Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the United Kingdom and the United States during the mid- to late-1950s. The movement presented a challenge to traditions of fine art by including imagery from popular and mass culture, such as advertising, comic books and mundane mass-produced objects. One of its aims is to use images of popular culture in art, emphasizing the banal or kitschy elements of any culture, most often through the use of irony. It is also associated with the artists' use of mechanical means of reproduction or rendering techniques. In pop art, material is sometimes visually removed from its known context, isolated, or combined with unrelated material.
Sir Peter Thomas Blake is an English pop artist. He co-created the sleeve design for the Beatles' 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. His other works include the covers for two of The Who's albums, the cover of the Band Aid single "Do They Know It's Christmas?", and the Live Aid concert poster. Blake also designed the 2012 Brit Award statuette.
Jess Collins, simply known today as Jess, was an American visual artist.
Robert Adams is an American photographer who has focused on the changing landscape of the American West. His work first came to prominence in the mid-1970s through his book The New West (1974) and his participation in the exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape in 1975. He has received two Guggenheim Fellowships, a MacArthur Fellowship, the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize and the Hasselblad Award.
Stephen Shore is an American photographer known for his images of scenes and objects of the banal, and for his pioneering use of color in art photography. His books include Uncommon Places (1982) and American Surfaces (1999), photographs that he took on cross-country road trips in the 1970s.
Fritz William Scholder V was a Native American artist, who produced paintings, monotypes, lithographs, and sculptures. Scholder was an enrolled member of the La Jolla Band of Luiseno Indians, a federally recognized tribe of Luiseños, a California Mission tribe. Scholder's most influential works were post-modern in sensibility and somewhat Pop Art in execution as he sought to deconstruct the mythos of the American Indian. A teacher at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe in the late 1960s, Scholder instructed prominent Native American students.
Mario Martinez is a Native American contemporary abstract painter. He is a member of the Pascua Yaqui Tribe from New Penjamo, the smallest of six Yaqui settlements, in Arizona. He lives in New York City.
Beatriz Milhazes is a Brazilian artist. She is known for her work juxtaposing Brazilian cultural imagery and references to western Modernist painting. Milhazes is a Brazilian-born collage artist and painter known for her large-scale works and vibrant colors. She has been called "Brazil's most successful contemporary painter."
Peter Ford Young is an American painter. He is primarily known for his abstract paintings that have been widely exhibited in the United States and in Europe since the 1960s. His work is associated with Minimal Art, Post-minimalism, and Lyrical Abstraction. Young has participated in more than a hundred group exhibitions and he has had more than forty solo exhibitions in important contemporary art galleries throughout his career. He currently lives in Bisbee, Arizona.
Miriam Schapiro was a Canadian-born artist based in the United States. She was a painter, sculptor, printmaker, and a pioneer of feminist art. She was also considered a leader of the Pattern and Decoration art movement. Schapiro's artwork blurs the line between fine art and craft. She incorporated craft elements into her paintings due to their association with women and femininity. Schapiro's work touches on the issue of feminism and art: especially in the aspect of feminism in relation to abstract art. Schapiro honed in her domesticated craft work and was able to create work that stood amongst the rest of the high art. These works represent Schapiro's identity as an artist working in the center of contemporary abstraction and simultaneously as a feminist being challenged to represent women's "consciousness" through imagery. She often used icons that are associated with women, such as hearts, floral decorations, geometric patterns, and the color pink. In the 1970s she made the hand fan, a typically small woman's object, heroic by painting it six feet by twelve feet. "The fan-shaped canvas, a powerful icon, gave Schapiro the opportunity to experiment … Out of this emerged a surface of textured coloristic complexity and opulence that formed the basis of her new personal style. The kimono, fans, houses, and hearts were the form into which she repeatedly poured her feelings and desires, her anxieties, and hopes".
Todd Hido is an American photographer. He has produced 17 books, had his work exhibited widely and included in various public collections. Hido is currently an adjunct professor at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco.
Arturo Herrera is a Venezuelan-born (1959), Berlin-based visual artist known for wide-ranging work that is rooted in the practice of collage. His colorful, often rhythmic art intertwines bits of pop iconography, gestural marks, and nonrepresentational shapes using pictorial strategies of fragmentation, repetition, effacement, and dislocation. The resulting imagery often balances between abstraction and figuration, detached from inherent narratives yet vaguely familiar. Critics suggest that this ambiguity engages memory, fantasy and a viewer's unconscious private interpretive schemes, evoking a multiplicity of references and readings. In 2020, Art in America writer Ara H. Merjian described Herrera's practice—which includes works on paper, paintings, reliefs, sculpture, public art and books—as "chameleonic as [it] is consistent," one that "breathes life into modernist collage, exploring the tensions between exactitude and spontaneity, placement and displacement."
John Divola is an American contemporary visual artist and educator, living in Riverside, California. He works in photography, describing himself as exploring the landscape by looking for the edge between the abstract and the specific. He is a professor in the art department at University of California Riverside.
Jonas Wood is a contemporary artist based in Los Angeles.
Holly Roberts is an American visual artist known best for her combination of photography and paint. “Holly Roberts caused a stir in the fine art photography world of the eighties by fusing painting and photography, painting directly onto photographs”. Roberts lives and works in Corrales, New Mexico. Her work is in the permanent collection of several museums in the United States.
Dick Arentz is an American fine art photographer and author, known for his textbook on platinum-palladium printing. Arentz's text book, Platinum & Palladium Printing, Focal Press. 1st edition (1999), 2nd edition (2004) “is known in online forums and industry magazines as the most comprehensive book on the subject.” Other photography insiders such as Dr. Michael J. Ware and Bill Jay have commended the author as a master-craftsman in platinum-palladium printing. Arentz has mentored other photographers in the platinum-palladium printing process by conducting more than 40 workshops for organizations such as The Center for Creative Photography, The Friends of Photography and The Museum of Photographic Arts. His work was displayed at over fifty one-man exhibits in museums and private galleries in the US and Europe.
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.
Bailey Doogan was an American artist best known for her large-scale, feminist paintings and drawings that offer an unflinching look at the aging, female body and that tackle cultural issues like the equation of beauty with youth. Doogan's artwork has been reviewed in numerous publications, including Art in America, The Nation, Art Journal, Ms., ARTnews and the New Art Examiner. Her work also has been reproduced in Harper's Magazine.
James G. Davis was an American contemporary artist best known for his intricate paintings and works on paper. He was acclaimed for his figurative pieces that explore issues of gender and social status, along with mythological and historical references that often have a metaphorical twist.
Jamey Stillings is an American photographer and artist known primarily for his aerial photography of renewable energy projects around the world, documenting the human impact on the environment. Stillings presents at photo festivals, universities, and professional conferences globally. His work is exhibited and published widely in Asia, Australia, Europe, and North and South America. His award-winning book, The Evolution of Ivanpah Solar, documents the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System in the Mojave Desert of California. His photographs are in private and public collections, including the United States Library of Congress, Museum of Fine Arts - Houston, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Nevada Museum of Art.
