5 Cents, Demopolis, Alabama

Description

Christenberry belonged to a generation of artists who, in the late 1950s and early ’60s, challenged the strict divisions between fine art and popular visual culture. Where Andy Warhol appropriated images of mass-produced products and Jasper Johns gesturally rendered common iconography, Christenberry turned to the ubiquitous signage painted on the sides of buildings and posted along rural roads across Hale County. He sought to catalogue the conventions present in corporately issued logos as well as the individual flourishes of hand-painted signs, as on this grocery store.