Occidental College is a private liberal arts college in Los Angeles, California. Founded in 1887 as a coeducational college by clergy and members of the Presbyterian Church, it became non-sectarian in 1910. It is one of the oldest liberal arts colleges on the West Coast of the United States.
Surrealism is a cultural movement that developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I in which artists depicted unnerving, illogical scenes and developed techniques to allow the unconscious mind to express itself. Its aim was, according to leader André Breton, to "resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality", or surreality. It produced works of painting, writing, theatre, filmmaking, photography, and other media.
Max Ernst was a German painter, sculptor, printmaker, graphic artist, and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst was a primary pioneer of the Dada movement and Surrealism in Europe. He had no formal artistic training, but his experimental attitude toward the making of art resulted in his invention of frottage—a technique that uses pencil rubbings of textured objects and relief surfaces to create images—and grattage, an analogous technique in which paint is scraped across canvas to reveal the imprints of the objects placed beneath. Ernst is noted for his unconventional drawing methods as well as for creating novels and pamphlets using the method of collages. He served as a soldier for four years during World War I, and this experience left him shocked, traumatised and critical of the modern world. During World War II he was designated an "undesirable foreigner" while living in France. He died in Paris on 1 April 1976.
The Noguchi Museum, chartered as The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, is a museum and sculpture garden in the Long Island City section of Queens, New York City, designed and created by the Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi. Opening on a limited basis to the public in 1985, the museum and foundation were intended to preserve and display Noguchi's sculptures, architectural models, stage designs, drawings, and furniture designs. The two-story, 24,000 square feet (2,200 m2) museum and sculpture garden, one block from the Socrates Sculpture Park, underwent major renovations in 2004 allowing the museum to stay open year-round.
Isamu Noguchi was an American artist and landscape architect whose artistic career spanned six decades, from the 1920s onward. Known for his sculpture and public artworks, Noguchi also designed stage sets for various Martha Graham productions, and several mass-produced lamps and furniture pieces, some of which are still manufactured and sold.
Robert C. Morgan is an American art critic, art historian, curator, poet, and artist.
Ithell Colquhoun was a British painter, occultist, poet and author. Stylistically her artwork was affiliated with surrealism. In the late 1930s, Colquhoun was part of the British Surrealist Group before being expelled because she refused to renounce her association with occult groups.
Dorothea Margaret Tanning was an American painter, printmaker, sculptor, writer, and poet. Her early work was influenced by Surrealism.
Rosalind Epstein Krauss is an American art critic, art theorist and a professor at Columbia University in New York City. Krauss is known for her scholarship in 20th-century painting, sculpture and photography. As a critic and theorist she has published steadily since 1965 in Artforum,Art International and Art in America. She was associate editor of Artforum from 1971 to 1974 and has been editor of October, a journal of contemporary arts criticism and theory that she co-founded in 1976.
Yonejirō Noguchi was an influential Japanese writer of poetry, fiction, essays and literary criticism in both English and Japanese. He is known in the west as Yone Noguchi. He was the father of noted sculptor Isamu Noguchi.
Women Surrealists are women artists, photographers, filmmakers and authors connected with the Surrealism movement, which began in the early 1920s.
Kansuke Yamamoto was a photographer and poet. He was a prominent Japanese surrealist born in Nagoya, Japan.
Amy Sueyoshi is the provost of San Francisco State University. Sueyoshi is a trained historian specializing in sexuality, gender, and race. Her publications and lectures focus on issues regarding race and sexuality such as cross-dressing, pornography, and marriage equality.
Xenia Cage was an American surrealist sculptor. Her work has been described as on the “cutting edge of surrealism in sculpture” for her time.
Saburō Hasegawa was a Japanese calligrapher, painter, art writer, curator, and teacher. He was an early advocate of abstract art in Japan and an equally vocal supporter of the Japanese traditional arts and Zen Buddhism. Throughout his career he argued for the connection between East Asian classical arts and Western abstract painting.
Jane ("Jenny") Hoadley Dixon is an American arts administrator. Dixon has undertaken initiatives which contributed to the development of four New York City cultural organizations—the Public Art Fund, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Bronx Museum of the Arts, and Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum. Her work has also focused on individual artists as vital contributors to society. Dixon is currently Director Emerita of the Noguchi Museum and Trustee Emerita of the Public Art Fund.
Toshiko Okanoue is a Japanese artist associated with the Japanese avant-garde art world of the 1950s and best known for her Surrealist photo collages.
Ichiro Fukuzawa was a Japanese modernist painter credited with the establishment of Surrealism in Japan's artistic communities during the early-1930s.
Death is a statue by Isamu Noguchi, depicting a dead body of a person who had been lynched, inspired by the 1930 lynching of George Hughes in Texas. The almost life-sized statue was exhibited at one of two 1935 New York anti-lynching exhibitions, where its bad and overtly racist reception caused its creator to change career direction.
William Kelly Fearing was a visual artist who was termed, in his time, a “magical realist” and “Romantic surrealist”. He was a member of the Fort Worth Circle, a cohort of artists often credited with bringing modern art to Texas and the firsts to steer away from the then dominating regional aesthetic. His spiritual themes spanned across multiple styles including abstract, impressionism, and surrealism.
