Keith Haring

• Haring’s simple imagery and text provided cultural commentary on issues including AIDS, drug addiction, illicit love, and apartheid. As both an artist and an activist he established that depicting serious issues could be fun or at least lively when communicated through highly cartoony images and fresh and vivid choices of colors.
• Haring was able to connect to these ideas such continuity due to the fact that he faced these issues himself as he developed his style.

   

Felix Gonzalez-Torres

• Gonzalez-Torres’s extraordinary contribution to contemporary art was to bring personal history and politics to the familiar forms of Minimalism and Conceptualism. Cube-like stacks of paper, strings of light, textual fragments, and the simple shapes of clocks, cellophane candies, and clouds were imbued with references to current events, including gay rights, gun violence, and the AIDS crisis.
• He explored this through personal experiences coming from a foreign and facing new ideals.

Andres Serrano

• Serrano challenges the powers of religion by discrediting the faces of both Christianity and Catholicism with human waste.
• The artist studied both forms of religion to correctly know to how manipulate the beliefs that figure upholds.

Guerrillla Girls

• Began a poster campaign to raise awareness of the lack of women artists represented in major contemporary art establishments.
• They based these observations by closing recording the amount of nude female figures in the Metropolitan Museum rather than actual female artists.

Banksy

• Banksy’s works of political and social commentary have been featured on streets, walls, and bridges of cities throughout the world. Their art questions the society in which we all live in and whether we realize the corrupt values it possesses.
• Banksy is able to base their art on these morals through simple observations over timer along with social media and media broadcast in general.