The Art Culture of the 1990s

The art culture of the 1990s exposed a new generation of different and unique styles. Great women masters of art emerged during the 1990s and other artists developed a new technique to the classic art. Claes Oldenburg began to direct art away from the accepted traditions of painting and sculpture. One of the great women who was an influential activist for women's rights is Judy Chicago. Unexpected new sounds in music also emerged in the 1990s and gradually continued to develop new rhythm. Throughout the decade of the 1990s different images in art and music, exposed the society to a new generation of art culture.

Claes Oldenburg was one of America's leading sculptors. He was born on January 18, 1929, in Stockholm, Sweden. He moved to America in 1936 with his family and first settled in New York. He then moved to Chicago and because he couldn't speak English, it isolated him from his new environment. This lead him to spending hours drawing and making collages that he kept in notebooks. Throughout his life, he constantly recorded his observations, ideas, and emotions that eventually lead to the basis for his sculptures and public projects. Oldenburg studied at Yale University and finished at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1954. During his time of studies, he was exploring what his heart truly desires because he was not yet convinced that art was his niche. He tried many things such as becoming a cub reporter for the Chicago City News Bureau. Although this job made him depressed and restless, he left the job with an advantage. The job gave him the experience of city street life that would become the raw material and inspiration for his art. Oldenburg tried a variety of jobs until 1952 but eventually he decided to become an artist. In 1952 he opened his own studio but by 1956 he moved back to New York where he met many great artists. The New York streets gave him inspirations and he constantly made notes and sketches of the scenes he saw there. Oldenburg was particularly impressed by the ideas of the artist Allan Kaprow. Oldenburg was drawn to his ideas because Kaprow's art came from his own experience of the city and the everyday theater of street life. He created two exhibits and he made figures and objects drawn from his notebooks and used everyday materials such as cardboard, paper, string, etc. The exhibit was important because it included the first of the artist's large soft sculptures, such as Floor-Burger, Giant Ice-Cream Cone. In 1965, Oldenburg began creating a series of public monuments in drawings, collages, and architectural models. Claes Oldenburg's trade mark was taking the ordinary and making it extraordinary.

Judy Chicago is a feminist artist and was one of the greatest promoters of the hierarchies movement in the United States during the 1970s. She was born on July 20, 1939 in Chicago as Judy Cohen. She moved to Los Angeles in 1957 to attend UCLA Art School. She received her MA at UCLA in painting and sculptor. In 1969, she establised the first program of women's art and teaches at the University of California in Fresno. She was first married to Lloyd Hamrol and is now married to Donald Woodman. During 1970, she changed her last name to Chicago because she believed in the Black Panther movement whose members believed that their given names only re-enforced their "slave" identities. In 1971, she establised a feminist art program directed by herself and Miriam Schapiro. During this time, she was also teaching at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. By 1973, she cofounded the Feminist Studio Workshop and Woman's Building in Los Angeles. Chicago has an individual exhibit at the Jack Glenn Gallery, JPL Fine Arts, Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, the Parco Gallery, the Fine Arts Gallery in Irvine, California, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Montreal, CA Galleries, and last but not least at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Germany. Judy Chicago created multidisciplinary artworks, experimenting with different means of expression and different supports and materials. In her art, the media is often employed to compose daring, crude, and scathing images. She employed techniques that had traditionally been reserved for comic books or photography, creating works combining sequences of movement and painted photomontages. Some of her famous works are Rainbow Man, Driving the world to Destruction, The Dinner Party, The Coronation, Red Flat, The Banality of Evil/Struthof, and Treblinka/Genocide. In the artwork of the Banality of Evil/Struthof she used the technique of combining photography and paint to create an innovative aesthetic. Chicago represents a frequent event in the life of many women and also focused on social criticism; she often implied messages towards the society. Judy Chicago has received many honorary doctorates such as an honorary doctorate of art from Smith College and in humanities from Lehigh University. In 1993 she exhibited the Holocaust Project at the Spertus Museum in Chicago. Judy Chicago has accomplished many tasks in her life and has a huge impact on many womens' life especially women artists. Chicago has made a difference and history in the art culture.

The 1990s was also a decade full of emerging new musicians with different styles/rhythm. Music types such as Hip Hop and Pop became the new trend. During this period Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera were very successful musicians but pop groups such as Spice Girls and boy bands such as Nsync, The Backstreet Boys, and Boys II Men, had a greater impact on the society. Although they had fans world-wide, the majority of their audience were teenage girls. The Backstreet Boys recorded 6 albums and sold over 100 million cds making them the top ranking boy band. Boys II Men recorded 4 albums and sold over 70 million making them 3rd place in the boy band history; New Kids on the Block came in before them. Last but not least Nsync recorded 5 albums and sold over 56 million making them 4th place in the boy band history of 1990s. During this era, the 1990s was big on pop music and it was what kids all over the country were listening to at home and in their cars. The pop singers had a huge impact on kids all over the country and the kids greatly admired them and then became their role models.

The art culture during the 1990s was a decade full of new and different techniques that made an impact on the United States. The artists such as painters and sculptors marked a new generation of unique styles of orginality. Judy Chicago and Claes Oldenburg were both great artists that extended beyond the measurement of ordinary art. Their creativity greatly inspired the artists of the 2000 millennium to go beyond the ordinary art work. Pop music was so popular during the 1900s but it did not last to the new millennium. Hip Hop emerged and pop music was no longer the trend. With the 1990s history of art in paint, sculptor, and music, led the next generation with ideas of new creations in styles and continues to turn ordinary to extrodinary.