John McNamara (born 1950) is an American artist who was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He graduated from the Massachusetts College of Art in 1971 with a BFA in painting and in 1977 with an MFA. In 1975, he began teaching painting at the Massachusetts College of Art and remained there until 1983. [1] He received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 1981. Since 1993, he has taught at University of California, Berkeley. He currently lives in Novato CA with his wife, educator and writer Diane Darrow and sons filmmaker Jeremy McNamara and musician Seamus McNamara.
John McNamara's paintings from the 1980s and 1990s are abstract landscapes. [2] Congestion, in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art, is an example of the artist's abstract landscapes that have been described as both sensual and painterly. [3] Although superficially resembling abstract expressionism, vegetation is clearly present. In 1992, McNamara began investigating the relationship between painting and photography by affixing photographs and postcards to canvas or wood panels and then proceeding to paint over them. [4] [5] The Boston Public Library, the Davis Museum and Cultural Center (Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA), the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park (Lincoln, MA), the Fitchburg Art Museum (Fitchburg, MA), the Honolulu Museum of Art [6] the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Rose Art Museum (Brandeis University, Waltham, MA), the Smith College Museum of Art (Northampton, MA), the Currier Museum of Art (Manchester, NH), the Speed Art Museum (Louisville, KY) and the Tucson Museum of Art (Tucson, AZ) are among the public collections holding work by John McNamara.
Abstract illusionism is a name coined by art historian and critic Barbara Rose in 1967. Louis K. Meisel independently coined the term to define an artistic movement that came into prominence in the United States during the mid-1970s.
Carlos Dorrien is an American sculptor of Mexican descent.
John Buck is an American sculptor and printmaker who was born in Ames, Iowa.
Tetsuo Ochikubo (1923–1975), also known as Bob Ochikubo, was a Japanese-American painter, sculpture, and printmaker who was born in Waipahu, Hawaii, Honolulu county, Hawaii. During the Second World War, he served with the 100th Battalion of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. After being discharged from the Army, he studied painting and design at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and at the Art Students League of New York. In 1953, he spent a year in Japan, studying traditional brush painting and connecting with his ancestry. He worked at Tamarind Institute in the 1960s and is best known for his entirely abstract paintings and lithographs. Along with Satoru Abe, Bumpei Akaji, Edmund Chung, Jerry T. Okimoto, James Park, and Tadashi Sato, Ochikubo was a member of the Metcalf Chateau, a group of seven Asian-American artists with ties to Honolulu. Ochikubo died in Kawaihae, Hawaii in 1975.
Leila Daw is an American installation artist and art professor; her work uses diverse materials to explore themes of cartography and feminism.
Jack Wolfe was a 20th-century American painter most known for his abstract art, portraiture, and political paintings.
Stephen DiRado is an American photographer. His work is mostly black-and-white, and he makes frequent use of large-format cameras. He is most noted for his portraiture, night-astronomical photography, and semi-composed group photography, and for the extensive length of his projects.
John Bageris (1924-2000) was an American artist.
Jason Berger was a Boston landscape painter, connected to Boston Expressionism. He painted from nature, en plein air, and used favorite motifs in abstract paintings, referred to as "studio paintings". He, also, enjoyed woodcuts which were predominantly printed in black and white. Known for his humor, love of jazz, and his upbeat approach to painting, “his work expresses the joy of life and love of place”.
Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially Visual art and music, where the work is set out to expose the essence, essentials or identity of a subject through eliminating all non-essential forms, features or concepts. As a specific movement in the arts it is identified with developments in post–World War II Western Art, most strongly with American visual arts in the 1960s and early 1970s. Minimalism is often interpreted as a reaction to abstract expressionism and a bridge to postminimal art practices. Prominent artists associated with this movement include Ad Reinhardt, Nassos Daphnis, Tony Smith, Donald Judd, John McCracken, Agnes Martin, Dan Flavin, Robert Morris, Larry Bell, Anne Truitt, Yves Klein and Frank Stella. Artists themselves have sometimes reacted against the label due to the negative implication of the work being simplistic.
Norman Toynton is a British abstract painter who lived for many years in America, where his work was acclaimed for its 'grand visual and tactile splendour' and for 'marshal(ling) all the sensuous force of color and oil paint to induce us to look with truly questioning attention'. He was the Chair of Fine Arts at the Massachusetts College of Art and exhibited widely in New York and Boston. In 2006 he returned to England, where he lives and works on the North Norfolk coast and is currently in an exhibition at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park.
Andrew Stevovich is an American painter. He is best known for oil paintings and pastels that combine abstract formalities with a figurative narrative. He has also produced lithographs, etchings, and wood-block prints.
Laylah Ali (born 1968) is an American contemporary visual artist. She is known for paintings in which ambiguous race relations are depicted with a graphic clarity and cartoon strip format. She lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and is a professor at Williams College.
Gregory Amenoff is an American painter. He is located in the tradition of the early American Modernist painters Georgia O'Keeffe, Charles Burchfield, Milton Avery, Arthur Dove and Marsden Hartley. In the early 80s his work was often associated with a style of painting called organic abstraction and exhibited alongside artists Bill Jensen, Katherine Porter and Terry Winters.
Barbara Swan (1922–2003), also known by her married name, Barbara Swan Fink, was an American painter, illustrator, and lithographer. Her early work is associated with the Boston Expressionist school; later she became known for her still-life paintings in which light is refracted through glass and water, and for her portraits. She is also known for her collaboration with the poets Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin, and for her archived correspondence with various artists and writers.
Mary Lum is an American visual artist whose paintings, collages and works on paper reference the urban environment, architectural forms and systems. Critic John Yau writes, "Mary Lum’s paintings on paper are based on collages, which are made from things she uses or encounters in her everyday life as well as photographs she takes of the places she visits. "
Alfonse Borysewicz is a Brooklyn-based painter. He received his B.A. from Sacred Heart Seminary and M.A. from St. John’s Provincial Seminary. He later attended the Studio School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (1982–1984). He is the recipient of two fellowships from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and a Guggenheim Fellowship (1995). Gregory Wolfe, an editor at Image, calls Borysewicz "one of the most important religious artists since the French Catholic Georges Rouault.”
Craig Stockwell is a visual artist who paints large, colorful, abstract paintings. He served (2013-20) as the Director of the MFA in Visual Arts program at the New Hampshire Institute of Art.
Melvin Joel Zabarsky (1932–2019) was an American figurative painter who created representational work in the narrative tradition. Known for a bright, bold palette, his work often explores political, historical and cultural themes to surreal and realist effect. In a six-decade career marked by several distinct phases, Zabarsky's imaginative use of color, formal experimentation and commitment to narrative organization in both traditional and avant garde styles are hallmarks of his work. In an interview with the British philosophers Donald and Monica Skilling, he said, "I'm discovering history, or a narrative, within a painting, as I go along."
Barbara Grad is an American artist and educator, known for abstract, fractured landscape paintings, which combine organic and geometric forms, colliding planes and patterns, and multiple perspectives. Her work's themes include the instability of experience, the ephemerality of nature, and the complexity of navigating cultural environments in flux. While best known as a painter, Grad also produces drawings, prints, mixed-media works and artist books. She has exhibited in venues including the Art Institute of Chicago, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Danforth Art, Rose Art Museum, Indianapolis Museum of Art and A.I.R., and been reviewed in publications, including Artforum, Arts Magazine and ARTnews. Grad co-founded Artemisia Gallery, one the country's first women-artist collectives, in Chicago in 1973. She has been an educator for over four decades, most notably at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Grad has been based in the Boston area since 1987.