KOLLEEN KU | DATE 12/7/2015

International Pop

"What do we talk about when we talk about Pop?" International Pop curators Darsie Alexander and Bartholomew Ryan ask in their Introduction to the Walker Art Center's groundbreaking survey, one of our top holiday gift books of the year. "A moment in the early to mid-1960s when young artists in many centers around the world—from Buenos Aires to Tokyo, New York to São Paulo—turned away from abstraction and preconceived notions of high art and engaged the kitsch, the low and the everyday. They were inspired by new advances in visual culture, an abundance of images transmitted via new print technologies, wider means of distribution, and the rise of television. Collectively and from different vantage points, attitudes, and identities, artists began to co-opt the objects and castaways of mass production, sampling celebrity culture, comic books, advertising and propaganda. They recycled, satirized, celebrated and reframed the world that was emerging around them, even as they merged into it." Ice Cream (1964) is by Belgian painter Evelyne Axell.