Abstract expressionism is a post–World War II art movement in American painting, developed in New York City in the 1940s. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve international influence and put New York at the center of the Western art world, a role formerly filled by Paris.
Agnes Bernice Martin, was an American abstract painter. Her work has been defined as an "essay in discretion on inward-ness and silence". Although she is often considered or referred to as a minimalist, Martin considered herself an abstract expressionist and was one of the leading practitioners of Abstract Expressionism in the 20th century. She was awarded a National Medal of Arts from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1998. She was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 2004.
John Egerton Christmas Piper CH was an English painter, printmaker and designer of stained-glass windows and both opera and theatre sets. His work often focused on the British landscape, especially churches and monuments, and included tapestry designs, book jackets, screen-prints, photography, fabrics and ceramics. He was educated at Epsom College and trained at the Richmond School of Art followed by the Royal College of Art in London. He turned from abstraction early in his career, concentrating on a more naturalistic but distinctive approach, but often worked in several different styles throughout his career.
Willem de Kooning was a Dutch-American abstract expressionist artist. He was born in Rotterdam and moved to the United States in 1926, becoming an American citizen in 1962. In 1943, he married painter Elaine Fried.
The Smithsonian American Art Museum is a museum in Washington, D.C., part of the Smithsonian Institution. Together with its branch museum, the Renwick Gallery, SAAM holds one of the world's largest and most inclusive collections of art, from the colonial period to the present, made in the United States. The museum has more than 7,000 artists represented in the collection. Most exhibitions take place in the museum's main building, the old Patent Office Building, while craft-focused exhibitions are shown in the Renwick Gallery.
Ellsworth Kelly was an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker associated with hard-edge painting, Color Field painting and minimalism. His works demonstrate unassuming techniques emphasizing line, color and form, similar to the work of John McLaughlin and Kenneth Noland. Kelly often employed bright colors. He lived and worked in Spencertown, New York.
Roxy Paine is an American painter and sculptor widely known for his installations that often convey elements of conflict between the natural world and the artificial plains man creates. He was educated at both the College of Santa Fe in New Mexico and the Pratt Institute in New York.
Sylvia Snowden is an African American abstract painter who works with acrylics, oil pastels, and mixed media to create textured works that convey the "feel of paint". Many museums have hosted her art in exhibits, while several have added her works to their permanent collections.
Kathleen Kucka is an American visual artist whose practice includes abstract paintings, works on paper and prints. She is known for work that combines a conceptual approach with unique, sometimes unpredictable processes of mark-making such as the burning of canvas, pouring paint, and sewing. Critics note her work for its highly associative, open-ended quality, which evokes modernist formalism and natural phenomena from the microcosmic to the macrocosmic. Critic Stephanie Buhmann wrote that Kucka's work is inspired by nature and contemporary abstraction with attention to geometry, and leaves viewers "wondering if we are witnessing a scene documented through a microscope or captured from an aerial view ... we find ourselves reminded of the interrelations between all things, be they of a natural or man-made origin."
Washington Project for the Arts, founded in 1975, is a non-profit organization dedicated to the support and aid of artists in the Washington, D.C. area.
Paul Bloodgood was an artist and gallery owner who played an iconoclastic role in the New York art world for multiple decades. Bloodgood produced predominantly abstract paintings often relating to the works of earlier artists from Jackson Pollock to Paul Cézanne. He co-founded the AC Project Room in Lower Manhattan, and held solo exhibitions in several US cities, including New York, San Francisco, and Washington D.C., and at the Andreas Binder Gallery in Germany. His group exhibitions included shows at the Saatchi Gallery in London. He was a 2009 Guggenheim Fellow.
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.
Mala Breuer was an American Abstract Expressionist. Her work is in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Albright Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe, New Mexico.
David Suter is an American artist known for his many years producing editorial illustrations for clients such as The Washington Post, Time, and The New York Times. Known as "Suterisms" or "visual koans", his illustrations are notable for their use of bistable perception, in which Suter combines multiple images and concepts into a single image. Suter is also an accomplished fine art painter and sculptor.
Maggie Michael is an American painter. Born in Milwaukee, Michael has spent much of her career in Washington, D.C. A 1996 graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, from which she received a BFA, with honors, she received her MA from San Francisco State University in 2000 and her MFA from American University in 2002. She has received numerous awards during her career, including a grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation in 2004, the same year in which she was given a Young Artist Grant by the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities; she has also worked with the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Michael is married to the sculptor Dan Steinhilber. She has served on the faculty of the Corcoran College of Art and Design.
Zenith Gallery is a fine arts gallery in Washington, DC.
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."
James Frances Hilleary was a working architect and painter who gained prominence as a member of the Washington Color School movement.
Catriona Fraser is a British photographer and art dealer. She has lived in Washington, DC since 1996.
The Fraser Gallery were two Washington, DC (1996-2011) and Bethesda, Maryland (2002-2011) art galleries founded by Catriona Fraser, an ex-pat British photographer and art dealer. She has lived in Washington, DC since 1996.
