Artist Tom Huck (American, born 1971)
Title Wienermania: The Birth of Frankenskank
Series Vintage Junk '04: Fair-y Tales from the Mississippi Expo
Date 2004
Medium Linocut on paper
Dimensions Image: 12 × 12 in. (30.5 × 30.5 cm)
Sheet: 16 5/8 × 15 3/16 in. (42.2 × 38.6 cm)
Credit Line Collection of Art Prints: "Powerful Impressions," Eskenazi Museum of Art, Indiana University
Accession Number 2006.15
About this Work
Tom Huck is a modern-day satirist in the tradition of William Hogarth and George Cruikshank. His other influences include Albrecht Dürer, José Guadalupe Posada, Max Beckmann, and R. Crumb. Although this print relates to the popularization of America’s first “junk food” in the form of hot dogs at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exhibition in St. Louis, it also reveals a twenty-first century twist on the medieval theme of the Seven Deadly Sins. In this work, the vice of gluttony is depicted as a redneck barbeque. Instead of angels, the sky is filled with winged, gun-wielding Mexican wrestlers (luchadores); the flames of hell become a fire pit; and an over-indulgent, possibly competitive, eater transforms into a weiner-fanged monster. Huck uses his grotesque fantasies of life in rural Missouri small towns as biting critiques of waste, violence, and hypocrisy in contemporary American society. This impression was included in the exhibition and exchange portfolio Powerful Impressions: Stampe Italiane e Americane. It included works by students and faculty from Indiana University and the Scuola Internazionale de Grafica in Venice, as well as by eight other professional artists, like Huck, representing Italy and the United States. Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art’s collection includes a complete set (Eskenazi Museum of Art 2006.10–.46).