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Published on November 02, 2021
The Jail, from the series, Chicken Little and the Culture of Fear; 2014-16, acrylic and giclee prints on canvas, and 3-D printed sculpture, 27 canvases, 134 x 244 inches.
The Jail, from the series, Chicken Little and the Culture of Fear; 2014-16, acrylic and giclee prints on canvas, and 3-D printed sculpture, 27 canvases, 134 x 244 inches.
With a dose of dark humor, New York artist Nancy Chunn explores the media’s role in America’s contemporary culture of fear. She creates work that references elements of the news, clip art, cartooning, and fairy tales. A recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts awards, Chunn spent the year of 1996 “editing” the front page of the New York Times every day. Using rubber stamps and pastels, the artist embellished and amended the images and text with symbols that could be recognized by people of all ages and regardless of the languages they spoke.
Born in Los Angeles in 1941, Nancy Chunn moved to New York City in the late seventies. Consistently concerned with political, sociological and cultural issues, Chunn’s work exposes geopolitical themes and the power of the media to define and control public opinion. A self-proclaimed “political junkie,” she achieved critical success with her early map-like paintings of tyrannized nations, and in her paintings over the past 25 years, she has continued her commitment to documenting world events. She has been widely recognized for the year-long Front Pages project in which she provided commentary by applying images and text on every front page of The New York Times from January 1 to December 31, 1996. Since this series, Chunn’s work has been filled with humorous references, satire and biting critique. Her latest series, Chicken Little and The Culture of Fear, restaged the folktale of the paranoid fowl to expose the media’s nonstop use of fear, real and imagined, to fuel the engine of the 24 hour news cycle.