Identification+Manual

Date: 1964
 * [[image:https://s3.amazonaws.com/saam.media/files/styles/x_large/s3/images/1984/1984.124.250A-C_1a.jpg?itok=l5TBLPEN width="396" height="290" link="@https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/identification-manual-21026"]] || Title: **Identification Manual**

Artist: **Larry Rivers** Born: New York, New York 1923 Died: Southampton, New York 2002

Medium: mixed media and collage on fiberboard Dimensions: 73 5/8 x 84 3/8 x 19 in. (187.0 x 214.3 x 48.3 cm.) Remarks: overall: 73 Smithsonian American Art Museum Gift of Container Corporation of America

Accession: 1984.124.250A-C || Rivers was one of the bad boys of the New York art world. He was a poet, lecturer, jazz musician, and painter who imagined that "white people probably think I'm nuts, black people think I'm insulting." Identification Manual combines phantom images of murdered civil rights marchers with pictures of beautiful black women and products designed to bleach dark skin. On the right, two sliding panes of glass afford different racial identities to a figure of a woman.
 * Exhibition Label: **

A white artist creating racially explicit art in the 1960s was controversial, and Rivers liked to give his works clinical, deadpan titles that made the images even more shocking. Identification Manual conveys the difficulty faced by blacks and whites trying to find their way through the heated conflicts of the civil rights movement.

A quotation from Lord Acton, a famously liberal historian in nineteenth-century England, accompanied the title. It read: "The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities."

Divide the group into three, each examining one part of Triptych and reporting back.
 * Suggested Questions: **
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 110%;">What is going on in this artwork?
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 110%;">What is this artist trying to say? How do you feel about that?




 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 110%;">Resources: **

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 14.3px;">Artist Biography <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 14.3px;">SAAM Collections Page
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 14.3px;">Links: **