James Seawright (1936-2022) was an American modernist sculptor.
Seawright was born in Jackson, Mississippi, and grew up in Greenwood, Mississippi. [1] As a boy, he discovered machine tools at a friend’s house, which launched his lifelong love of making objects by hand. Later, when serving in the United States Navy, he pursued every available opportunity to work with new tools and materials, gravitating toward the machine shop on his ship and the hobby shops on the base, where he made furniture. [2]
When he moved to New York in 1961, Seawright prowled Canal Street for the electronic parts that proliferated after World War II. Inspired by the Bauhaus movement, which he said, “was doing revolutionary things with light even before the war,” he realized that he could “use modern electronics and controlled technology to apply to sculpture.” Seawright became a pioneer of interactive sculptures, using mirrors and electronic components in his work. [3] Mirror XV, in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art, is an example of this phase of his work.
He started teaching at Princeton University in 1969 and served as acting director and then director of the Program in Visual Arts from 1975 to 2001. He is recognized as a pioneer of kinetic, electronic sculpture.
The Butler Institute of American Art (Youngstown, Ohio), the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art (New York City), [4] the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (Kansas City, Missouri), the Neuberger Museum of Art, (Purchase College, Purchase, New York), the New Jersey State Museum (Trenton, New Jersey), [5] the Rose Art Museum (Brandeis University), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York City), [6] the University of Michigan Museum of Art (Ann Arbor, Michigan), [7] the Smithsonian American Art Museum, [8] the Weatherspoon Art Museum, [9] the Hunter Museum, [10] and the Whitney Museum (New York City) are among the public collections holding works by James Seawright. [11] [12]
Nam June Paik was a Korean American artist. He worked with a variety of media and is considered to be the founder of video art. He is credited with the first use (1974) of the term "electronic super highway" to describe the future of telecommunications.
George Warren Rickey was an American kinetic sculptor.
George Segal was an American painter and sculptor associated with the pop art movement. He was presented with the United States National Medal of Arts in 1999.
The Honolulu Museum of Art is an art museum in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi. The museum is the largest of its kind in the state, and was founded in 1922 by Anna Rice Cooke. The museum has one of the largest single collections of Asian and Pan-Pacific art in the United States, and since its official opening on April 8, 1927, its collections have grown to more than 55,000 works of art.
Jim Perry is an American sculptor. He received a BA in sculpture from Bard College. He began his sculpture career in the early 1970s in New York City where he exhibited extensively and, in 1975, was included in the Whitney Biennial.
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Toshiko Takaezu was an American ceramic artist, painter, sculptor, and educator with an oeuvre spanning a wide range of mediums, including ceramics, weavings, bronzes, and paintings. She is noted for her pioneer work in ceramics and has played an important role in the international revival of interest in the ceramic arts. Takaezu was known for her rounded, closed ceramic forms which broke from traditions of clay as a medium for functional objects to explore its potential for aesthetic expression, taking on Abstract Expressionist concepts and placing her work in the realm of postwar abstractionism. She is of Japanese descent and from Pepeeko, Hawaii.
Mary Frank is an English visual artist who works as a sculptor, painter, printmaker, draftswoman, and illustrator.
James Rosati was an American abstract sculptor. He is best known for creating an outdoor sculpture in New York: a stainless steel Ideogram.
Bob Justin (1941–2015) was an American outsider artist from New Jersey. After being forced into retirement in 1991 by illness, he began to liquidate an old tool collection and other property at local flea markets. During this time he returned to a childhood penchant for finding imagery in everyday objects. By combining various antique found objects, or what he called the refuse of society, he would create what he calls “critters”, animal or human faces or forms set forth in found object wall masks or standing sculptures.
The Honolulu Museum of Art Spalding House, formerly The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, was integrated into the Honolulu Museum of Art under this name. It was the only museum in the state of Hawaii devoted exclusively to contemporary art. The Contemporary Museum had two venues: in residential Honolulu at the historic Spalding House, and downtown Honolulu at First Hawaiian Center. All venues continue to be open to the public.
Satoru Abe is a Japanese American sculptor and painter.
William Thomas Wiley was an American artist. His work spanned a broad range of media including drawing, painting, sculpture, film, performance, and pinball. At least some of Wiley's work has been referred to as funk art.
Nick Cave is an American sculptor, dancer, performance artist, and professor. He is best known for his Soundsuit series: wearable assemblage fabric sculptures that are bright, whimsical, and other-worldly, often made with found objects. He also trained as a dancer with Alvin Ailey and often incorporates dance and performance into his works. His later sculptures have focused on color theory and included mixed media and large-scale installations. He lives in Chicago, Illinois, and directs the graduate fashion program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He continues to work on Soundsuits as well as works completed as a sculptor, dancer, and performance artist.
Peter Alexander was an American artist who was part of the Light and Space artistic movement in southern California in the 1960s. He is notable for his resin sculptures from the 1960s and 1970s.
Alvin D. Loving Jr., better known as Al Loving, was an African-American abstract expressionist painter. His work is known for hard-edge abstraction, fabric constructions, and large paper collages, all exploring complicated color relationships.
Spalding House, also known as the Cooke-Spalding House was an art museum and sculpture garden in Honolulu, Hawaii. It was called Nuumealani by Anna Rice Cooke, who commissioned it. The house and gardens constituted a 3+1⁄2-acre former art museum in the Makiki Heights district of Honolulu.
The Weatherspoon Art Museum is located at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and is one of the largest collections of modern and contemporary art in the southeast with a focus on American art. Its programming includes fifteen or more exhibitions per year, year-round educational activities, and scholarly publications. The Weatherspoon Art Museum was accredited by the American Alliance of Museums in 1995 and earned reaccreditation status in 2005.
Ronald Bladen was a Canadian-born American painter and sculptor. He is particularly known for his large-scale sculptures. His artistic stance, was influenced by European Constructivism, American Hard-Edge Painting, and sculptors such as Isamu Noguchi and David Smith. Bladen in turn had stimulating effect on a circle of younger artists including Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt and others, who repeatedly referred to him as one of the 'father figures' of Minimal Art.
Kenneth Richard Ferguson was an American ceramist.