Agnes Bernice Martin was an American abstract painter known for her minimalist style and abstract expressionism. Born in Canada, she moved to the United States in 1931, where she pursued higher education and became a U.S. citizen in 1950. Martin's artistic journey began in New York City, where she immersed herself in modern art and developed a deep interest in abstraction. Despite often being labeled a minimalist, she identified more with abstract expressionism. Her work has been defined as an "essay in discretion, inwardness and silence."
Josef Albers was a German-born American artist and educator who is considered one of the most influential 20th-century art teachers in the United States. Born in 1888 in Bottrop, Westphalia, Germany, into a Roman Catholic family with a background in craftsmanship, Albers received practical training in diverse skills like engraving glass, plumbing, and wiring during his childhood. He later worked as a schoolteacher from 1908 to 1913 and received his first public commission in 1918 and moved to Munich in 1919.
Eva Hesse was a German-born American sculptor known for her pioneering work in materials such as latex, fiberglass, and plastics. She is one of the artists who ushered in the postminimal art movement in the 1960s.
Cecily Brown is a British painter. Her style displays the influence of a variety of contemporary painters, from Willem de Kooning, Francis Bacon and Joan Mitchell, to Old Masters like Rubens, Poussin and Goya. Brown lives and works in New York.
The Yale School of Art is the art school of Yale University. Founded in 1869 as the first professional fine arts school in the United States, it grants Masters of Fine Arts degrees to students completing a two-year course in graphic design, painting/printmaking, photography, or sculpture.
Svetlana Leontief Alpers is an American art historian, also a professor, writer and critic. Her specialty is Dutch Golden Age painting, a field she revolutionized with her 1984 book The Art of Describing. She has also written on Tiepolo, Rubens, Bruegel, and Velázquez, among others.
Marisa Olson is an artist, writer, curator, and former punk singer. In 2004 she auditioned for popular American television show American Idol as an artistic project. Over the course of three months of daily "training exercises," it is revealed that she is critiquing gender norms entrenched by the show, while also using the popularity of her site to speak to readers about using their voice to vote in elections as well as on the show.
Squeak Carnwath is an American contemporary painter and arts educator. She is a professor emerita of art at the University of California, Berkeley. She has a studio in Oakland, California, where she has lived and worked since 1970.
Janet Sobel, born Jennie Olechovsky, was a Ukrainian-born American Abstract Expressionist painter whose career started mid-life, at age forty-five in 1938. Sobel pioneered the drip painting technique; her work directly influenced Jackson Pollock. She was credited as exhibiting the first instance of all-over painting seen by Clement Greenberg, a notable art critic.
Tameka Norris, also known as T.J. Dedeaux-Norris and Meka Jean, is an American visual and performing artist. Norris uses painting, sculpture, and performance art to create work about racial identity and the simultaneous visibility and invisibility of blackness through cultural appropriation in modern society. Her work critiques the presence of the Black body in the history of painting and fine art.
Elizabeth Okie Paxton (1878–1972) was an American painter, married to another artist William McGregor Paxton (1869–1941). The Paxtons were part of the Boston School, a prominent group of artists known for works of beautiful interiors, landscapes, and portraits of their wealthy patrons. Her paintings were widely exhibited and sold well.
Bettina von Zwehl is a German artist who lives and works in London. She has centred her artistic practice on photography, installation and archival exploration evolving through artist-residencies in museums. Her work explores representations of the human condition and human concerns through an observational approach combined with a distinctive use of the profile view and silhouette that continues to underpin her practice.
Rose Theodora Piper was an American painter best known for her semi-abstract, blues-inspired paintings of the 1940s. In the 1950s, out of financial necessity, she became a textile designer. For nearly thirty years, she worked as Rose Ransier, designing knit fabrics.
Black Iris, formerly called Black Iris III, is a 1926 oil painting by Georgia O'Keeffe. Art historian Linda Nochlin interpreted Black Iris as a morphological metaphor for female genitalia. O'Keeffe rejected such interpretations in a 1939 text accompanying an exhibition of her work, in which she wrote: "Well—I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower you hung all your own associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower—and I don't." She attempted to do away with sexualized readings of her work by adding a lot of detail.
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.
Caitlin Cherry is an African-American painter, sculptor, and educator.
Walter S. Feldman was a modernist American painter, printmaker and mosaicist who spent most of his life and career in Providence, Rhode Island. He is best known for his expressionist paintings, woodcuts, and public commission mosaics and stained glass windows. He became a student at the Yale School of Art in 1942. After graduating from the Yale University of Fine Arts and Yale University School of Design, he became an art educator at Brown University for over 5 decades. In 1990, Feldman founded and was the principal designer of art books of Ziggurat Press in Providence.
Marcia Hall, who usually publishes as Marcia B. Hall, is an American art historian, who is the Laura H. Carnell Professor of Renaissance Art at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture of Temple University in Philadelphia. Hall's scholarship has concentrated on Italian Renaissance painting, mostly of the sixteenth century, and especially Raphael and Michelangelo.
Wendy Edwards is an American artist known for vibrant, tactile paintings rooted in organic forms and landscape, which have ranged from representation and figuration to free-form abstraction. Her work has been strongly influenced by the 1970s Pattern and Decoration movement and its embrace of ornamentation, repetition, edge-to-edge composition, sensuality and a feminist vision grounded in women's life experience. Critics note in Edwards's paintings an emphasis on surfaces and the materiality of paint, a rhythmic use of linear or geometric elements, and an intuitive orientation toward action, response and immediacy rather than premeditation. In a 2020 review, Boston Globe critic Cate McQuaid wrote, "Edwards's pieces are exuberant, edgy, and thoughtful ... [her] sweet, tart colors and delicious textures make the senses a gateway into larger notions about women and men, creation and mortality."
