Visual Theories and Tools of Interpretation
This term describes using existing images or objects in new contexts, often challenging meaning or authority.
Appropriation
These collages, low-tech publications, were a favorite medium of underground activists, feminists, and countercultural artists.
Zines
This syndicated daily and Sunday American comic series, illustrated by Charles M. Schulz, debuted in 1950.
The Peanuts
This mass-produced visual style turned soup cans and celebrities into high art, famously embraced by Andy Warhol.
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.
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.
Iconography
This movement used visual arts and murals, including The Great Wall of Los Angeles, to reclaim historical narratives.
El Movimiento / the Chicano Movement
This children's book and character, illustrated by Dr. Suess, stood as an icon for the environmental movement of the early 1970s.
The Lorax
How old did the Photographer of the Year Competition turn in 1963?
21
This was the first war to be broadcast nightly on television.
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.
Index, Indexicality
This grassroots press outlet documented Native activism and served as a visual and political record of the American Indian Movement.
Akwesasne Notes?
This comic book character, first appearing in Tales of Suspense #39, represents Cold War anxieties about science, weapons, and masculinity.
Iron Man
This 1960s federal initiative commissioned artists to depict space exploration and communicate a sanitized, inspirational version of scientific progress.
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.
The Civil Rights Movement
This term describes the process of examining an image's formal elements, like color, composition, and medium.
Formal/Visual analysis
This 1960s-70s cultural movement in Hawai'i revived traditional music, language, and pride in 'Hawaiian' identity.
The Second Hawaiian Renaissance
This long-running public television show first aired in the late 1960s and changed children's educational programming utilizing puppets.
Sesame Street
These everyday consumer visuals--from magazine promotions to TV jingles--are studied as cultural texts that shape gender, class, and national identity.
Advertisments
This landmark event on April 22, 1970, was promoted with posters of crying cartoon animals and photos of polluted landscapes.
Earth Day
This scholar that we read in the middle of the semester argued that photography is not just a way of seeing but a form of power that shapes reality and memory.
Susan Sontag
This early LGBTQ+ rights movement of the 1950s and 60s focused on gaining acceptance through quiet activism, public education, and respectability politics.
The Homophile Movement
This iconic drawing toy, introduced in 1960 and named after a method of illustration, uses aluminum powder and a stylus to create erasable works of art.
Etch-A-Sketch
These colorful, swirling posters advertised concerts and gatherings, visually expressing the 1960s counterculture's fascination with altered states and anti-establishment ideals.
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.
The Human Be-In