandably, the artists in this collection give voice to the oft en fraught
politics of identity. Th e 1960s are frequently mis-remembered for making social
diff erence the fulcrum of progressive politics rather than the “commonality”
which distinguished the radicality of decolonization, the Civil Rights movement
and, above all, the sexual revolution’s body politics as observed by Jonathan D.
Katz. 30 It is indeed in this period of contradictions, that the rights movements
gave rise to identity politics and politicized diff erence.3 1 And it is precisely in this
period, that artists found in the immediacy of Pop the agency to speak and/or
counter all kinds of power and dominations, including that dominating “matrix” 32
of gender, race, and class. In so doing, they oft en critically exposed the role of
representation in reifying the “otherness” that reinforced their disadvantage.
Mapping a multitude of radical identifi cations and disidentifi cations 33 produced
in/through Pop iconography and everyday rituals, Pop Art and Beyond troubles
rather than fi xes diff erence in Pop.
While this book is the fi rst on Pop to include more women artists than men,
we acknowledge that neither Pop nor gender are monolithic or stable categories.
We include essays that challenge the commonality of experience or oppression
among “women” as a unifi ed entity, as for example in Kalliopi Minioudaki’s
analysis of the racialization of domestic labor in light of works by Jann Haworth,
Martha Rosler, and Betye Saar. We trace the fostering of intersectionality in this
era, with the rise of the Black Arts Movement and feminism, as in Rebecca
Zorach’s nuanced reading of the body politics of Yaound é Olu and Evelyn
Introduction 7
Patricia Terry, or Giulia Lamoni’s deciphering of the intertwinement of gender
and race politics in the work of Y ê damaria. 34 Th e latter’s Yemanj á com luz , 1972
(plate 14), for example, collaged a circular photograph of Martin Luther King
onto the fi gure of the Orisha Yemanjá , an Afro-Brazilian nature deity traditionally
related to the maternal that the artist used repeatedly in collages and prints to
advocate for equality for all women. 35 As Giulia Lamoni reveals, Y ê damaria thus
aligned the agency of the Civil Rights leader with the magical-religious power of
the African gods, and the politics of race with feminism, thereby carving also a
space for a reclamation of Black women’s (eco)feminist spirituality 36 in Pop.
Rather than limiting intersectionality to “a feminist theory of identity,” we resort
to it as a tool of critical inquiry and “praxis” that, as theorized by Patricia Hill
Collins and Sirma Bilge, can battle the “fl attening” of diff erences in all the
heterogeneity of their global manifestations. 37 It is by bringing together
comparative explorations of the inscription of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity
or class, and diff erent combinations of the above, in the work of “women” and
“men,” that P op Art and Beyond squeezes out their interaction and furthers an art
history of diversity that suspends its separate battles.3 8
More than race and class, gender and sexuality have been particularly targeted
in Pop discourse, as Pop rummaged domains identifi ed with femininity including
the domestic, consumer culture and camp aesthetics and delighted at the
scopophilia and the combined commodity and sexual fetishism of visual
culture.3 9 In the seminal book, A Taste for Pop , C é cile Whiting fi rst scrutinized
New York Pop through the lens of gender, analyzing the hierarchies of taste that
Pop challenged and reconfi gured. In addition to exposing the masculinist
assumptions of the construction of its hardcore canon, she opened the way to
understanding how Pop artists reiterated and troubled hegemonic constructions
of gender, including how Warhol and Pop sculptor Marisol Escobar unmasked its
performativity.4 0
Broadly speaking, essays in this collection further the discussion on gender
and sexuality in Pop expanding notions of radical desire. From Pauline Boty’s
“labial” fl ower in her painting 5 -4-3-2-1 , 1963 (fi gure 1.4) amplifying the sexual
pleasure encoded in the laughter of a Mod TV heroine4 1 to Evelyn Patricia Terry’s
repurposing of a “centerfold” nude to address alternatively the violation of
women’s bodies or (Black women’s) pleasure, to Mart í nez’s pink boys and Warhol’s
queer and working-class vulgarity, our authors problematize alternative—
subversive, humorous, deconstructive, emancipatory, and oppositional—erotic
Pop gazes.4 2 In her chapter, for example, Lowery Stokes Sims argues that the Black,
White, and multiracial beauties available to multiple masculine gazes in Robert
