SEATTLE, WA.- More than 50 years after American pop art made its debut in the early 1960s, the provocative ideas that Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Edward Ruscha, James Rosenquist, Andy Warhol, and their peers first introduced are still reverberating in contemporary art and culture. Pop Departures, organized by the Seattle Art Museum and on view through Jan 11, 2015, investigates how artists in subsequent decades have continued to critically engage with and redefine consumer culture and the cult of celebrity.

Pop art presented a challenge to traditions of fine art by including imagery from popular culture such as advertising, news, etc. With pop art, consumerism and the image culture surrounding it were put on bold display, and many artists rebelled against traditional notions of artistic style through their retooling and imitation of commercial printing techniques.

The exhibition features key works by pioneers of American pop art in the 1960s, and with humor and irony, charts later generations of artists from the 1980s through today for whom pop art and consumer culture was an inspiration, a central point of departure, or a vehicle for critique.

"Unlike many other art movements that have great importance at a particular moment in time and then become a part of history, the ideas first introduced by pop art are in new ways pressing and provocative today. Pop Departures hopes to show why and how." says Catharina Manchanda, SAM’s Jon & Mary Shirley Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art.

Perhaps no artist is better known for his manipulations of the subtleties of marketing and the projection of desire than Andy Warhol. In the late 1950s, Warhol created magazine illustrations for the upper echelon of New York society and gained experience in decorating shop windows. He was already celebrated as a highly successful illustrator before launching himself as Warhol the artist, celebrity, filmmaker, artistic director, impresario, publisher, and self-styled pop icon.

In the 1960’s each of the pop artists mined a different aspect of commodity culture: film stars, celebrity portraits, and product design were Warhol’s chosen arena. Lichtenstein homed in on the visual language and subjects of comics. Rosenquist focused on the imagery of billboard advertisements in New York (a market that was increasingly squeezed by competition from television, in the same city). Tom Wesselmann reinvented the classic art historical odalisque in suburban settings as an empty surface. California-based Mel Ramos mashed advertisements and pin-up imagery into one, and Ed Ruscha in Los Angeles claimed the canvas as a movie screen and field for free word association.

In the 1980s and 1990s, many artists staked out a critical territory by claiming and manipulating media imagery in the face of growing conspicuous consumption that was no longer modeled on purchasing and furnishing the family home but centered instead on individual indulgence.

Barbara Kruger’s bold billboard-size works were informed by the feminist critiques and conceptual methods of the previous decades. Richard Prince’s appropriations, such as his cowboy series targeted the world of advertising in the 1980s while Jeff Koons embodied the hedonistic moment of that decade.

Later, the 1990s became the decade when technology became the tool for accelerated communication and trade and also led to a renewed interest in Andy Warhol. In fact, just a few years before the millennial turn, Kruger’s Untitled (not cruel enough), pointed in this direction. Kruger’s work demonstrated the essential relationship between image and text, in this instance a battle over meanings that hold the entire work in constant tension.

The first decade of the millennium brought a renewed interest in objects and processes. Margarita Cabrera’s soft sculptures of 2003–4 measure the geography of labor in a global marketplace. With Vocho (Yellow) the obsolescence and disappearance of a consumer good, and possible implications for local employment, are mapped on a single object.

With today’s commodity culture, artists including Josephine Meckseper, Elad Lassry, and Rachel Harrison center on the aesthetics of product display. The demand for product display photography, enhanced by digital editing tools, is soaring. At a time when shoppers spend seconds on the assessment of a particular good in those carefully crafted online images, these contemporary artists create works that require time and reveal themselves gradually.

"Rather than the conceptual appeals to the intellect in 1980s-style photo-conceptual appropriations, these recent works appeal first to our gut," says Manchanda. "The tinge of strangeness, surrealness, or discomfort that is built into their fabric prompts us to look harder and becomes the key to a broader critique of this brave new world of self-production, display, and consumption where appearance and presentation tend to outweigh self-reflection and thought."