Personal Histories
Art drawn from lived experience: family stories, memories, diaries and the private past of the artist or of someone close to them.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
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About
Artists have long drawn on their own lives, but the 20th century made personal history a central subject. Frida Kahlo's My Grandparents, My Parents, and I (1936) lays out her ancestry as a family tree, with herself as a small child at its heart. Charlotte Salomon, sheltering in the south of France, painted Life? or Theatre? (1940–42), hundreds of gouaches that retell her family's story with captions and musical cues, before she was murdered at Auschwitz in 1943.
Later artists made the personal public in other forms. Faith Ringgold's story quilt Tar Beach (1988) blends memories of a Harlem rooftop with a girl's dream of flying, and Nan Goldin reworked her slide show The Ballad of Sexual Dependency through the 1980s, circling through friends, lovers and bruises. Njideka Akunyili Crosby layers photo transfers of Nigerian life into scenes of home. Look for snapshots, letters, handwriting and family likenesses.
Related artists
More in Subject Matter
Personal Writing Systems
Personification
Political
Political Events
Political Figures
Popular Culture
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Portrait
Portraits without a Face
Provocative
Psychoanalysis
Racial and Ethnic Identity
References to Art History
