Events
Browse

Artist Talk with Alumnus Sonny Assu | Audain Art Museum

This event is in the past
Sonny Assu Breakfast Series X 895
Sonny Assu
Breakfast Series

Sonny will speak about his work featured in the current POP! exhibition, as well as his recently released retrospective publication.

When

Add to Calendar: iCal Google

Audain Art Museum

In celebration of the closing weekend of POP!, the Audain Art Museum hosts an artist talk by alumnus Sonny Assu who will speak to his work currently on display in Canada Goes POP!, housed within the permanent collection. Sonny will also speak about his newly released retrospective publication, Sonny Assu: A Selective History. A Q+A and book signing will follow.

Sonny Assu (Liǥwildaʼx̱w of the Kwakwaka’wakw Nations) was raised in North Delta, BC, over 250 km away from his ancestral home on Vancouver Island. Having been raised as your everyday average suburbanite, it wasn't until he was eight years old that he discovered his Liǥwildax̱w/Kwakwaka’wakw heritage. Later in life, this discovery would be the conceptual focal point that helped launch his unique art practice. Assu's artistic practice is diverse: spanning painting, sculpture, photography, digital art and printmaking. Sonny negotiates Western and Kwakwaka’wakw principles of art making as a means of exploring his family history and the experiences of being an Indigenous person in the colonial state of Canada. Having cut his teeth in Vancouver's art scene, Assu packed up and moved to Montreal to be with the love of his life. Five years later, along with his wife and beautiful daughter, Sonny moved back to BC, eventually settling back "home" in unceded Liǥwildaʼx̱w territory (Campbell River, BC.).

POP!

June 30 – September 17, 2018

Organized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Audain Art Museum

Pop art is bold and brash. The subjects are familiar, the forms flat. The lines are crisp and the images clear. But in spite of its apparent simplicity, pop art transforms images lifted directly from advertising, news reports, and highway signs into sly commentaries on consumerism, our fascination with glamour, and the superficiality of contemporary American mass culture. Pop art emerged in stark contrast to the emotional intensity of abstract expressionism, then the reigning movement in contemporary art. Pop art’s banal subject matter and commercial references startled viewers. Pizza? A comic book frame? A movie star? Pin-up girls? Art lovers had always assumed that high art and popular culture were oppositional concepts—until Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol and others of their generation challenged prevailing assumptions about what fine art should be. This exhibition features 37 works drawn from the Smithsonian American Art Museum collection.