The Spokane Art Center in Spokane, Washington, was a community art school opened in 1938 as part of the Works Progress Administration's (WPA) Federal Art Project during the Great Depression. Its staff included many notable artists, and it was widely considered to be one of the nation's most successful FAP art centers. It closed in 1942.
Ester Hernández is a California Bay Area Chicana visual artist recognized for her prints and pastels focusing on farm worker rights, cultural, political, and Chicana feminist issues. Hernández' was an activist in the Chicano Arts Movement in the 1960's and also made art pieces that focus on issues of social justice, civil rights, women's rights, and the Farm Worker Movement.
John D. Graham was a Ukrainian–born American modernist and figurative painter, art collector, and a mentor of modernist artists in New York City.
Charles Green Shaw was an American painter, poet, writer, and illustrator. He was a key figure in early American abstract art. Shaw's paintings are part of most major collections of American Art, including the Art Institute of Chicago, Corcoran Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Musee d'Art Moderne de Paris, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Whitney Museum.
Robert William Ebendorf is an American metalsmith and jeweler, known for craft, art and studio jewelry, often using found objects. In 2003–2004, the Smithsonian American Art Museum organized an exhibition of 95 pieces, titled The Jewelry of Robert Ebendorf: A Retrospective of Forty Years.
Carl Ashby was an American abstract expressionist artist who lived and worked in New York City.
Paul Bransom was an American painter, cartoonist, and illustrator of animals.
Abbo Ostrowsky was an American art teacher and etcher.
Louis George Bouché was an American artist, muralist, and decorator. He was a 1933 Guggenheim Fellow.
Antonio Prieto was an American ceramic artist and art professor at Mills College in Oakland, California. He was instrumental in developing an important ceramics collection for the Mills College Art Museum. He was born in Yaldepenas, Spain on August 23, 1912, and died in Oakland on March 11, 1967.
Paul J. Smith was an arts administrator, curator, and artist based in New York. Smith was professionally involved with the art, craft, and design fields since the early 1950s and was closely associated with the twentieth-century studio craft movement in the United States. He joined the staff of the American Craftsmen's Council in 1957, and in 1963 was appointed Director of the Museum of Contemporary Crafts, a position he held for the next 25 years. In September 1987, he assumed the title of director emeritus and continued to work as an independent curator and consultant for museums, arts organizations, and collectors.
Robert Bruce Inverarity was an American artist, art educator, museum director, author, and anthropologist. He was the Washington State Director of the Federal Arts Project from 1936 to 1939 and the Washington Arts Project from 1939 to 1941, working with many noted Pacific Northwest artists. Fascinated with the Indian tribes of the Northwest from early youth, he amassed a major collection of North Pacific Coast Native art and authored several works on the subject.
Mary Huntoon was an American artist and art therapist. The Mary Huntoon Papers are located at the University of Kansas. It consists primarily of her personal correspondences, correspondences as director of the Federal Art Project in Kansas, original poetry manuscripts, speech and lecture notes, photographs or reproductions of her artwork, original artwork, inventories, exhibit catalogs and programs, information on employment and research as an Art Therapist at the Winter Veterans Affairs Hospital in Topeka, and family photographs.
Alice Winchester was an American magazine editor and art historian.
Ruth Armer was an American abstractionist painter, teacher, art collector, and lithographer, from the San Francisco Bay area in California. Her art is held in the collections of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
Alfred Levitt, born Avraham Levitt in Starodub, Russian Empire, was a painter and an expert on prehistoric art who migrated to the United States in 1911 and was made a Chevalier of the Order of the Arts and Letters by the government of France for his studies of paleolithic cave paintings.
Homer Boss (1882–1956) was a painter, printmaker and advanced art instructor of the early 20th century Modern art movement in America. He first taught at the Henri School of Art in 1909. Boss ended up purchasing the school in 1910 from his former teacher, Robert Henri, and later renamed it the Independent School of Art. Among those that gave Boss accolades for their own success was famed Brazilian modernist Anita Malfatti, and many of her most lauded paintings were created during this period while she was under his instruction. Boss later taught for two decades at the Art Students League of New York where he met his future wife, Suzanne Kutka. He also taught at the New York School of Fine and Applied Art and for a few years at the New York School of Applied Design for Women. Boss had a studio in Santa Cruz, New Mexico for the remaining 25 years of his life and it was there that he painted many of his most famous landscapes, as well as portraits of American Indians.
Walter Miller Askin (1929–2021) was an American artist and educator, best known for his printmaking, who also paints and sculpts.
Mary Perry Stone was an American painter, sculptor, and muralist. She is best known for her social protest artwork. Her archives are held in the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art.
Joseph Alexander Cain was an American artist, educator, and art critic. He led a combat art team during the Korean War, received degrees from the University of California at Berkeley, and was recognized for his art at the local, state, national, and international levels, being elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in London. Cain served the art community as educator, originator of the National Drawing and Small Sculpture Show at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi, Texas, and art critic. Personal and professional documents are included in the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution.
