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Help add this important work to the JSMA’s permanent collection!
Despite housing a large collection of Hung Liu’s mixed-media works, the JSMA does not own any of her most recent compositions inspired by Dorothea Lange. If you would like to see this wonderful piece become part of the museum’s permanent collection, please consider making a donation toward its purchase.
Chinese-born American artist Hung Liu (1948-2021) explores themes of history, memory, suffering, and social justice in her art. Characterized by layers of luminous color, drips, and gestural circles, Liu’s works impart dignity on the poor, the afflicted, and the displaced. In 2015, Liu began a series of paintings inspired by the Dust Bowl-era portraits by pioneering American photographer Dorothea Lange (1895-1965). Liu found a kindred spirit in Lange, another intrepid female artist who made work intending to document injustice and inspire empathy.
This mixed-media work by Hung Liu is based on one of Lange’s most famous subjects, Migrant Mother—a Cherokee woman later identified as Florence Owens Thompson (1903-1983) that Lange met in 1936 in a farm workers camp in Nipomo, California, where she was struggling to support seven children. Liu faithfully rendered the haggard figure feeding her baby, but replaced the tattered tent of the original photo with a rustic building in a barren landscape. She also added a delicate long-tailed bird and one of her signature brushed circles, which in this case suggests a celestial body as well as connoting the passage of time.
Art credit:
Hung LIU (LIU Hung, Chinese-born American, 1948-2021)
Oklahoma, 2021
Mixed media, 60 x 60 inches
