Kenneth Noland was an American painter. He was one of the best-known American color field painters, although in the 1950s he was thought of as an abstract expressionist and in the early 1960s he was thought of as a minimalist painter. Noland helped establish the Washington Color School movement. In 1977, he was honored with a major retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York that then traveled to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and Ohio's Toledo Museum of Art in 1978. In 2006, Noland's Stripe Paintings were exhibited at the Tate in London.
Helen Frankenthaler was an American abstract expressionist painter. She was a major contributor to the history of postwar American painting. Having exhibited her work for over six decades, she spanned several generations of abstract painters while continuing to produce vital and ever-changing new work. Frankenthaler began exhibiting her large-scale abstract expressionist paintings in contemporary museums and galleries in the early 1950s. She was included in the 1964 Post-Painterly Abstraction exhibition curated by Clement Greenberg that introduced a newer generation of abstract painting that came to be known as color field. Born in Manhattan, she was influenced by Greenberg, Hans Hofmann, and Jackson Pollock's paintings. Her work has been the subject of several retrospective exhibitions, including a 1989 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and been exhibited worldwide since the 1950s. In 2001, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts.
Morris Louis Bernstein, known professionally as Morris Louis, was an American painter. During the 1950s he became one of the earliest exponents of Color Field painting. While living in Washington, D.C., Louis, along with Kenneth Noland and other Washington painters, formed an art movement that is known today as the Washington Color School.
Color field painting is a style of abstract painting that emerged in New York City during the 1940s and 1950s. It was inspired by European modernism and closely related to abstract expressionism, while many of its notable early proponents were among the pioneering abstract expressionists. Color field is characterized primarily by large fields of flat, solid color spread across or stained into the canvas creating areas of unbroken surface and a flat picture plane. The movement places less emphasis on gesture, brushstrokes and action in favor of an overall consistency of form and process. In color field painting "color is freed from objective context and becomes the subject in itself."
Paul Jenkins was an American abstract expressionist painter.
The Washington Color School, also known as the Washington, D.C., Color School, was an art movement starting during the 1950s–1970s in Washington, D.C., in the United States, built of abstract expressionist artists. The movement emerged during a time when society, the arts, and people were changing quickly. The founders of this movement are Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, however four more artists were part of the initial art exhibition in 1965.
Matthew Langley is a New York City painter and photographer whose work has focuses on space, compression, volume and sentience (painting) and Vanishing American DIY culture (photography). This photographic series is titled Vanishing Culture USA.
The Jefferson Place Gallery was an art gallery in Washington, D.C., founded in 1957 and closed in 1974. It had been located at 1216 Connecticut Street, NW in Washington, D.C.. The gallery was associated with the Washington Color School artists.
Jack Hamilton Bush was a Canadian abstract painter. A member of Painters Eleven, his paintings are associated with the Color Field movement and Post-painterly Abstraction. Inspired by Henri Matisse and American abstract expressionist painters like Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis, Bush encapsulated joyful yet emotional feelings in his vibrant paintings, comparing them to jazz music. Clement Greenberg described him as a "supreme colorist", along with Kenneth Noland in 1984. Bush explained that capturing the feeling of a subject rather than its likeness was
a hard step for the art loving public to take, not to have the red look like a side of a barn but to let it be the red for its own sake and how it exists in the environment of that canvas.
Paul (Allen) Reed was an American artist most associated with the Washington Color School and Color Field Painting.
Artomatic is a multi-week, multimedia arts event held in the Washington, D.C. area. It was founded by Washington, D.C artist and arts activist George Koch. The non-juried, open event has provided a forum for artists of all types and abilities. There are also arts education and professional development workshops and discussions. Events were held from 1999 up to 2017 at intervals from one to three years, depending upon the availability of a site. Unable to have in-person events due to the COVID-19 pandemic, an online event was held in 2020. The organization has remained active in the local arts community.
Thomas Downing (1928–1985) was an American painter, associated with the Washington Color Field Movement, which also featured Sam Gilliam, Kenneth Noland, Howard Mehring, Alma Thomas, and Paul Reed.
Judith Godwin was an American abstract painter, associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement.
Hilda Shapiro Thorpe (1919–2000) was an American sculptor and painter. Thorpe taught a generation of metro Washington, D.C. artists.
Clarice Smith was an American painter and portraitist whose paintings have appeared in a number of exhibitions in the United States and Europe. With her husband, Robert H. Smith, Clarice Smith engaged in philanthropy, especially at the University of Maryland, where the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center is named for her, and at George Washington University, where the couple endowed the Smith Hall of Art. They also initiated a distinguished lecture series at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art.
Grace Thorp Gemberling was an American artist known for the broad range of her subjects in paintings having a pronounced psychological as well as aesthetic impact. One critic said they conveyed a mood that was "ethereal, bold and engaged." Another said her work showed "a disciplined hand and a romantic eye" together with "a magical color sense." Known for her control of detail and successful handling of line and blocks of color, she was said to paint in a modernist style that stayed clear of abstraction and was remembered by a teacher and fellow artist as "the finest woman painter in Philadelphia during the 20s and 30s."
F. Lennox Campello is an American artist, art critic, author, art dealer, curator, and visual arts blogger. In 2016 The Washington City Paper called him "one of the most interesting people of Washington, DC."
Sandra Pérez-Ramos is a Puerto Rican visual artist currently residing and working out of the Greater Washington, D.C. area. Pérez-Ramos earned a BA in Visual Arts for Public Communication in 1997 from the School of Communication at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras campus.
Wayson R. Jones is an American artist predominantly known for his textured abstract paintings. He resides in Mount Rainier, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C.
Mountains and Sea is a 1952 painting by American abstract expressionist painter Helen Frankenthaler. Painted when Frankenthaler was 23 years old, it was her first professionally exhibited work. Though initially panned by critics, Mountains and Sea later became her most influential and best known canvas.
