25 August - 28 April 2013
Mint Museum Uptown
The tenth iteration of the Mint's VantagePoint series focuses primarily on Vik Muniz's longstanding obsession with reconstructing famous paintings or images found in newspapers or magazines. His photographs fuse two important strands of postmodern photography - staging and appropriation. The resulting images are both fascinating and disarming, and probe the function and traditions of visual representation. For the series Pictures of Junk, Muniz used scraps of garbage to re-create history paintings by well-known artists. Born in São Paolo, Brazil in 1961, Muniz began his career after relocating to New York and establishing his studio in 1986. Over the last two decades, Muniz has systematically investigated the variety of ways in which photography mediates our engagement with objects and works of art. Often working in a series, Muniz creates the subjects of his photographs from a multiplicity of unlikely materials: dirt, diamonds, sugar, string, chocolate syrup, detritus, and garbage.
Online Resources
An Interview with Vik Muniz
Vik Muniz discusses the thinking behind his art, at the TED Conference, Feburary 2003.
Selected Print Resources from the Mint Museum Library
Vik Muniz: Garbage Matters exhibition and publication are generously sponsored by the Goodrich Foundation.
Created by Megan Westmoreland, Library Intern.