"A Concept: 1 Million Marks" by Sandra Straus

12 May–27 June 1976

The impetus for this series of works came from in a homework assignment for a sixth grade Social Studies class at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. The students were asked to make one million marks to help them understand what ‘one million’ really means. When Sandra Straus heard of the assignment, she asked if she could use these students’ papers as the basis for a new work of art. Straus’s choice to use works of art created by others is reminiscent of Marcel Duchamp’s Dadaist theories, while her interest in the power and expression of the stroke or artist’s simple gesture, follows closely on the heels Abstract Expressionists Cy Twombly, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. 

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