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2024, “In This Place: American Dreams”
Considered one of the great 20th-century social realists, Ben Shahn often addressed political issues and social themes in his art. His works are filled with sympathetic portrayals of working-class Americans, immigrants, and victims of systemic abuse. In contrast, Supermarket is an abstracted still life of seven shopping carts. Gaps in the carts’ frames are filled with color, creating a stained-glass effect. Perhaps the work suggests that supermarkets and other spaces of consumerism, which were rapidly proliferating in the 1950s, have taken on almost religious significance in modern American life.Label
The work is of seven grocery carts in a row. Each cart is angled in a different direction. The artist has used a stained glass effect to add color and distinction to each cart which at the same time unites them. Shahn focused on the composition of the lines and the overlapping effect, rather than a three-dimensional look.Label
(2025 post)
Throughout this week, we’re sharing works in a digital exhibition created by Washburn student Oliver Salazar.
"Objects as Embodiments" is a collection of pieces that focus on the objects we use in everyday life. From a shopping cart half your city has touched to a chair that welcomes you to relax everyday after work, these are the things we look past but that see the entire world with us.
This print pictures shopping carts that are scattered but interlocked by sharp lines and abstract colors throughout. You can interpret the piece as a comment on consumerism and our society's growing dependency on it. A shopping cart used by you and many others speaks to the shared experience everyone has of shopping.