Collecting the New Irascibles: Art in the 1980s

Jeff Koons was born in York, Pennsylvania in 1955 and studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore before moving to New York to establish himself as an artist. Initially working at the membership desk of the Museum of Modern Art while developing his artistic practice, Koons took an unconventional path by becoming a Wall Street commodities broker, a position that paradoxically funded his early artistic experiments. This dual existence between the commercial world and the art world would become central to his artistic identity. Working across sculpture, photography, and mixed media, Koons emerged in the early 1980s as a pioneering figure in Neo-pop and Post-Pop movements, movements that directly engaged with consumer culture and the commercialization of art itself. His core themes revolve around the intersection of high art and popular culture, exploring how everyday objects and commercial systems structure contemporary life and desire. What distinguishes Koons's work is his radical approach to appropriation and his unapologetic embrace of consumer aesthetics at a moment when many artists rejected such subjects as frivolous. His early series The New, debuted at the New Museum in 1980, presented commercial vacuum cleaners and floor polishers displayed in illuminated plexiglass vitrines, transforming mass-produced cleaning equipment into monumental sculpture. This was followed by his Equilibrium series featuring basketballs suspended in tanks of distilled water, and later the provocative Made in Heaven series combining explicit photography with sculptural kitsch. Unlike some Pop artists who embedded subtle critique within their work, Koons insisted on sincere engagement with commercialism and glamour, rejecting irony entirely. His visual language employs the sleek, polished surfaces and pristine presentation of advertising and retail display, collapsing the boundaries between showroom and gallery, commodity and art object. For Philadelphia audiences experiencing Collecting the New Irascibles, Koons represents a pivotal moment when the art world fractured around questions of taste, authenticity, and value. His presence in this 1980s exhibition illuminates how artists of this generation used community and collective vision to challenge established hierarchies within the art establishment. Koons's work embodies the radical proposition that serious art could emerge from embracing rather than rejecting the commercial systems surrounding us, offering viewers a mirror to the material desires and visual saturations that defined the era and continue to shape contemporary culture today.

Jean-Michel Basquiat emerged from the vibrant underbelly of 1980s New York City, born in 1960 to a Haitian father and Puerto Rican mother in Brooklyn, where he honed his craft amid the city's economic strife and cultural ferment. Rising from street graffiti as part of the SAMO© duo to a studio practice in downtown Manhattan, Basquiat worked across painting, drawing, sculpture, and even photography, channeling a raw neo-expressionist style that fused modernist vigor with vernacular grit. His canvases teemed with jagged figures, scrawled text, and cryptic symbols—dollar signs, crowns, skulls—probing core themes of Black identity, racism, colonialism, police brutality, consumerism, and the heroism of overlooked Black figures in art, music, jazz, and sports. What set Basquiat apart was his urgent, layered visual language, blending punk graffiti's defiance with influences from jazz poetry, African art, and Renaissance masters, all filtered through New York's tense zeitgeist of racial discord, AIDS, and gentrification. Works like Defacement (The Death of Michael Stewart) seared the pain of police violence into public memory, while anguished heads in oil stick evoked self-portraiture amid rapid output—over 200 pieces in 1982 alone, including collaborations with Andy Warhol. His meteoric ascent, from the 1980 Times Square Show to solo debuts at Annina Nosei Gallery and Documenta 7, captured the era's raw energy, mocking tokenism with phrases like "Famous Negro Athlete" even as fame isolated him. In "Collecting the New Irascibles: Art in the 1980s" at Arthur Ross Gallery, Philly audiences will encounter Basquiat's electric contributions as a cornerstone of communal creativity, his multimedia works pulsing with the decade's defiant spirit. Here, amid peers who forged bonds against adversity, visitors experience not just his explosive mark-making but the profound support networks that amplified marginalized voices, inviting reflection on how Basquiat's urgent icons of struggle and triumph resonate in today's fractured world.

Sherrie Levine, born in 1947 in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, emerged as a pivotal figure in the appropriation art movement during the 1980s, working primarily out of New York City after relocating there in 1975. Educated at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she earned her MFA in 1973, Levine initially explored painting, printmaking, and collage before embracing photography, sculpture, and drawing as her core mediums. Her style, deeply rooted in postmodern conceptualism, revolves around rephotographing, recasting, and repurposing canonical artworks—often by male predecessors—challenging notions of originality, authorship, and authenticity. Central themes in her practice include the circulation of images in mass culture, feminist critiques of art-world patriarchy, and the fluidity of meaning when icons are decontextualized and reborn. What distinguishes Levine's work is its provocative visual language of exact replication laced with subtle transformation, drawing from influences like Walker Evans, Edward Weston, and modernist painters such as Monet and Duchamp. Her seminal 1981 series After Walker Evans, exhibited at Metro Pictures Gallery, rephotographed Evans's Depression-era images of sharecropper families from exhibition catalogs, presenting them unadorned as her own—a scandalous act that sparked debates on copyright and originality, yet cemented her alongside Pictures Generation peers like Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger. In sculptures like La Fortune (After Man Ray) and stripe paintings from the mid-1980s, she shifts mediums to alter perception, infusing feminist undertones by "re-feminizing" male-dominated histories and exposing the mechanics of representation in a media-saturated era. In "Collecting the New Irascibles: Art in the 1980s" at the Arthur Ross Gallery, Philadelphia audiences will encounter Levine's contributions as a testament to the era's communal spirit, where artists supported one another in subverting tradition amid New York's vibrant scene. Her 1980s works—spanning photography's stark reappropriations, geometric paintings, and sculptural echoes—highlight the decade's innovative push against modernism, inviting viewers to grapple with how borrowed forms foster new dialogues on identity and community. This showcase positions Levine as a quiet revolutionary, her pieces resonating with Philly's art ecosystem by underscoring the collaborative ethos that propelled the appropriationists forward.