When the Pop art movement first surfaced in the mid-1950s, artists sought to challenge traditional conceptions of art-making by incorporating consumer culture and everyday objects into their works. Artists during this period transformed icons associated with mass media, comic books, and popular culture into visual expressions that often reflected a growing societal infatuation with consumerism.

The works on view demonstrate conceptions of Pop art as they emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as the ways that contemporary artists today have extended and elaborated upon visual representations of mass culture and consumerism. Pop artists and their successors abandoned traditions of “high art” in favor of creating work that is based on conventionalized imagery of commercial graphics. Pop Culture illustrates how the movement’s extensive history has influenced artistic production in our present cultural movement.