Art F200X blog Sawyer Christiansen

  This blog will be slightly different from my past blogs. In the past I have covered specific styles of art, and artwork in a certain place and time. In this blog I will instead be covering the artworks of a single artist, known only as “Banksy”. Banksy is an anonymous England-based graffiti artist who uses his art as a form of political activism. His art is always politically involved in some form or another, usually acting as not-so-subtle commentary on political and social issues. As a graffiti artist, what he’s doing is technically a crime, which he states as one of the reasons he prefers to remain anonymous. In the early stages of his career(1990-2000), he was often chased by police before he was able to finish the artworks, so he switched to stenciling because it is a much faster method of graffitiing. In the present day, his artwork can be found all over the world, not just in the United Kingdom. He has visited political hotspots such as Ukraine following the Russian invasi...

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, more commonly known as the USSR or the Soviet Union, was the successor of the Russian Empire, and the precursor to the Russian Federation. The Soviet Union was officially founded in 1922, after a 5 year civil war (the Bolshevik revolution) against the Russian empire. This blog will be focused on artwork created during the Soviet era, including art created during or just before the civil war, and until the union's eventual collapse in 1991. Revolutions often come with a drastic shift in culture, which also brings with it an equal shift in the production, purpose, and place of art within society. Revolutions are a great opportunity for previously unpopular artforms to rise in popularity, and for the artform that was popular pre-revolution to fall out of style. The dominating style prior to the Bolshevik Revolution was Russian avant-garde, which is an umbrella term that covers several styles, including one I have covered in a previous blog (Sup...