Art may be seen as a commodity or as something that simply lives on walls, but art majors at Murray State, want to use art to create social commentary.
Shinyong Kim is a senior studio art major that uses art to express her Asian background and social issues the community faces today. One of those issues being COVID-19.
“Since COVID-19 has increased hatred towards the Asian community, I wanted to make works that commented on the general public's apathy on this issue and how it affects my family's lives and mine,” Kim said.
Kim sees art as a tool that not only can create something beautiful but something that can serve an educational purpose and spread awareness.
“Using art as a platform to talk about social problems could help people get a deeper understanding of the reality of the world,” Kim said. “A lot of Asian American problems can be easily hidden, which can negatively impact the Asian community for generations.”
Similarly to Kim, Freshman studio art major Wesley Hammer uses art as a tool of self expression in relation to social commentary.
“Even with the art I've created for classes, I always want things to have a deeper meaning to have an underlying message about social issues,” Hammer said. “Because no matter what you create, someone will always find a way to relate to it, it's just how people consume art.”
Hammer finds art as something that is wide and expansive, that can create multiple messages, he uses art to discuss queerness and issues related to the LGBT community.
Hammer said social matters can be communicated in a broad amount of ways that are not just limited to words.
“There isn't much in art that I think you can't do, if someone wants to use art to make societal statements, they should be allowed to,” Hammer said. “Using words isn't the only way to communicate how one feels about society. All art is up to interpretation, and in my interpretation, everything is art.”
Murray State Art history professors and treasurer of the Gender Equity Caucus, Antje Gamble finds art as a useful medium for making comments on reality.
“Art is deeply connected to larger social movements, either intentionally engaged with by the artist or not,” Gamble said. “I see artists as humans who are influenced by their environments, physical, social and political.”
Gamble said no art is created in a vacuum, meaning no art is created without an influence or an idea from the real world. Gamble cites French sociologist and philosopher Pierre Bordieu as someone who explores art as social commentary and the way all art is an idea based in reality.
In his novel, “The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature,” Bordieu addresses the link between culture and society and its impact on the creation of art.
“I think all art is engaging with society in implicit and explicit ways,” Gamble said. “It is the work of critics, curators, art historians and other scholars, like my awesome students, to make the connections between what is happening in the artwork and how it connects to trends in the artist's contemporary context.”
