Vic Muniz

Vik Muniz: From Rags to Riches Vincente Jose de Olivera Muniz was born in Sao Paulo, Brazil in 1961. He now works and lives in New York City as an artist. He now makes beautiful works of art from the most bizarre materials and really brings to light the hidden beauty in all things. How he got his start as an artist living in the United States is quite an interesting story. One day he was driving home and he saw a fight happening. He stopped to break it apart, and after succeeding, one of the fighters pulled out a gun and shot him in the leg because he mistook Vik for the man that started the fight. Luckily the man that shot him was very rich and he gave him some money to compensate for the wound. With that money Vik bought a ticket to the US in 1983. Before he came to the US he worked at a grocery store shoveling old rotten organic matter into the back of a truck. This could possible be where he got his initial ideas for the art he later created. “Vik Muniz incorporates everyday objects into his photographic process to create witty, bold, and often deceiving, images/ Often working in series, the New York-based artist makes pictures from unlikely materials including dirt, diamonds, sugar, wire, string chocolate syrup, peanut butter, and pigment” (Wasteland film). His pictures are very intriguing, often being a very simple picture made of very intricate materials. Vik claims one of the most important works of his career as “Sugar Children”(1996). He said it was the first time he used a different material to try to draw. He took pictures of sons and daughters of plantation workers in the Caribbean. He imagined these young happy children’s parents working in the sugar fields, often working 16-hour shifts. He says that “the sweetness was taken from the sugar”, and proceeded to draw these children with the sugar. All of these works, and possibly his prior work with garbage, led him to return to Brazil to start and produce his most known work featured in the