Brenda Goodman (born in Detroit, Michigan in 1943 [1] ) is an American artist and painter currently living and working in Pine Hill, New York. Her artistic practice includes paintings, works on paper, and sculptures. [2] [3] [4]
Goodman received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1965 from the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, Michigan. [1] She received an honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from the College for Creative Studies in 2017. [5] From 1965 to 1975, when she moved to New York City, Goodman was a member of the Cass Corridor Movement, the group of artists from Detroit's Cass Corridor neighborhood whose work responded to the post-industrial decline sweeping the country. It has been noted that "as one of the few women associated with the movement, Goodman’s work is especially notable." [6]
Goodman has described her intuitive approach to painting as “akin to the improvisations of jazz”. [1] [6] She has been recognized for her unorthodox use of painting materials and her exploration of both abstraction and representation in her work, which often combines elements of both. [7] [8] [9] Her self-portraits have been called "one of the most powerful and disturbing achievements of portraiture in modern art". [10]
John Yau writes "...Goodman had absorbed lessons from Surrealism, Expressionism, and Symbolism, as well as from Hieronymus Bosch, James Ensor, Alfred Kubin, and Goya." [11]
Goodman's work has been exhibited at numerous galleries and museums including one-person exhibitions at Sikkema Jenkins Gallery, Jeff Bailey Gallery, the College for Creative Studies Center Galleries, Paul Kotula Projects, and Life on Mars Gallery. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield, Connecticut. [1]
Collections of Goodman's work can currently be found within: The Museum of Modern Art, The Birmingham Museum of Art, The Carnegie Museum of Art, The California Center for the Arts Museum, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The Agnes Gund Foundation, Cranbrook Art Museum, The Santa Barbara Museum of Art, The Detroit Institute of Arts, The Museum of Contemporary Arts in Chicago, The First National Bank of Chicago, The American Medical Association Headquarters, and The Rutgers-Camden Collection of Art. [1]
Goodman has been the recipient of numerous awards and grants. She received a Visual Arts Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, two New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships in Painting, and an award from the Academy of Arts and Letters. [9] [12] Goodman has been a visiting artist at many esteemed colleges and universities across the United States and Canada including: The University of the Arts, The Parsons School of Design, Bard College, Hunter College, The University of Michigan, The University of Tennessee, and The University of Windsor.
Angela Dufresne is a Brooklyn based American artist known for paintings that explore narrative in a variety of ways. Dufresne holds a BFA from Kansas City Art Institute, MO and an MFA from Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia, PA. She is currently faculty at the Rhode Island School of Design.
Lois Dodd, is an American painter and educator. Dodd was a key member of New York's postwar art scene. She played a large part and was involved in the wave of modern artists including Alex Katz and Yvonne Jacquette who explored the coast of Maine in the latter half of the 20th century.
Susanna J. Coffey is an American artist and educator. She is the F. H. Sellers Professor in Painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and lives and works in New York City. She was elected a member the National Academy of Design in 1999.
Stephen Westfall is an American painter, critic, and professor at Rutgers University and Bard College.
Katherine Bradford, née Houston, is an American artist based in New York City, known for figurative paintings, particularly of swimmers, that critics describe as simultaneously representational, abstract and metaphorical. She began her art career relatively late and has received her widest recognition in her seventies. Critic John Yau characterizes her work as independent of canon or genre dictates, open-ended in terms of process, and quirky in its humor and interior logic.
Barbara Takenaga is an American artist known for swirling, abstract paintings that have been described as psychedelic and cosmic, as well as scientific, due to their highly detailed, obsessive patterning. She gained wide recognition in the 2000s, as critics such as David Cohen and Kenneth Baker placed her among a leading edge of artists renewing abstraction with paintings that emphasized visual beauty and excess, meticulous technique, and optical effects. Her work suggests possibilities that range from imagined landscapes and aerial maps to astronomical and meteorological phenomena to microscopic views of cells, aquatic creatures or mineral cross-sections. In a 2018 review, The New Yorker described Takenaga as "an abstractionist with a mystic’s interest in how the ecstatic can emerge from the laborious."
Jiha Moon is a contemporary artist who focuses on painting, printmaking, and sculptural ceramic objects. Born in Daegu, South Korea, Moon is currently based in Tallahassee, Florida, after years of living and working in Atlanta, Georgia. She joined Florida State University's Art department faculty in the fall of 2023.
Jennie C. Jones is an African-American artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has been described, by Ken Johnson, as evoking minimalism, and paying tribute to the cross-pollination of different genres of music, especially jazz. As an artist, she connects most of her work between art and sound. Such connections are made with multiple mediums, from paintings to sculptures and paper to audio collages. In 2012, Jones was the recipient of the Joyce Alexander Wien Prize, one of the biggest awards given to an individual artist in the United States. The prize honors one African-American artist who has proven their commitment to innovation and creativity, with an award of 50,000 dollars. In December 2015 a 10-year survey of Jones's work, titled Compilation, opened at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, Texas.
