Vik Muniz

Early life

Vik Muniz received a scholarship to art school because of his drawings. At the age of 18, Muniz worked in advertising in Brazil, redesigning billboards for higher readability. While on the way to his first black-tie gala, Muniz witnessed and attempted to break up a street fight, where he was accidentally shot in the leg by one of the brawlers. He was paid by the shooter to not press charges, and used the money to travel to New York. After his arrival in New York in 1983, Muniz's friend lent him a studio, and he started his career as a sculptor, which resulted in his first solo exhibit in 1988.

Works and philosophy

Muniz is best known for recreating famous imagery from art history and pop culture with unexpected, everyday objects, and photographing them. For example, Muniz's Action Photo, After Hans Namuth (From Pictures of Chocolate), a Cibachrome print, is a Bosco Chocolate Syrup recreation of one of Hans Namuth's photographs of Jackson Pollock in his studio. The monumental series Pictures of Cars (after Ruscha) is his social commentary of the car culture of Los Angeles utilizing Ed Ruscha's 60's Pop masterpieces rendered from car ephemera. Muniz often works on a large scale and then he destroys the originals of his work and only the photo of his work remains.

Muniz has spoken of wanting to make "color pictures that talked about color and also talked about the practical simplification of such impossible concepts". He has spoken of an interest in making pictures that "reveal their process and material structure", and describes himself as having been "a willing bystander in the middle of the shootout between structuralist and post-structuralist critique". He cites the mosaics in a church in Ravenna as one of his influences.

Muniz says that when he takes photographs, he intuitively searches for "a vantage point that would make the picture identical to the ones in my head before I’d made the works", so that his photographs match those mental images. He sees photography as having "freed painting from its responsibility to depict the world as fact".

Appropriation Art

Vik Muniz cites many people as his inspirations. He is a self-proclaimed student of Buster Keaton. He decided to become an artist after seeing the works of the Postmodernist artists, Cindy Serman and Jeff Koons. Muniz, like both of these artists, also reworks popular imagery in his work. Muniz says that he does not believe in originals. Rather, he states that he believes in individuality. Muniz works to repurpose themes and showcase these old themes in a different light for the viewer.

In Muniz's earthworks series, Pictures of Earthworks, show a strong resemblance to the 1970s Earthworks movement. However unlike the Earthworks movement, that were influenced by ancient cultures, Muniz's series shows distinct human impact on nature.

Critiques and social practices

In addition to sculpting, Muniz began experimenting with drawing and photography, ultimately combining these mediums in the series Sugar Children, which was featured in the Museum of Modern Art's New Photography 13 show, alongside Rineke Dijikstra, An-My Le, and Kunié Sugiura, in 1997. In Sugar Children, Muniz photographed the families that worked on sugar plantations on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts. Beginning with Polaroids of several of the children of plantation workers, Muniz "drew" their images by sprinkling sugar on black paper and rephotographed these compositions. Muniz has faced criticism for profiting off his portrait subjects who are living in poverty. This criticism is mainly directed towards his Sugar Children series, where scholars have pointed out that he photographs of subjects continuing to live in poverty and yet can make upwards of 5 figures on these works at auction. After his Pictures in Garbage series, Muniz donated the profits, close to $50,000, from the Marat (Sebastiao) to the workers collective after its auctioned in the UK. He takes high resolution photographs of his works that are made of non-traditional materials. He tries to make art more accessible through the use of common materials, because of his belief that the art world should not be just for the elite. Muniz stated in the documentary Waste Land "I'm at this point in my career where I'm trying to step away from the realm of fine arts because I think it's a very exclusive, very restrictive place to be. What I want to be able to do is to change the lives of people with the same materials they deal with every day."

Publications

Curatorial projects

1998 – Best Photography Exhibition, Second Place: Vik Muniz: Seeing is Believing. Awarded by The International Center of Photography and curated by Charles Stainback.[citation needed] 1999 – Líderes Latinoamericanos para el Nuevo Milenio. CNN Time. NY, USA.[citation needed] 2005 – National Artist Award granted by the Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Aspen, Colorado.[10] 2005 – Premio Villa de Madrid de Fotografía “Kaulak" 2005, awarded by the Ayuntamiento de Madrid, Madrid, Spain.[citation needed] 2007 – Society for News Design Annual Creative Competition Award of Excellence in the category of Magazine Cover Design for the cover of The New York Times Magazine.[11] 2008 – Honored at CITYarts’ 40th Anniversary sponsored by Dr. Miriam & Sheldon G. Adelson, Candia Fisher, Winston Fisher, and chaired by Jane Holzer. New York, NY.[citation needed] 2009 – Honored with the Prêmio Cidadão Carioca 2009 by the State of Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Honored with the Medalha da Inconfidência[12] by the governor of Minas Gerais, Mr. Aécio Neves. Minas Gerais, Brazil, April 21. 2010 – Honored with the pt:Ordem do Ipiranga by the governor José Serra. São Paulo, Brazil, March 17.[citation needed] 2013 – Crystal Award by the World Economic Forum. Davos-Klosters, Switzerland.

Solo exhibitions (selected)

Collections