Volando Bajo (Low Flying)

Artist: Pablo Ortiz Monasterio (Mexican, Born 1952)

Date: 1988

Classification: Photographs

Medium: Gelatin silver print

Dimensions: 16 × 20 inches (40.6 × 50.8 cm)

Collection of the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University

Gift of Sandra Berler, and David K. Berler, Class of 1955, MD 1958; 2000.043.002

Image Courtesy of the Johnson Museum

Description: Pablo Ortiz Monasterio is a highly influential and prolific Mexican photographer known for capturing unflinchingly honest images that depict the beauty, but also the ever-present risk of violence and intense hardship, that characterize life in contemporary Mexico. In his photo books, Ortiz Monasterio frequently chooses to juxtapose his imagery with poetic text written by a collaborator. This particular image was included in the dystopian-themed book “ La Ultima Cuidad” (“The Last City”) which featured the writing of Jose Emilio Pacheco.

Hawksbill Creek Swimming Hole, Luray Virginia

Artist: O. Winston Link (American, 1914-2001)

Date: 1956 (negative); 1998 (print)

Classifications: Photographs

Medium: Gelatin silver print

Dimensions:

Image: 19 3/8 × 15 1/2 in. (49.2 × 39.4 cm)

Sheet: 19 5/8 × 16 in. (49.8 × 40.6 cm)

Mat: 28 × 22 in. (71.1 × 55.9 cm)

Credit Line: Acquired through the generosity of Jennifer, Gale, and Ira Drukier

Collection of the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University

Acquired through the generosity of Jennifer, Gale, and Ira Drukier; 99.047.002

Image Courtesy of the Johnson Museum

Descriptions: O. Winston Link was an acclaimed American artist known for black and white photography, in particular his documentation of the decline of steam locomotives as they were being replaced by diesel-run trains and the meteoric rise in popularity of the automobile. Link’s habit of shooting photographs at night led him to innovate new methods and equipment for lighting these scenes. The layered composition seen in this photograph appears to explore both the possibility and complexity of transit during this time, featuring swimmers at the bottom, in the middle an empty roadway for automobiles, and at the top, a steam locomotive, seeming at once both noble, and yet somehow out of place.

Seven Passages to a Flight

Artist: Faith Ringgold, (American, Born 1934)

Date: 1998

Medium: Quilt, produced with accompanying artist's book From the deluxe edition of 10

Dimensions: 49 × 41 1/2 inches (124.5 × 105.4 cm)

Collection of the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University

Acquired through the Marcia Jacobson and Daniel R. Schwarz Johnson Museum

Purchase Fund, the Marguerite Gelfman, Class of 1987, Fund, and the Peter B. Ruppe

Memorial Fund; 2003.088.002 b

Image courtesy of the Johnson Museum

Description: Though highly acclaimed American artist Faith Ringgold has an extensive body of work in a variety of mediums, she is most well-known for her story quilts such as this one. The mixed-media story quilts are created through a combination of sewing and quilting techniques paired with painting and narrative text. It is through these pieces that Ringgold addresses the lives and stories of Black Americans as well as her own personal history. The highly personal Seven Passages to Flight pairs nine etching depicting scenes with autobiographical text descriptions that range from the quotidian to the fantastical.

Was Läuft Er? [How He Runs?]

Artist: Paul Klee (Swiss, 1879–1940)

Date: 1932

Medium: Etching

Dimensions:

Plate: 9 3/8 x 11 13/16" (23.8 x 30 cm);

Sheet: 11 11/16 x 15 1/16" (29.7 x 38.3 cm)

Collection of the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University

Acquired through the Membership Purchase Fund; 69.005

Image courtesy of the Johnson Museum

Description: Paul Klee was a Swiss-born German artist. His style was highly influenced by expressionism, cubism, and surrealism, reflecting his dry humor and sometimes childlike perspective, personal moods, beliefs, and musicality. In “Was Lauft Er?”, etching, on heavy wove paper, 1932, signed in pencil, Klee is bringing up a new suggestion for drawing the human body that doesn’t necessarily require a nude model which can be found hardly. Painters can easily illustrate their transition from self-imagination to a realistic view and vice versa to create consciousness in their artworks.

Chain Belt Movement: Machine Dance, Moscow Ballet School, from Photographs of U.S.S.R.

Artist: Margaret Bourke-White (American, 1904–1971)

Date: 1931-32 (negative); 1934 (print)

Medium: Photogravure

Dimensions:

Image: 13 × 9 1/8 in. (33 × 23.2 cm)

Sheet: 20 × 14 in. (50.8 × 35.6 cm)

Mat: 20 1/2 × 15 15/16 in. (52 × 40.5 cm)

Collection of the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University

Gift of Albert G. Preston, Jr., Class of 1935; 80.030.024

Image courtesy of the Johnson Museum

Description: Margaret Bourke-White was a prolific and traveled American photographer and photojournalist in the twentieth century, capturing industrial work, war, socialism, communism, civil injustice, and in many ways life, as she found it interesting or beautiful. After transferring universities many times, she completed a bachelor of arts at Cornell University in 1927 and is famous for taking images of rural Ithaca, New York, and living in Risley Hall. She was one of the first female war correspondents and was uniquely allowed access into the U.S.S.R. to document life under communism. This particular image features the Moscow Ballet School in the early thirties performing a choreography titled Chain Belt Movement: Machine Dance; the dancers grip the crux of the elbows of the dancer in front of them and move together like that of a chain belt on a machine or a bicycle. The effect is a dynamic visual linking, something Bourke-White was intensely fond of: machines and people in the same world.

Untitled, From the Silueta Series

Artist: Ana Mendieta (American, born Cuba, 1948–1985)

Date: 1980

Medium: Gelatin silver print

Collection of the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University

Acquired through the Class of 1970 Contemporary Art Fund; 2005.014

Image courtesy of the Johnson Museum

Description: A multidisciplinary artist, Ana Mendieta’s works circulates the spiritual connections between the body and nature via performance, sculpture, film, and drawing. Mendieta came to the United States as a Cuban exile in 1961, leaving many of her family members behind, creating a traumatic separation of culture that significantly impacted her artwork.

Her Silueta (Silhouette) series began in 1973 and employed a typology of abstracted feminine forms, through which she hoped to access an “omnipresent female force.”¹ Working in Iowa and Mexico, she carved and shaped her figure into the earth, with arms overhead to represent the merger of earth and sky; floating in the water to symbolize the minimal space between land and sea; or with arms raised and legs together to signify a wandering soul. These bodily traces were fashioned from various materials, including flowers, tree branches, moss, gunpowder, and fire, occasionally combined with animals’ hearts or handprints that she branded directly into the ground.