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Preview image of work. color polaroid on paper,  Blue Yellow 21337

2011.13.a-.b

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Blue Yellow

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Artist

William Wegman (Bill Wegman) (Holyoke, Massachusetts, 1943 - )

Title

Blue Yellow

Creation Date

1991

Century

late 20th century

Dimensions

24 in. x 20 in. (60.96 cm x 50.8 cm)

Classification

Photographs

Creation Place

North America, United States

Medium and Support

color polaroid on paper

Credit Line

Museum Purchase, Lloyd O. and Marjorie Strong Coulter Fund

Copyright

This artwork may be under copyright. For further information, please consult the Museum’s Copyright Terms and Conditions.

Accession Number

2011.13.a-.b

Deliberately exploiting new photographic media to reimagine what art could be, Wegman turned to video in the mid-1960s and the polaroid in the late 1970s. During the same period, he became immersed in a partnership with a Weimaraner dog named “Man Ray,” after the Dada photographer. A successor, named Fay Ray, is pictured here. Just as, with a sly sense of humor, Wegman references the legacy of Minimalism by placing Fay Ray on stacked cubes, so too his pet’s very presence eerily shifts the image into something more haunting and less easily characterized, disrupting the conventions that keep art at a safe remove from life. As he explained in 2018, “In my photographs, what I like people to see is—yes, there is a dog, and yes, it is a Weimaraner—but what has it become? The dogs are always in a state of becoming something. They become characters, objects. When they are lying down, they become landscapes.”

Object Description

Fay on the blue and yellow cubes