Dr. Melissa Mednicov specializes in art after 1940. Her book, Pop Art and Popular Music: Jukebox Modernism, published with Routledge, offers an interdisciplinary approach to Pop art scholarship through a recuperation of popular music into art historical understandings of the movement.
Jukebox Modernism is a procedure by which Pop artists used popular music within their works to disrupt decorous modernism during the sixties. Artists, including Peter Blake, Pauline Boty, James Rosenquist, and Andy Warhol, respond to popular music for reasons such as its emotional connectivity, issues of fandom and identity, and the pleasures and problems of looking and listening to an artwork. When we both look at and listen to Pop art, essential aspects of Pop’s history that have been neglected―its sounds, its women, its queerness, and its black subjects―come into focus.“Pop art and popular music of the sixties, when looked at and listened to together, can recover aspects of Pop that have been previously ignored.” said Mednicov. “I hope that readers gain a new understanding of Pop art—and the possibilities of art history—and I hope that readers also see how many of the questions these artists grappled with through their use of music continue to have meaning today in both contemporary art and our understandings of the past."
Dr. Mednicov’s recent essays have appeared in Art Journal, Imago Musicae, and The Global Sixties in Sound and Vision: Media, Counterculture, Revolt. Her contemporary art criticism has been published in the College Art Association’s caareviews and Glasstire.
The lecture will take place on Friday, April 5th, 2019 at 10:00 am at Sullivant Hall Room 225, 1813 N. High St. Columbus, OH 43210. Hope to see you there!
