General Artist’s Statement of “NYC Pizza Art”
Created by Vic Chen, Aarush Kumar, Nathan Zheng, and Haroon Awan
For our project, we were inspired by Andy Warhol, particularly his works involving Campbell’s soup and Marilyn Monroe. Inspired by his creation of art from ordinary objects, we wanted to feature pizza as the main theme of this artwork. Not only is pizza delicious, but it is also synonymous with NYC in a way that no other food can match in reputation and popularity. The general structure of our work of art takes inspiration from Warhol’s work involving Marilyn Monroe, but we tweaked the premise beyond recoloring where each square is meant to represent different art styles we learned about in Seminar 1.
Our artwork has six different squares, all relating to the intersection of pizza and art. The first square is simply a picture of a pepperoni pizza pie that we took ourselves. The square under is a picture of the ingredients of NYC-style pizza, inspired by Nobutaka Aozaki and his work titled “Groceries Portraits.” However, unlike Nobutake Aozaki emphasizing the diversity of ingredients in NYC, we wanted to show how these relatively simple ingredients create an infamous NYC food. The third square is a graffiti art-inspired pizza illustration using dark ink pens and oil pastel to emulate the spray paint aesthetic.
The fourth square is an image of pizza created by AI. The purpose of this square was to generate conversation about how effective and ethical AI art is, and whether or not it has a place in the contemporary art world. A citation is available at the end of this document. The fifth square is a Keith Haring-style illustration of pizza, using solid, contrasting colors that were inverted from the classic pizza colors. We chose Keith Haring specifically because his art in NYC subways was accessible to all, similar to how pizza is a food that is accessible and embedded in the city. The last square was a surrealist illustration of pizza, combining cosmic imagery and unsettling eyes with a familiar New York food to create a playfood and slightly uneasy tone, as if the slice you are about to eat is also silently looking back at you.
Works Cited
“Image of a whole pepperoni pizza from the direct top view and make the background light grey” prompt. Gemini, Google, 3 Dec. 2025, g.co/gemini/chat.
This project helped us identify what we felt were the more memorable art styles and forms that we were able to learn in Seminar 1. It allowed us to form connections between what pizza literally is and what it abstractly represents to different New Yorkers.
