More Contemporary Artists Who Influence My Culture

Barry McGee

Barry McGee is a San Francisco graffiti artist who is also a political activist. He likes to draw attention to the social problem of homelessness. He collects liquor bottles he finds on the streets, cleans them up, and paints faces on them and puts them on exhibit in galleries and art shows. On the streets his tag name is "TWIST". In the installation "One More Thing" McGee found abandoned overturned vehicles in New York and brought them to a gallery in New York. There are images of male faces in the graffiti, an image of the male figure, in all different colors. It is a statement of homelessness and how it is a huge problem and how everyone wants to get rid of it and society pretends it is not there. 

This relates to my culture in that he is bringing awareness to a social problem, as I am bringing awareness to Plastic Pollution. The discarded liquor bottles in his art resemble the discarded water bottles and other trash that our society produces. I made my monster sculpture out of plastic trash as he did his liquor bottle portraits. His vehicle installation is also made of discarded trash, which is abandoned vehicles. The bright colors in his portraits of male faces resembles the uniqueness of each brightly colored GoGo in my culture.

Cao Fei

Cao Fei is an artist in Beijing, China. She creates virtual art that is like a game. She speaks out about the repercussions of China trying to become the world's super power. In the first image below I was drawn to it because it has two figures in a gaming environment that look like they are in a bit of a Utopia next to the smog filled city in the background. My culture lives on a planet that is a Utopia outside of Earth. My culture does not want to be like Earth. They want to live more primitively in a society with no pollution and no plastic trash. They are trying to help Earth. The next three images are from Fei's game and they look like islands to me. Earth is an island and my GoGo Planet is an island. In this pandemic with everyone staying home, city smog is lifting, car emissions are low, and people are not producing as much trash in public. Is this where we want our island Earth to be?