Dirk Reinhard Westphal (born 1963 in Columbus, Ohio) is an American artist living in New York City.
Since completing his MFA at California Institute of the Arts in 1989 he has been working in several different artistic processes, but with an emphasis in photography. Initially working commercially as a freelance photographer for magazines and newspaper, now he works solely in the studio. Presently, he does virtually no commercial work leaving the distribution of his work up to the several galleries he works with, namely Mixed Greens in NYC, [1] Baldwin Gallery in Aspen, Co., [2] the Cat Street Galleries in Hong Kong, [3] and Tim Olsen in Sydney, Australia. [4]
Although his work does not always look the same, the common threads would be mutation, artificial colors, and interpretations or perceptions of beauty. He hopes to somehow communicate his unique position on his favorite topics back to the viewer/consumer of his work, in order to spur a larger dialogue, not just with him and his own work, but outwardly in a broader way.
His photos have been published widely, the most obvious being in The New York Times, [5] Der Spiegel and People Magazine. His work has been reviewed in Art in America [6] and ArtForum.com amongst many other publications. His work is also held in several private and public collections.
Westphal married Elizabeth Anne Lewis in 2002. [7]
Andy Warhol was an American visual artist, film director and producer. A leading figure in the pop art movement, Warhol is considered one of the most important American artists of the second half of the 20th century. His works explore the relationship between artistic expression, advertising, and celebrity culture that flourished by the 1960s, and span a variety of media, including painting, silkscreening, photography, film, and sculpture. Some of his best-known works include the silkscreen paintings Campbell's Soup Cans (1962) and Marilyn Diptych (1962), the experimental films Empire (1964) and Chelsea Girls (1966), and the multimedia events known as the Exploding Plastic Inevitable (1966–67).
David Royston Bailey is an English photographer and director, most widely known for his fashion photography and portraiture, and role in shaping the image of the Swinging Sixties.
Samuel Lewis Francis was an American painter and printmaker.
James Albert Rosenquist was an American artist and one of the proponents of the pop art movement. Drawing from his background working in sign painting, Rosenquist's pieces often explored the role of advertising and consumer culture in art and society, utilizing techniques he learned making commercial art to depict popular cultural icons and mundane everyday objects. While his works have often been compared to those from other key figures of the pop art movement, such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, Rosenquist's pieces were unique in the way that they often employed elements of surrealism using fragments of advertisements and cultural imagery to emphasize the overwhelming nature of ads. He was a 2001 inductee into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame.
André Kertész, born Andor Kertész, was a Hungarian-born photographer known for his groundbreaking contributions to photographic composition and the photo essay. In the early years of his career, his then-unorthodox camera angles and style prevented his work from gaining wider recognition. Kertész never felt that he had gained the worldwide recognition he deserved. Today he is considered one of the seminal figures of 20th century photography.
Sally Mann HonFRPS is an American photographer known for making large format black and white photographs of people and places in her immediate surroundings: her children, husband, and rural landscapes, as well as self-portraits.
The Ashcan School, also called the Ash Can School, was an artistic movement in the United States during the late 19th-early 20th century that produced works portraying scenes of daily life in New York, often in the city's poorer neighborhoods.
Alan Bermowitz, known professionally as Alan Vega, was an American vocalist and visual artist, primarily known for his work with the electronic proto-punk duo Suicide.
African-American art is a broad term describing visual art created by African Americans. The range of art they have created, and are continuing to create, over more than two centuries is as varied as the artists themselves. Some have drawn on cultural traditions in Africa, and other parts of the world, for inspiration. Others have found inspiration in traditional African-American plastic art forms, including basket weaving, pottery, quilting, woodcarving and painting, all of which are sometimes classified as "handicrafts" or "folk art".
Cynthia Morris Sherman is an American artist whose work consists primarily of photographic self-portraits, depicting herself in many different contexts and as various imagined characters.
Robert Longo is an American artist, filmmaker, photographer and musician.
Dieter Roth was a Swiss artist who gained recognition for his diverse body of work, which included artist's books, editioned prints, sculpture, and creations from found materials, including rotting food stuffs. He was also known as Dieter Rot and Diter Rot.
Elizabeth Catlett, born as Alice Elizabeth Catlett, also known as Elizabeth Catlett Mora was an American and Mexican sculptor and graphic artist best known for her depictions of the Black-American experience in the 20th century, which often focused on the female experience. She was born and raised in Washington, D.C., to parents working in education, and was the grandchild of formerly enslaved people. It was difficult for a black woman at this time to pursue a career as a working artist. Catlett devoted much of her career to teaching. However, a fellowship awarded to her in 1946 allowed her to travel to Mexico City, where she settled and worked with the Taller de Gráfica Popular for twenty years and became head of the sculpture department for the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas. In the 1950s, her main means of artistic expression shifted from print to sculpture, though she never gave up the former.
Ryan Trecartin is an American artist and filmmaker currently based in Athens, Ohio. He studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, graduating with a BFA in 2004. Trecartin has since lived and worked in New Orleans, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Miami. His creative partner and long-term collaborator is Lizzie Fitch, an artist that he has been working with since 2000.
Anita E. Kunz, OC, DFA, RCA is a Canadian-born artist and illustrator. She was the first woman and first Canadian to have a solo exhibit at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
Ed Rossbach was an American fiber artist. His career began with ceramics and weaving in the 1940s, but evolved over the next decade into basket making, as he experimented playfully with traditional techniques and nontraditional materials such as plastic and newspaper.
Norman Wilfred Lewis was an American painter, scholar, and teacher. Lewis, who was African-American and of Bermudian descent, was associated with abstract expressionism, and used representational strategies to focus on black urban life and his community's struggles.
Anna-Lou Leibovitz is an American portrait photographer best known for her portraits, particularly of celebrities, which often feature subjects in intimate settings and poses. Leibovitz's Polaroid photo of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, taken five hours before Lennon's murder, is considered one of Rolling Stone magazine's most famous cover photographs. The Library of Congress declared her a Living Legend, and she is the first woman to have a feature exhibition at Washington's National Portrait Gallery.
Douglas Bizzaro and Elizabeth Moss are American photographers and film directors working in the fields of fashion, advertising, and fine art.
The terms California Impressionism and California Plein-Air Painting describe the large movement of 20th century artists who worked out of doors, directly from nature in California, United States. Their work became popular in the San Francisco Bay Area and Southern California in the first three decades after the turn of the 20th century. Considered to be a regional variation on American Impressionism, the California Impressionists are a subset of the California Plein-Air School.