Mernet Larsen is an American artist known for idiosyncratic, disorienting narrative paintings that depict a highly abstracted, parallel world of enigmatic and mundane scenarios. Since 2000, her work has been characterized by flat, origami-like figures composed of plank-like shapes and blocky volumes and non-illusionistic space with a dislocated, aggregated vision freely combining incompatible pictorial systems—reverse, isometric, parallel, and conventional Renaissance perspectives—and various visual distortions. Critics have described her approach as "a heady, unlikely brew" taking compositional cues from wide-ranging sources, including the modernist geometries of Constructivist artists like El Lissitzky, Japanese Bunraku puppet theater and emaki narrative scrolls, early Chinese landscapes, and Indian miniatures and palace paintings. Roberta Smith wrote that Larsen's works "navigate the divide between abstraction and representation with a form of geometric figuration that owes less to Cubo-Futurism than to de Chirico, architectural rendering and early Renaissance painting of the Sienese kind. They relish human connection and odd, stretched out, sometimes contradictory perspectival effects, often perpetuated by radical shifts in scale."
Mary Lum is an American visual artist whose paintings, collages and works on paper reference the urban environment, architectural forms and systems. Critic John Yau writes, "Mary Lum’s paintings on paper are based on collages, which are made from things she uses or encounters in her everyday life as well as photographs she takes of the places she visits. "
Paula Wilson is an African American "mixed media" artist creating works examining women's identities through a lens of cultural history. She uses sculpture, collage, painting, installation, and printmaking methods such as silkscreen, lithography, and woodblock. In 2007 Wilson moved from Brooklyn, New York, to Carrizozo, New Mexico, where she currently lives and works with her woodworking partner Mike Lagg.
Josephine Halvorson is an American contemporary painter, sculptor, and print maker based in Massachusetts. She is best known for her on-site paintings, drawing from scenes of the natural world and everyday life. Her work bends material fact and immaterial illusion. Halvorson is a Professor of Art and Chair of Graduate Studies in Painting at Boston University.
Clarity Haynes is a queer feminist American artist and writer. She currently lives and works in New York, NY. Haynes is best known for her unconventional painted portraits of torsos, focusing on queer, trans, cis female and nonbinary bodies. She is a former member of the tART Collective and the Corpus VI Collective.
Joanna Pousette-Dart is an American abstract artist, based in New York City. She is best known for her distinctive shaped-canvas paintings, which typically consist of two or three stacked, curved-edge planes whose arrangements—from slightly precarious to nested—convey a sense of momentary balance with the potential to rock, tilt or slip. She overlays the planes with meandering, variable arabesque lines that delineate interior shapes and contours, often echoing the curves of the supports. Her work draws on diverse inspirations, including the landscapes of the American Southwest, Islamic, Mozarabic and Catalan art, Chinese landscape painting and calligraphy, and Mayan art, as well as early and mid-20th-century modernism. Critic John Yau writes that her shaped canvasses explore "the meeting place between abstraction and landscape, quietly expanding on the work of predecessors", through a combination of personal geometry and linear structure that creates "a sense of constant and latent movement."
John Dilg is an American painter based in the Midwest. He is known for idiosyncratic landscapes that use a pared-down visual vocabulary drawing on imagination, vernacular artifacts, folk art and art historical sources. Critics describe them as dreamlike ruminations on place, the fragility of nature, the collective unconscious and mystical storytelling. Precedents for his work that have been cited include 19th-century Romantic landscape painters, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O’Keeffe and Horace Pippin, and the imaginary vistas of Henri Rousseau.
Brenda Zlamany is an American artist best known for portraiture that combines Old Master technique with a postmodern conceptual approach. She gained attention beginning in the 1990s, when critics such as Artforum's Barry Schwabsky, Donald Kuspit and John Yau identified her among a small group of figurative painters reviving the neglected legacies of portraiture and classical technique by introducing confrontational subject matter, psychological insight and social critique. Her early portraits of well-known male artists, such as Chuck Close and Leon Golub, reversed conventional artist/sitter gender and power dynamics; her later projects upend the traditionally "heroic" nature of portraiture by featuring underrepresented groups and everyday people.
Ann Margaret (Stroman) Mikolowski was a twentieth-century American contemporary artist. She was a painter of portrait miniatures and waterscapes, as well as a printmaker and illustrator of printed matter. Mikolowski was part of Detroit's Cass Corridor artist movement and co-founder of The Alternative Press.
Peter Beresford Williams was an American painter, educator, and social activist. His paintings have been described by writer and artist William Eckhardt Kohler as "in no particular order: hallucinogenic, acerbic, pained, beautiful, confessional, obsessive, critical, jarring, wild, weird, and profoundly human". In 2020, Williams received the Artists' Legacy Foundation Artist Award.
Amanda Church is an American artist known for abstract paintings that reference the human figure and other discernible elements. Her works straddle representational and formalist art traditions, suggesting recognizable body parts, objects, and perspectival elements in an otherwise abstract field. Church's distinctive use of contrasting style elements has been consistently noted by critics such as Hyperallergic's Cora Fisher, who described Church's work as "whimsically overruling the left-right brain dichotomy as well as the traditionally gendered axis that divides geometric and decorative art." Church received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2015 and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant in 2017, among other awards. Her work has been covered in publications such as The New York Times, The Boston Globe, ARTnews, Hyperallergic and Forbes Magazine. Her paintings have been exhibited in major U.S. cities as well as internationally, in galleries and museums such as the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the Aldrich Museum. She lives and works in New York.
Elliott Green is an artist who paints abstract and gesturally expressive landscape works that depict surreal geographic terrains. He is based in upstate New York. He was a recipient of the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 1993 and the Rome Prize in 2011. His work has been featured in magazines such as Hyperallergic and Artforum.