objects, wax, and plastics—and diverse themes
were explored.
The grand dame of sculpture in the 1990’s was
Louise Bourgeois. On September 29, 1997, Bour-
geois received the National Medal of the Arts and
was selected to represent the United States at the
Venice Biennale in 1993. She also had a number of
solo exhibitions during the 1990’s in Brooklyn, Mi-
lan, and Paris. Bourgeois drew on memories of her
mother and childhood in some of her sculptures.
Her gigantic steel spiders that filled entire rooms
were in homage to her mother, a weaver whom she
viewed as a positive and nurturing force in her life.
Another influence in Bourgeois’s art was the pain of
her father’s infidelities. This in turn led to the artist’s
interest in psychoanalysis and her exploration of the
themes of sexuality in her sculptures.
While artist Richard Serra had been working as a
sculptor since the 1960’s, his art came to fruition in
the 1990’s in his use of thick plates of rolled steel that
formed pathways or spaces that the viewer must navi-
gate around. Artist Judy Pfaff also confronted the is-
sues of architectural space, except instead of orga-
nizing and ordering the space as did Serra, Pfaff
explored its disorganization. Materials such as steel
tubes, wires, glass, and plastic were suspended in
space, hanging from the ceiling and off walls. Jessica
Stockholder dealt with found objects that juxta-
posed color, form, and texture. Using materials such
as milk crates, carpeting, household lamps, and
other everyday items, she created whimsical and sur-
realist compositions.
Other installation artists working in the 1990’s re-
turned to the conceptualism that was prominent in
the art of the 1970’s. Félix González-Torres explored
issues such as gay identity and AIDS through his
work. By using piles of brightly colored, discarded
candy wrappers from candy that viewers could take
and eat, he explored issues of the transience of
things. On photographed billboards around New
York City, he created a memorial to his companion
who had died of AIDS. Roni Horn scattered alumi-
num blocks of letters on the floor, which although
impossible to read, spelled out the word “ephem-
eral” twenty-four times in a play with semantics.
Heim Steinbach also played with the idea of the con-
structed nature of language. He questioned the so-
cial and psychological meaning of found objects
through their juxtaposition. Fred Wilson ques-
tioned how museums interpret historical truth and
artistic value as well as the biases these cultural insti-
tutions express. For example, Wilson rearranged
and recontextualized the Baltimore Historical S-
ociety’s collection in order to shed light on the his-
tory of slavery in America. Combining materials
such as wax, embroidery, bronze, and paper, Kiki
Smith evoked themes such as birth and death, cruci-
fixion, and resurrection through fragile bodies
hanging from walls and lying on the floor. For her,
the body is the focus of mythologizing and storytell-
ing. Ann Hamilton also used diverse materials in her
installations. In “Tropos,” her 1993 installation at
the Dia Center for the Arts in New York, a stitched
carpet of horsehair covered the floor while at the
end of the room a person sat at a table burning away
the lines of a book, with coils of smoke lingering in
the air. This experience brings the viewer into con-
tact with natural processes and organic matter that
is often lost in day-to-day living in contemporary so-
ciety.
Puerto Rican-born installation artist Pepón Osorio
examined the theme of the self. His media installa-
tions dealt with cultural identity and politics of Latin
cultures living in urban America. His mixed-media
installations included film and video. David Ham-
mons’s sculptures presented symbolism of racism
and black pride in ironic sculptures that combined
found objects from the streets of the Harlem com-
munity where he lived and worked. Kara Walker also
explored issues in African American identity through
her reuse of racial stereotypes in her black silhouette
wall installations that in turn requestioned these ste-
reotypes. Adrian Piper delved into the racial issues
of having a black father and a white mother by using
video installations that questioned the illogical na-
ture of stereotypes. Mike Kelley incorporated ideas
about commercialism and the abject into his sculp-
tures of discarded stuffed animals and other objects.
In his video installations and sculptures, Matthew
Barney created surrealist fictions exploring ideas
about beauty, gender, mythic narrative, and the po-
tential for bodily transformation.Video Art and Photography Bill Viola relied on
scale and slow motion in his video installations to
create a physical and emphatic relationship between
the viewer and his work. Gary Hill also invoked in-
tense physical experiences through his videos
through the utilization of imagery and language.
Both Viola and Hill utilized large screens and multi-56 Art movements The Nineties in America