Famous Figures

Her construction of a visual identity through her dress, her self-portraits, and her public persona that was simultaneously personal and political, and that she maintained consistently through severe physical suffering, reflects an Identity orientation of great intentionality.

Basquiat's documented insistence that his work was both formally sophisticated and politically specific - his simultaneous engagement with art historical traditions and his explicit representation of Black experience in those terms - and his refusal to allow his market success to neutralise his anger, reflect an Identity orientation in which the work's meaning is the self's meaning.

Warhol's construction of a public persona as deliberately blank - the wig, the sunglasses, the monosyllabic interviews - and his documented investigation of what remains when surface is the whole content, reflect an Identity orientation that treated identity itself as the subject of the work.