J. J. McCracken (born 1972, [1] Mifflin, PA) is an American artist who lives and works in Washington, DC. McCracken creates "sculptures, performances, and immersive installations focused on free speech, social justice and resource equity." [2]
McCracken received a B.A. in Anthropology from The College of William and Mary in 1995, and an M.F.A. in Studio Art from The George Washington University in 2005. Subsequently, she attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.
McCracken has been called "among the smartest artists in Washington" by the Washington Post . [3] Her work, installations and performances has been exhibited and performed in museums, galleries and universities. [3] [4] [5] In 2018, she was one of 10 artists selected for the "Identify" series of performance/lectures at the National Portrait Gallery's "Identify" series. [6]
Beth Cavener, also known as Beth Cavener Stichter, is an American artist based out of Montana. A classically trained sculptor, her process involves building complex metal armatures to support massive amounts of clay. Cavener is best known for her fantastical animal figures, which embody the complexity of human emotion and behavior.
Artisphere was an arts center located in the Rosslyn section of Arlington, Virginia. The center encompassed four performance venues, three visual art galleries, an artist in residence studio, a 4,000 square foot ballroom, studio space, social gathering spots, food service facilities, a bar and lounge area as well as outdoor terraces. Programming includes visual art, theatre, live music, film, new media, family programs, dance, conferences and private events.
Peter Grippe was an American sculptor, printmaker, and painter. As a sculptor, he worked in bronze, terracotta, wire, plaster, and found objects. His "Monument to Hiroshima" series (1963) used found objects cast in bronze sculptures to evoke the chaotic humanity of the Japanese city after its incineration by atomic bomb. Other Grippe Surrealist sculptural works address less warlike themes, including that of city life. However, his expertise extended beyond sculpture to ink drawings, watercolor painting, and printmaking (intaglio). He joined and later directed Atelier 17, the intaglio studio founded in London and moved to New York at the beginning of World War II by its founder, Stanley William Hayter. Today, Grippe's 21 Etchings and Poems, a part of the permanent collection at the Davis Museum and Cultural Center at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, is available as part of the museum's virtual collection.
Joyce J. Scott is an African-American artist, sculptor, quilter, performance artist, installation artist, print-maker, lecturer and educator. Named a MacArthur Fellow in 2016, and a Smithsonian Visionary Artist in 2019, Scott is best known for her figurative sculptures and jewelry using free form, off-loom beadweaving techniques, similar to a peyote stitch. Each piece is often constructed using thousands of glass seed beads or pony beads, and sometimes other found objects or materials such as glass, quilting and leather. In 2018, she was hailed for working in new medium — a mixture of soil, clay, straw, and cement — for a sculpture meant to disintegrate and return to the earth. Scott is influenced by a variety of diverse cultures, including Native American and African traditions, Mexican, Czech, and Russian beadwork, illustration and comic books, and pop culture.
Cassils is a performance artist, body builder, and personal trainer from Montreal, Quebec, Canada now based in Los Angeles, California, United States. Their work uses the body in a sculptural fashion, integrating feminism, body art, and gay male aesthetics. Cassils is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Creative Capital Grant, a United States Artists Fellowship, a California Community Foundation Visual Artist Fellowship (2012), several Canada Council for the Arts grants, and the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Visual Arts Fellowship. Cassils is gender non-conforming, transmasculine, and goes by singular they pronouns.
Jefferson Pinder is an African-American performance artist whose work provokes commentary about race and struggle.
Ann Stewart Anderson was an artist from Louisville, Kentucky whose paintings have "focused on the rituals of being a woman." Anderson is known for her part in creating the collective work, the "Hot Flash Fan," a fabric art work about menopause funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. She was the executive director of the Kentucky Foundation for Women.
Jacolby Satterwhite is an American contemporary artist recognizable for fusing performance, digital animation, and personal ephemera to create immersive installations inspired by art history, "expanded cinema", and the pop-cultural worlds of music videos, social media, and video games. Satterwhite was awarded the United States Artist Francie Bishop Good & David Horvitz Fellowship in 2016 and has exhibited work at institutions like the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Minneapolis Insititute of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, New Museum, New York, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. He is based in Brooklyn, NY.
Robert McCurdy is an American artist known for his photorealistic oil paintings and photographs of notable figures in contemporary history. Among works held in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., are paintings of Toni Morrison, Neil Armstrong, the Dalai Lama, Muhammad Ali, Nelson Mandela, and others. In 2002, McCurdy was commissioned to paint a portrait of US Representative Martin Sabo for the US Capitol.
Nell is an Australian artist working across performance, installation, video, painting and sculpture. In 2013 she won the University of Queensland Self-Portrait Award. In 2017 she was inducted into the Maitland City Hall of Fame in the category of The Arts.
Chawky Frenn is a Lebanese-born American artist, author, and art professor. He currently teaches art at George Mason University in northern Virginia. His highly realistic paintings have strong narrative social and political elements. Frenn is a former Fulbright Scholar, and currently resides in the Greater Washington, D.C. area.
Michael Janis is an American artist currently residing in Washington, DC where he is one of the directors of the Washington Glass School. He is known for his work on glass using the exceptionally difficult sgraffito technique on glass.
Wilmer Wilson IV is an American artist based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania who works in performance, photography, sculpture, and other media. Although typically identified as a performance artist, Wilson also works with sculpture and photography.
Nestor Hernández was an American photographer and photojournalist of Cuban descent, based in Washington, DC. Hernández was best known for his street photography of his Washington, DC neighborhood as well as street scenes of Cuba, Ghana and Mali, where he led arts-based projects for children and young adults.
Joan Belmar is an American artist. He is a painter who uses a three dimensional technique using painting and collage processes with both painted and untreated Mylar/paper strips in circles and curvilinear shapes variations which then produced different and changes degrees of transparency, as light and the viewer move in relation to the work. He was a Washington, DC Mayor's Art Award Finalist in 2007 as an outstanding emerging artist. The DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities has also awarded him with an Artist Fellowship Program grant in 2009, and in 2011 he was awarded an Individual Artist Grant by the Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County, MD. He is a two-time recipient of the Maryland Arts Council Individual Artist Grant in Visual Arts: Painting, in 2010and 2013.
Judith Peck is an American artist currently residing in the Greater Washington, D.C. area who is predominantly known for her allegorical figurative oil paintings.
Amber Robles-Gordon is an American mixed media visual artist. She resides in Washington, DC and predominantly works with found objects and textiles to create assemblages, large-scale sculptures, installations and public artwork.
Tazuko Ichikawa is an artist, primarily a sculptor, based in the Washington, D.C. area. Her studio is in Maryland. The forms of her sculptures are abstract, organic, and streamlined, and she employs natural materials. Curved, draping, bending, and flowing shapes repeat throughout her body of work.
Alessandra Torres is an American visual artist of Puerto Rican ancestry. Torres was raised in Puerto Rico, and now she resides in Baltimore, Maryland.
Michelle Lisa Herman is an American contemporary and conceptual artist who works with sculpture, video, installation, and painting. Herman's work draws on theoretical and philosophical research, feminist and disability politics, comedy, and conceptualism and investigates ideas of agency and invisible systems of power in technologically mediated society. Herman is currently based in Washington, DC.