Art terms
Learn about the materials, techniques, movements, and themes of modern and contemporary art from around the world.
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Showing 11 of 345 art terms
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B
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B movie
A low-budget movie, especially one made for use as a companion to the main attraction in a double feature.
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Bauhaus
The school of art and design founded in Germany by Walter Gropius in 1919, and shut down by the Nazis in 1933. The faculty brought together artists, architects, and designers, and developed an experimental pedagogy that focused on materials and functions rather than traditional art school methodologies. In its successive incarnations in Weimar, Dessau, and Berlin, it became the site of influential conversations about the role of modern art and design in society.
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Ben-Day dots
An inexpensive mechanical printing method developed in the late 19th century and named after its inventor, illustrator and printer Benjamin Henry Day, Jr. The method relies upon small colored dots (typically cyan, magenta, yellow, and black) that are variously spaced and combined to create shading and colors in images.
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Binder
The material that holds the pigment together in paint and creates uniform consistency. Binder is often a liquid or an oil, like linseed oil, which is commonly used in oil paint.
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Biomorphic
Derived from the Greek words bios (life) and morphe (form), the term refers to abstract forms or images that evoke naturally occurring forms such as plants, organisms, and body parts.
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Black Arts movement
This 1960s and 1970s cultural movement, begun by African American artists and intellectuals based in the United States, arose during a time when Black people around the world were engaged in struggles for liberation and equality—from the Black Power movement to decolonization efforts across the African continent—to promote Black self-determination (or the power to make decisions for oneself) through cultural production. Using literature, theater, and the visual arts, the movement emphasized artmaking rooted in Black history and identity. Work was made for Black audiences and was meant to be easily accessible, both in terms of its figurative content (what it depicted) and where you could find it (public murals, inexpensive prints, etc.).
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Black Maria
The world’s first film studio, developed in 1892–93 by American inventor Thomas Alva Edison and his assistant and protégé, William K. L. Dickson. Comprised of an armature of wooden planks covered with tar paper, the structure was set on tracks so that it could be moved into optimal sunlight and outfitted with a roof made of panels that could be raised or lowered to control the amount of light coming in.
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Black Mountain College
A small liberal arts college founded in 1933 by John Rice on a farm in Asheville, North Carolina, and continued under changing leadership until 1957. Courses in painting, weaving, sculpture, pottery, poetry, music, and dance placed the arts at the center of the school’s curriculum. Its program fostered exchange and dialogue between faculty, many of them refugees from World War II Europe, and a younger generation of American artists.
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Blockchain
A computer system that runs across many traditional computers and is protected by encryption. Blockchains reliably and securely execute programs, known as smart contracts, without the need for trusting any one particular remote computer.
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Brutalist Architecture
Brutalism is a mid-20th-century architectural style that emerged in Europe after World War II, when massive reconstruction projects and material shortages demanded more cost-effective building solutions. Architects often eliminated cladding and external ornamentation in favor of exposed building materials such as concrete, and the textures of these raw materials took on an aesthetic quality.English architectural historian Reyner Banham first defined the term in 1955, describing it as a design ethic with materially and socially responsible goals, marked by its formal clarity, structural presentation, and use of raw materials. French artist Jean Dubuffet’s concept of “art brut” and Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier’s use of béton brut (unpolished concrete) inspired the term. Banham credited English architects Alison and Peter Smithson as Brutalism’s pioneers.Brutalist projects spread across the UK, the US, the Eastern Bloc, and postcolonial nations in the Global South in the 1960s and ’70s. The Brutalist design approach began to decline in the early 1980s amid widespread criticism for often monumental scales and an association with large-scale public housing projects and their related bureaucracies. Today, especially in popular culture, the term is often used to summarily describe any large-scale building made of exposed concrete.
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Built environment
The spaces that human design and actions have shaped. These include infrastructural systems like electricity grids or highway networks, cities, buildings and other structures, landscaped areas, and resource-extraction sites like mines or oil wells. The ways in which these spaces are designed impact our social, cultural, and physical interactions with them. This term came to prominence in the United States and Europe in the 1960s, as the study of relationships between organisms and environments expanded beyond the ecological sciences into such disciplines as anthropology, psychology, urban planning, and architectural design.
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