When Jacob A. Riis, a police reporter in New York, began his personal campaign to expose the misery of the underprivileged living in the crime-infested slums of the lower East side, he soon found that the printed word was not sufficiently convincing, and so he turned to photography by flashlight.

19th century photography, Dark, Depressive, Documentary photography, Egalitarian, Grotesque, In-your-face, Monochromatic, Political, Social realism, Social revolution, Urban

Sigmar Polke was born in 1941 in Silesia, then part of East Germany and now present-day Poland. At the age of twelve his family left the Socialist East and moved to Düsseldorf, in the Rhineland, where he grew up in the increasingly affluent society of former West Germany. He studied art at the Staat

Complex, Layered, Political, Sardonic

Kent Monkman is a filmmaker, illustrator, painter and performance artist, of Swampy Cree and English/Irish descent. He was raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba and is now based in Toronto. His postmodernist, postcolonialist work revises the Romantic tradition of nation-building, ethnography and representati

Homoerotic, Ironic, Playful, Political, Queer

Architectural, Event, Grand, Improvised, Pioneering, Playful, Political, Postmodern dance, Site specific art, Technology