Ansel Easton Adams was an American landscape photographer and environmentalist known for his black-and-white images of the American West. He helped found Group f/64, an association of photographers advocating "pure" photography which favored sharp focus and the use of the full tonal range of a photograph. He and Fred Archer developed an exacting system of image-making called the Zone System, a method of achieving a desired final print through a deeply technical understanding of how tonal range is recorded and developed during exposure, negative development, and printing. The resulting clarity and depth of such images characterized his photography.
Morton Wayne Thiebaud was an American painter known for his colorful works depicting commonplace objects—pies, lipsticks, paint cans, ice cream cones, pastries, and hot dogs—as well as for his landscapes and figure paintings. Thiebaud is associated with the pop art movement because of his interest in objects of mass culture, although his early works, executed during the fifties and sixties, slightly predate the works of the classic pop artists. Thiebaud used heavy pigment and exaggerated colors to depict his subjects, and the well-defined shadows characteristic of advertisements are almost always included in his work.
Michael McClure was an American poet, playwright, songwriter, and novelist. After moving to San Francisco as a young man, he found fame as one of the five poets who read at the famous San Francisco Six Gallery reading in 1955, which was rendered in barely fictionalized terms in Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums. He soon became a key member of the Beat Generation and was immortalized as Pat McLear in Kerouac's Big Sur.
Roger Lee Reynolds is a Pulitzer prize-winning American composer. He is known for his capacity to integrate diverse ideas and resources, for the seamless blending of traditional musical sounds and those newly enabled by technology. His work responds to text of poetic or mythological origins. His reputation rests, in part, upon his “wizardry in sending music flying through space: whether vocal, instrumental, or computerized”. This signature feature first appeared in the notationally innovative theater piece, The Emperor of Ice-Cream (1961–62).
Harold Craig Reynolds is an American former professional baseball second baseman, who played in Major League Baseball (MLB) for the Seattle Mariners, Baltimore Orioles, and California Angels. Since his retirement, he has become a television analyst, working for MLB Network and Fox Sports.
David Carson is an American graphic designer, art director and surfer. He is best known for his innovative magazine design, and use of experimental typography. He was the art director for the magazine Ray Gun, in which he employed much of the typographic and layout approach for which he is known. In particular, his widely imitated aesthetic defined the so-called "grunge typography" era.
Gary Charles Erbe, known as Raven Grimassi, was an American author of over 20 books, including topics on Wicca, Stregheria, witchcraft and neo-paganism. He popularized Stregheria, the religious practice of witchcraft with roots in Italy. Grimassi presented this material in the form of neo-paganism through his books. Raven had been a practitioner of witchcraft for over 45 years and was the co-director of the Ash, Birch and Willow tradition. He died of pancreatic cancer on March 10, 2019.
David C. Driskell was an American artist, scholar and curator; recognized for his work in establishing African-American Art as a distinct field of study. In his lifetime, Driskell was cited as one of the world’s leading authorities on the subject of African-American Art. Driskell held the title of Distinguished University Professor of Art, Emeritus, at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Arthur F. Mathews was an American Tonalist painter who was one of the founders of the American Arts and Crafts Movement. Trained as an architect and artist, he and his wife Lucia Kleinhans Mathews had a significant effect on the evolution of Californian art in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His students include Granville Redmond, Xavier Martinez, Armin Hansen, Percy Gray, Gottardo Piazzoni, Ralph Stackpole, Mary Colter, Maynard Dixon, Rinaldo Cuneo and Francis McComas.
The Bay Area Figurative Movement was a mid-20th Century art movement made up of a group of artists in the San Francisco Bay Area who abandoned working in the prevailing style of Abstract Expressionism in favor of a return to figuration in painting during the 1950s and onward into the 1960s. Spanning two decades, this art movement is often broken down into three groups, or generations: the First Generation, the Bridge Generation, and the Second Generation.
Manuel John Neri Jr. was an American sculptor who is recognized for his life-size figurative sculptures in plaster, bronze, and marble. In Neri's work with the figure, he conveys an emotional inner state that is revealed through body language and gesture. Since 1965 his studio was in Benicia, California; in 1981 he purchased a studio in Carrara, Italy, for working in marble. Over four decades, beginning in the early 1970s, Neri worked primarily with the same model, Mary Julia Klimenko, creating drawings and sculptures that merge contemporary concerns with Modernist sculptural forms.
Cliff Nielsen is an American book illustrator and comic book artist. The Internet Speculative Fiction Database credits him with cover art for about 500 book and magazine covers published since 1994 Nielsen is best known for his work on projects such as Star Wars, The X-Files, Chronicles of Narnia among many projects including advertising campaigns, designs, and magazines. His illustrations have been recognized for their excellence by the Society of Illustrators, Print, and Spectrum among others. Feature articles focusing on his work appear in design publications and fanzine magazines. Nielsen has been an international speaker on digital art and has served as a judge for the Society of Illustrators and a variety of professional illustration award programs. He lives in Los Angeles, California.
Lynda Rae Resnick is an American billionaire businesswoman. Resnick is married to Stewart Resnick, who is her business partner, and through their holding company The Wonderful Company, they own the POM Wonderful and Fiji Water brands, Wonderful Pistachios and Almonds, Wonderful Halos, JUSTIN Wines, Landmark Wines, JNSQ Wines and the Teleflora floral wire service company.
William Seltzer Rice was an American woodblock print artist, art educator and author, associated with the Arts and Crafts movement in Northern California.
Carl Eytel was a German American artist who built his reputation for paintings and drawings of desert subjects in the American Southwest. Immigrating to the United States in 1885, he settled in Palm Springs, California in 1903. With an extensive knowledge of the Sonoran Desert, Eytel traveled with author George Wharton James as he wrote the successful Wonders of the Colorado Desert, and contributed over 300 drawings to the 1908 work. While he enjoyed success as an artist, he lived as an ascetic and would die in poverty. Eytel's most important work, Desert Near Palm Springs, hangs in the History Room of the California State Library.
Bill Martin was a realist and visionary artist. "Bill Martin's images possess an inexplicable compelling power," wrote Walter Hopps, the Smithsonian Institution's Curator of the 20th Century American Art Collection.
Pomegranate Communications is a publishing and printing company formerly based in Petaluma, California, having moved to Portland, Oregon in 2013. The company, founded by Thomas F. Burke, began by publishing works of psychedelic art from San Francisco in 1968 under the name ThoFra Distributors. It distributed posters for concerts at Avalon Ballroom and The Fillmore.
Gage Taylor was a visionary artist known for his psychedelic-inspired landscapes. Art critic Thomas Albright wrote, "Taylor's landscape fantasies combined profuse detail with heavier, painterly surfaces and achieved a 'naive' and nostalgic flavor, like the work of a visionary Grandma Moses."
R. Kenton Nelson is an American painter and contemporary artist from California.
Margo Humphrey is an American printmaker, illustrator and art teacher. She earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from Stanford after earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the California College of Arts and Crafts in printmaking. She has traveled in Africa, Brazil, the Caribbean, and Europe and has taught in Fiji, Nigeria, Uganda, and the University of Maryland. As a printmaker, she is known for her "bold, expressive use of color and freedom of form", creating works that are "engaging, exuberant and alive." Her techniques for layering colors are uncommon in lithography. Her work is considered to be "in the forefront of contemporary printmaking."
