The Art of Junk Food

1. The Art of
Junk Food

2. • California/Chicago
• Graduated with a B.S.
in Civil Engineering and
an art minor with
honors.
• Shortly after her return
from an art residency
in Japan, Johnson
decided to seek new
direction in her life and
to focus on art as a
career
Pamela Michelle Johnson

3. Artist Statement
“Teetering towers of hamburgers, drippy stacks of
syrupy waffles, sticky piles of sugary candy... Junk
food. It's the taste of America. It is what we eat. It is
who we are. The insatiable American appetite is set on
a path of consumption. Devouring to the point where
we are left with nothing, nothing but the
consequential garbage. Quintessentially American,
junk food is not just part of our diet, it epitomizes our
cultural ideals and social norms. Through my work, I
strive to invoke reflection on a culture focused on
mass-consumption and mass-production, where the
negative aspects of overindulgence are often forgotten
or ignored. The work questions a culture that equates
fulfillment, pleasure and happiness with what we
consume.”
- Pamela Michelle Johnson

12. • Beacon, NY
• She is an American
figurative realist painter.
• “She has been painting
women and food for over
twenty years and continues
to address the intersections
of food with body image,
addiction, and unabating
desire.” (source: theotherjournal.com)
Lee Price

13. “Many women have a complicated relationship with
food, a situation artist Lee Price knows well. In her new
series of work, Price explores emotional eating using
herself as her subject.
New York-based portrait artist Lee Price is fascinated
with the relationship between women and food. In a
series that has taken over seven years to produce, Price
features herself as the subject (with the exception of
two images, one with her mother, one with a friend)
gorging on bags of Cheetos, boxes of sweets, and pints
of ice cream in very solitary, almost obscure locations
including one’s bed or bathroom.
Price’s paintings are neither derived from nor aimed at
producing humor. They’re based on very real eating
disorders (which Price herself has suffered from in the
past), and explore the obsession—and sometimes
compulsive relationship—many women have with
food.”
(source: thedailybeast.com)

18. • California
• American painter best known
for his colorful works
depicting commonplace
objects—pies, lipsticks, paint
cans, ice cream cones,
pastries, and hot dogs—as
well as for his landscapes and
figures.
• On October 14, 1994,
Thiebaud was presented with
the National Medal of Arts by
President Clinton.
Wayne Thiebaud

19. In a contemporary art world enthralled with such stunts as
Damien Hirst’s diamond-encrusted skull, Thiebaud is
wonderfully ungimmicky. He belongs more to a classical
tradition of painting than to the Pop revolution that first
propelled him to national attention in the 1960s. Then,
the sweet everydayness of his cake and pie pictures
looked like cousins of Andy Warhol’s soup cans.
But where Warhol was cool and ironic, Thiebaud was
warm and gently comic, playing on a collective nostalgia
just this side of sentimentality. He pushed himself as a
painter—experimenting with brushstrokes, color,
composition, light and shadow. The cylindrical cakes and
cones of ice cream owed more to such masters of the still
life as the 18th-century French painter Chardin, or the
20th-century Italian Giorgio Morandi, as critics have
pointed out, than to the art trends of the time.
(source: www.smithsonianmag.com)