Neil Kelly’s Shit Picnic (2005)

Neil Kelly’s Shit Picnic (2005)

Kelly’s childhood experience while attending a family picnics on Sunday afternoons embarrassed him because he thought picnics were “uncool.” The result years after is Shit Picnic (2005), a sad picnic in which there is a vacant white blanket in a...
Banksy’s Picnic (2005c.)

Banksy’s Picnic (2005c.)

Banksy’s satirical Picnic contrasts a group of indigenous African hunter-gatherers bewildered by the Picnic of a White middle-class urban family picnicking on the beach. The contrast between civilizations and technologies suggests irreconcilable differences...
Anthony Ackrill’s Picnic (2008)

Anthony Ackrill’s Picnic (2008)

It is uncertain if Ackrill’s Picnic is a spinoff of pin-up art, soft porn, or sly humor. Whatever it means to be, it’s not the kind of picnic that meets traditional expectations. This picnic is a life-sized woman holding a skull and a walking staff. This allusion...

James G. Davis’s Prometheus Bound, Prometheus Unbound (2006)

Davis’s Prometheus Bound, Prometheus Unbound, is a picnic enigma based on the Greek myth of Prometheus. The best-known versions of which are Hesiod’s Theogony (700 BCE) and Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, Prometheus Unbound, and Prometheus Fire-Bringer (415 c. BCE). None...
David RussellTalbott’s Apple Pie Picnic (2008)

David RussellTalbott’s Apple Pie Picnic (2008)

Talbott’s Apple Pie Picnic is a send-up of the cliché “As American as apple pie.” Talbott jams as many icons as he can on the picnic cloth. Marilyn Monroe is on her knees next to a picnic basket, a steaming apple pie, a  copy of Jack Kerouac’s...