Pop Art: A New Vernacular

See how artists like Rosalyn Drexler, Andy Warhol, and Billy Apple transformed images of celebrity, kitsch, and advertising into potent statements.

Exploding in the late 1950s and early 1960s across the globe, Pop Art drew from a wide world of recognizable images, influences, and information from TV and print. Fueled by postwar politics and rising consumerism, artists associated with Pop often appropriated and reinvented motifs of daily life as wry, witty, and pointed works of art.

By elevating vernacular, or commonplace, imagery, Pop created a new visual language that challenged the boundaries holding painting and sculpture above the stuff of everyday life. Yet the familiarity that Pop embraced was also a means of critique, asking us not to take images at face value. Pop’s capacity to probe the rules of representation while questioning the dominance of a commodified culture remains one of its most relevant legacies today.