Untitled (TIME)

© Martin Wong Foundation and P.P.O.W. Image courtesy of the Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art…

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Artist/Maker Martin Wong (American, 1946 - 1999)

Date1983

MediumAcrylic on canvas

DimensionsFrame: 25 1/4 × 19 1/2 × 1 3/4 in. (64.1 × 49.5 × 4.4 cm) Canvas: 24 × 18 in. (61 × 45.7 cm)

Credit LineGift of Peter B. Fischer, Class of 1963

Object number2023.1

On view

DescriptionRaised in San Francisco, Martin Wong was a self-taught painter. He moved to New York in 1978 and, three years later, to the Lower East Side, where he lived and worked throughout the tumultuous decade of the 1980s and until the end of the 1990s. At the beginning, the neighborhood—which the locals called “Loisaida”—was predominantly Black and Latino; Wong, as a gay man and a Chinese American, was a member of at least two minority groups and found deep resonance in his surroundings. Wong’s works tend to display the gritty realities of urban life. He often reproduced large swaths of the city’s then-ubiquitous grungy brick walls, sometimes covered in graffiti but more often as neat arrays of dark red rectangles, frequently accompanied by chain-link or barbed-wire fencing. The present work depicts a Latino family beside a Christmas tree under a starry sky. In 1980, Wong also began incorporating the titles of his paintings—spelled out in American Sign Language—into his images, as seen here. The artist once admitted a “profound love of arcana, secret languages, and private codes” and likely understood both the barriers and the bridges brought about by language. Wong created this painting to be reproduced on the cover of Time magazine as part of a series of his works that accompanied a story about the working-class neighborhood of Sunset Park, Brooklyn, published in the December 30, 1985, issue (in the end, the magazine selected a different cover). The following year, Wong made his first major sale, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. (SOURCE: Alcauskas, INNOVATIVE APPROACHES, HONORED TRADITIONS, 2017)

Collections

Additional Details

Exhibition History 2017
Clinton, NY (Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art, Hamilton College). "Innovative Approaches, Honored Traditions: The Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art at Five Years, Highlights from the Permanent Collection," September 9 - December 10, 2017 (cat. no. 109, illus.).

Provenance 2023: Hamilton College (Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art), by gift of Peter Fischer, Class of 1963; 2016: by purchase from Web Gallery, NYC; from the collection of Ken Moss

Published References Katherine D. Alcauskas, INNOVATIVE APPROACHES, HONORED TRADITIONS: THE RUTH AND ELMER WELLIN MUSEUM OF ART AT FIVE YEARS, HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE PERMANENT COLLECTION (Clinton, NY: Wellin Museum of Art, 2017), p. 240.

Inscribed Recto, top half (gold paint): [sign language TIME] / "TIME"