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Charles Compo is a contemporary American fine artist, composer and multi-instrumentalist.
Charles Compo was born in 1958 in Jamaica, Queens to jazz violinist Peter Compo and Broadway actress Faith Daltry Compo. He grew up surrounded by music in Ossining NY.
His father recorded and performed with jazz artists like Zoot Sims, Duke Jordon and Lionel Hampton and his mother was part of the original cast of Plain and Fancy on Broadway. His grandfather, Joseph Daltry, founded the music department at Wesleyan University and his grandmother, Faith Merriman, was a soprano with the San Francisco Opera under the direction of Gaetano Merola.
He studied music at his father's school, Compo Conservatory. At the age of 16 Compo began playing in and around New York City with funk bands, club bands, and touring oldies acts including The Ink Spots and The Platters.
In 1976 he moved to New York City, where he met Harry Smith. Compo composed music for Smith's Film Number 21, as well as for live presentations of Smith’s animations at the Film Makers Collective and Anthology Film Archives. In 1983 Smith introduced Compo to Moses Asch, who signed him to Folkways Records. The Smithsonian/Folkways released Compo's ''Seven Flute Solos in 1987. From 1986-1990, he worked as assistant to songwriter Ritchie Cordell.
In 1991, he appeared in a number of shows in and around New York City under the stage name Chuck Tempo, including Axel Rhodes in the Off Broadway production of Return to the Forbidden Planet. He also played Fast Eddie in the NBC daytime drama Another World. In 1992, Twyla Tharp commissioned Compo to compose Touch Dance. During this time, Compo also recorded, wrote, and performed on commercial projects for companies such as Hitachi, New York Lotto, ESPN, and Johnson and Johnson.
Compo studied composition and arranging with Don Sebesky and has performed and recorded with jazz artists Curtis Fowlkes, Sahib Shihab, and Roy Campbell Jr., William Hooker, and Ted Daniel. Compo also collaborated with notable hardcore producer Don Fury on the album Doctor Phibe's Portable Darkness. In addition to his consistent work with respected jazz artists, Compo has also supported and performed with pop artists such as Christina Aguilera, Martha Reeves, Bo Diddley, and Julee Cruise.
Originally a collector of Lower East Side artists in the 1980’s, notable artists in his collection of Rivington School artists include work by Shalom Neuman, Phil Rostek, Fa-Q (Kevin Wendell), and Miss Understood. He began a painting practice of his own as he naturally became immersed in the New York art scene, and worked briefly as an assistant to Andy Warhol in 1985 before Warhol's death. Compo’s painting style is considered an intuitive process, expression of narratives inspired by everyday life. His artwork has now been exhibited throughout the United States and Europe, including a painting selected to debut at the 2021 London Biennale. In December 2021 A selection of his work was acquired by The Yuko Nii Foundation’s Permanent Collection. The selected work “Down At The Rally” had also been awarded a special prize by MOMA curator Paulina Pabocha, at the WAH Center’s juried exhibition “America The Beautiful: The Real and Imagined”. The show was promoted in conjunction with Smithsonian Magazine’s Museum day, and ran from September–November 2021.
Sheila Hicks is an American artist. She is known for her innovative and experimental weavings and sculptural textile art that incorporate distinctive colors, natural materials, and personal narratives.
Sam Gilliam was an American abstract painter and sculptor. Born in Mississippi and raised in Kentucky, Gilliam spent his entire adult life in Washington, D.C., eventually being described as the "dean" of the city's arts community. Originally associated with the Washington Color School, a group of Washington-area artists that developed a form of abstract art from color field painting in the 1950s and 1960s, Gilliam began to move beyond the movement's core aesthetics of flat fields of color when he introduced sculptural elements to his paintings. His work has also been described as lyrical abstraction.
Ursula von Rydingsvard is a sculptor who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She is best known for creating large-scale works influenced by nature, primarily using cedar and other forms of timber.
Pamela Z is an American composer, performer, and media artist best known for her solo works for voice with electronic processing. In performance, she combines various vocal sounds including operatic bel canto, experimental extended techniques and spoken word, with samples and sounds generated by manipulating found objects. Z's musical aesthetic is one of sonic accretion, and she typically processes her voice in real time through the software program Max on a MacBook Pro as a means of layering, looping, and altering her live vocal sound. Her performance work often includes video projections and special controllers with sensors that allow her to use physical gestures to manipulate the sound and projected media.
Keith Anthony Morrison, Commander of Distinction (C.D.), born May 20, 1942), is a Jamaican-born painter, printmaker, educator, critic, curator and administrator.
