Visual Theories and Tools of Interpretation
This term describes using existing images or objects in new contexts, often challenging meaning or authority.
What is appropriation?
These collages, low-tech publications, were a favorite medium of underground activists, feminists, and countercultural artists.
What are zines?
This doll, launched in 1959, reinforced gender norms in toy advertising.
What is Barbie?
This mass-produced visual style turned soup cans and celebrities into high art, famously embraced by Andy Warhol.
What is Pop Art?
This president inspired the nation to "choose to go to the moon," a speech that helped shape America's image as a futuristic world leader.
Who is John F. Kennedy?
This method identifies images, symbols, or figures to represent a subject, movement, or idea. OR the study of symbols, themes, and motifs in visual art.
What is iconography?
This movement used visual arts and murals, including The Great Wall of Los Angeles, to reclaim historical narratives.
What is El Movimiento / the Chicano Movement?
This long-running public television show first aired in the late 1960s and changed children's educational programming utilizing puppets.
What is Sesame Street?
How old did the Photographer of the Year Competition turn in 1963?
What is 20?
This was the first war to be broadcast nightly on television.
What is the Vietnam War.
A sign that has a direct, causal connection to its object. A quality of a photograph that refers to its direct, physical connection to what it depicts.
What is an index or indexicality?
This grassroots press outlet documented Native activism and served as a visual and political record of the American Indian Movement.
What is Akwesasne Notes?
This comic book character, first appearing in Tales of Suspense #39, represents Cold War anxieties about science, weapons, and masculinity.
Who is Iron Man?
This 1960s federal initiative commissioned artists to depict space exploration and communicate a sanitized, inspirational version of scientific progress.
What is the NASA Art Program?
This movement used powerful photographs--like children attacked by police dogs in Birmingham and peaceful protesters--to gain national support for racial justice.
What is the Civil Rights Movement?
This term describes the process of examining an image's formal elements like color, composition, and medium.
What is formal analysis?
This 1960s-70s cultural movement in Hawai'i revived traditional music, language, and pride in 'Hawaiian' identity.
What is the Second Hawaiian Renaissance
This children's book by Ezra Jack Keats was revolutionary for featuring a Black protagonist in a snowy landscape.
What is Snowy Day?
These everyday consumer visuals--from magazine promotions to TV jingles--are studied as cultural texts that shape gender, class, and national identity.
What are advertisments?
This landmark event on April 22, 1970, was promoted with posters of crying cartoon animals and photos of polluted landscapes.
What is Earth Day?
This scholar that we read early in the semester developed a method of studying objects by analyzing and describing their form, function, and cultural context--treating material things as texts that reveal societal values.
Who is Jules Prown?
This early LGBTQ+ rights movement of the 1950s and 60s focused on gaining acceptance through quiet activism, public education, and respectability politics.
What is the homophile movement?
These two handbooks, one for boys and one for girls, used illustrations and activities in the 1960s to promote very different ideals of citizenship, work, and gender roles.
What are the Boy Scout Handbook and the Junior Girl Scout Handbook?
These colorful, swirling posters advertised concerts and gatherings, visually expressing the 1960s counterculture's fascination with altered states and anti-establishment ideals.
What are psychedelic rock posters?
This 1967 San Francisco event, advertised with posters and filmed in psychedelic style, gathered thousands in protest and celebration of counterculture ideals.
What is the Human Be-In?