Identify two pieces of art from this course that had the biggest impact on you.

LENGTH: In this section of the exam, your responses should be between 100-200 words.

CHOICE: All questions have some kind of built-in choice. Questions 2 & 4 have A/B options. Pick only one of these. Questions 1 & 3 are worded so that everyone is answering the same question, but you are free to choose your own examples.

Question 1:

Identify two pieces of art from this course that had the biggest impact on you. (Perhaps you were still thinking about it a week or two later? Perhaps it caused you to reevaluate your thinking about some issue? Perhaps it had outstanding aesthetic qualities?) Describe each piece by name and artist, describe its appearance, assess the values you believe it conveys, and explain its impact on you. [This question has no A/B format because you are selecting your own art to discuss.]

Question 2:
Pick ONE of these prompts about divided culture and respond to it in 100-200 words.

A. The cultural critic Nato Thompson asserted, “The culture war wasn’t a war on culture. …[Rather,] it was also a war that used ” (Culture as a Weapon, 5) Discuss one or two examples from an assigned text or assigned art that illustrates the concept of one side or the other using culture to make its points.

B. You are the Curator: You are a Curator at a local, southern California museum includes a mural that depicts Spanish colonizers interacting with local native Americans in the 16th The 19th century painting is by a famous artist and is among the best-known pieces owned by your museum. It is one of the reasons tourists visit the museum, where it has a hung for a century. The local town has sometimes used it in their promotional materials. Recently, descendants of the Native American group have requested the museum remove the painting, which they feel glamorizes the Spanish and glosses over the violent methods used to convert Native Americans to Christianity. The Museum Director (your boss!) has asked you to write a 100-200 word memo outlining the issues at stake and your opinion about whether to remove the piece.

Question3
Identify two attributes of performance art that you believe make it appealing to artists who seek to make a statement or use art to further some political agenda. Provide at least one example of a performance art piece (by referencing artist, title of piece and a bit of context/descriiption) for each of the two attributes you identify. [This question has no A/B format because there are more than two attributes to choose from, and you may combine any two in this answer.]

Question 4

Question 4 asks about the two images below. You have not previously seen the two images in any previous assignment. The bullet points (and footnotes) below supply additional information about the images. Read through the new information, then select either a) or b) at the end to answer the prompt.

Image One (left): This is a photograph of the signage outside a gay bar in the Castro District of San Francisco that was popular during the 1970s and 1980s. The Castro (or “gayborhood”) was the rare urban enclave where gays could feel like they were in the majority. Numerous restaurants, bars, and businesses catered to this community, and many gay men and lesbians chose the neighborhood to live in. Therefore, the Stud’s sign would have been a familiar sight to any person who frequently passed through the Castro, whether they patronized this specific bar or not. Due to its prominent location, one might say the sign itself became an important symbol of local gay culture during that time frame. For a culture whose politics is related to sexuality, you may wish to ponder the significance of the word “stud” in conveying a sexual message.
Image Two (right), “Dust” by Nayland Blake, 1987. Nayland Blake is a queer artist living in San Francisco who created the image on the right in 1987, well before any effective AIDS medications had been developed. A critic has described Blake’s work as “cerebral, playful, and at times arcane, but notably attuned to the metaphorical effects of HIV/AIDS on the city’s psyche….”[1]

A. Analyze Blake’s work in light of the three themes we discussed for analyzing AIDS-related images—activism, chronology, legacy. Which theme best corresponds to Blake’s work? What statement does this simple graphic make about the impact of the HIV-epidemic on the gay community, particularly when it was created in 1987?

B. Create a thematic connection between any one piece of artwork in this course to the work “Dust” by Nayland Blake. While another piece related to the AIDS epidemic makes an obvious selection, you are free to select any work at all, as long as you can establish a thematic connection. What that theme is is also up to you.

Glen Helfland, “Art, AIDS, SF: Tales of the City,” in Jonathan D. Katz, editor, Art AIDS America (Tacoma Arts Museum, 2015), 92. “Tales of the City” was the name of a popular newspaper column of fiction writing by Armistead Maupin that ran from the late 1970s through the mid-1980s. Appearing in the San Francisco Examiner newspaper, the column chronicled life in the city from the perspective of several characters, many of them queer. When the AIDS epidemic struck, Maupin worked it into his storylines. Enormously popular, the columns were eventually published as a series of books, beginning with Tales of the City. Maupin’s best-sellers have also been twice adapted for television. Today Maupin’s books are regarded as landmarks in gay male literature, but also as first-hand historical chronicles of gay culture in the city just before the AIDS epidemic and its early stages. Helfland’s essay title is thus an homage both to Maupin’s work as a record of gay life and culture and to the interconnection of San Francisco’s history with the plague.

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