El Anatsui is a Ghanaian sculptor active for much of his career in Nigeria. He has drawn particular international attention for his "bottle-top installations". These installations consist of thousands of aluminum pieces sourced from alcohol recycling stations and sewn together with copper wire, which are then transformed into metallic cloth-like wall sculptures. Such materials, while seemingly stiff and sturdy, are actually free and flexible, which often helps with manipulation when installing his sculptures. Anatsui was included in the 2023 Time 100 list of the world's most influential people.
Tim Okamura is a Japanese Canadian artist known for his contemporary realist portraits that combine graffiti and realism. His work has been on the cover of Time Magazine and has been featured in several major motion pictures. Okamura's paintings are featured in major permanent collections around the world such as London's National Portrait Gallery and Washington DC's National Portrait Gallery. He was also one of several artists to be shortlisted in 2006 for a proposed portrait of Queen Elizabeth of England.
Established in 1950, the List Visual Arts Center (LVAC) is the contemporary art museum of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is known for temporary exhibitions in its galleries located in the MIT Media Lab building, as well as its administration of the permanent art collection distributed throughout the university campus, faculty offices, and student housing.
Nick Cave is an American sculptor, dancer, performance artist, and professor. He is best known for his Soundsuit series: wearable assemblage fabric sculptures that are bright, whimsical, and other-worldly, often made with found objects. He also trained as a dancer with Alvin Ailey and often incorporates dance and performance into his works. His later sculptures have focused on color theory and included mixed media and large-scale installations. He lives in Chicago, Illinois, and directs the graduate fashion program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He continues to work on Soundsuits as well as works completed as a sculptor, dancer, and performance artist.
Penelope Umbrico is an American artist best known for her work that appropriates images found using search engines and picture sharing websites.
Aleksander Balos is a Romani-Polish-American artist and figurative painter, known for his classical photorealistic paintings depicting contemporary subject matter and narrative. He currently lives in the United States and is a naturalised American.
Jeffrey A. Gibson is an American Mississippi Choctaw/Cherokee painter and sculptor. He has lived and worked in Brooklyn, New York; Hudson, New York; and Germantown, New York.
Anthony Barboza is a photographer, historian, artist and writer. With roots originating from Cape Verde, and work that began in commercial art more than forty years ago, Barboza's artistic talents and successful career helped him to cross over and pursue his passions in the fine arts where he continues to contribute to the American art scene.
Irwin J. Rosenhouse (1924-2002) was an American visual artist based in New York City.
Simone Leigh is an American artist from Chicago who works in New York City in the United States. She works in various media including sculpture, installations, video, performance, and social practice. Leigh has described her work as auto-ethnographic, and her interests include African art and vernacular objects, performance, and feminism. Her work is concerned with the marginalization of women of color and reframes their experience as central to society. Leigh has often said that her work is focused on “Black female subjectivity,” with an interest in complex interplays between various strands of history. She was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2023.
Jefferson Pinder is an African-American performance artist whose work provokes commentary about race and struggle.
Beth Lipman is a contemporary artist working in glass. She is best known for her glass still-life compositions which reference the work of 16th- and 17th-century European painters.
Françoise Grossen is a textile artist known for her braided and knotted rope sculptures. She lives and works in New York City. Grossen’s work has been acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; and the State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia.
Jack Earl is an American ceramic artist and former teacher, known for drawing inspiration from his home state of Ohio to create rural pieces “with meticulous craftsmanship and astute details… to where you could smell the air, hear the silence and swat the flies.” Although his works hint at highly personal, intellectual, and narrative themes in an almost unsettling manner, Earl is “a self-described anti-intellectual who shuns the art world." He is known particularly for using his trademark format, the dos-a-dos : “This art form is like a book with two stories… the two seemingly incongruent images prompt the viewer to fill in the conceptual gap through poetic speculation.” His work often involves dogs or the character “Bill”, who is said to be a combination of Earl’s father-in-law, himself, and others. The titles to his pieces are typically lengthy, stream-of-consciousness narratives that suggest the folk or rural lifestyle. These are intended to add another dimension to the artwork. His work has received a notable response over his decades-long career, especially since he is regarded as “a master at reminding us that within the events we take for granted are moments of never-ending mystery and wonder.” Earl continues to live in Lakeview, Ohio with his wife, Fairlie.
Hasna Sal is an American glass sculptor known for designing and sculpting large-scale glass sculptures and glass jewelry.