Funk You Too!

Description

The first book to connect the historic Funk Art movement to contemporary ceramic practice.  
The founding generation of Funk artists used irony and satire to deflate the aesthetic hierarchy that dismissed ceramics as hobby art. Funk You Too! explores the movement’s influence on contemporary artists, spotlighting the enduring roles of satire, absurdity, and irreverence on image-making with clay. Today, in the hands of a younger, more diverse cohort, a similarly cheeky approach is used to address social injustice, and slapstick or gallows humor is a vehicle for confronting thorny subject matter like race, gender, and sexuality.
Showcasing works from a 2023 exhibit at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City, this catalog addresses the historical context for the emergence of ceramic sculpture in the Funk Art movement and applies a critical lens to work by its contemporary successors. The exhibition’s curator, Angelik Vizcarrondo-Laboy, conceptually frames the exhibition’s emphasis on humor as a tool for tackling personal and political themes. Garth Johnson contributes an essay on the Funk Art movement, its development over the years, and the important but often overlooked place of ceramic sculpture within it. Andres Payan Estrada examines ceramic trends in the contemporary art world, paying particular attention to the new generation of artists included in the exhibition; for many of the younger artists featured in the exhibition, this is the first scholarly examination of their work. Features biographies of the artists, color images, and a bibliography. Angelik Vizcarrondo-Laboy is an independent art curator and writer based in Los Angeles. She is the founder and cohost of the podcast Clay in Color and a former assistant curator at the Museum of Arts and Design. 

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