Jacob Armstead Lawrence was an American painter known for his portrayal of African-American historical subjects and contemporary life. Lawrence referred to his style as "dynamic cubism", an art form popularized in Europe which drew great inspiration from West African and Meso-American art. For his compositions, Lawrence found inspiration in everyday life in Harlem. He brought the African-American experience to life using blacks and browns juxtaposed with vivid colors. He also taught and spent 16 years as a professor at the University of Washington.
Lee Oscar Lawrie was an American architectural sculptor and an important figure in the American sculpture scene preceding World War II. Over his long career of more than 300 commissions Lawrie's style evolved through Modern Gothic, to Beaux-Arts, Classicism, and, finally, into Moderne or Art Deco.
Paul Howard Manship was an American sculptor. He consistently created mythological pieces in a classical style, and was a major force in the Art Deco movement. He is well known for his large public commissions, including the iconic Prometheus in Rockefeller Center and the Celestial Sphere Woodrow Wilson Memorial in Geneva, Switzerland. He is also credited for designing the modern rendition of New York City's official seal.
Gaston Lachaise was a French-born sculptor, active in America in the early 20th century. A native of Paris, he is most noted for his robust female nudes such as his heroic Standing Woman. Gaston Lachaise was taught the fundamentals of European sculpture while living in France. While still a student, he met and fell in love with an older American woman, Isabel Dutaud Nagle, then followed her after she returned to America. There, he became profoundly impressed by the great vitality and promise of his adopted country. Those life-altering experiences clarified his artistic vision and inspired him to define the female nude in a new and powerful manner. His drawings, typically made as ends in themselves, also exemplify his remarkably new treatment of the female body.
Hiram Powers was an American neoclassical sculptor. He was one of the first 19th-century American artists to gain an international reputation, largely based on his famous marble sculpture The Greek Slave.
The Great Plains Art Museum is a fine arts museum located in Lincoln, Nebraska that is dedicated to the arts of the Great Plains in the United States.
African-American art is known as 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 where the Black diaspora is found, 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".
James Richmond Barthé, also known as Richmond Barthé was an African-American sculptor associated with the Harlem Renaissance. Barthé is best known for his portrayal of black subjects. The focus of his artistic work was portraying the diversity and spirituality of man. Barthé once said: "All my life I have been interested in trying to capture the spiritual quality I see and feel in people, and I feel that the human figure as God made it, is the best means of expressing this spirit in man."
Richard Howard Hunt was an American sculptor. In the second half of the 20th century, he became "the foremost African-American abstract sculptor and artist of public sculpture." Hunt, the descendant of enslaved people brought from West Africa through the Port of Savannah, studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the 1950s. While there he received multiple prizes for his work. In 1971, he was the first African-American sculptor to have a retrospective at Museum of Modern Art. Hunt has created over 160 public sculpture commissions, more than any other sculptor in prominent locations in 24 states across the United States.
Attilio Piccirilli was an American sculptor. Born in Massa, Italy, he was educated at the Accademia di San Luca of Rome.
Augusta Savage was an American sculptor associated with the Harlem Renaissance. She was also a teacher whose studio was important to the careers of a generation of artists who would become nationally known. She worked for equal rights for African Americans in the arts.
Judith Brown was an American dancer and a sculptor who was drawn to images of the body in motion and its effect on the cloth surrounding it. She welded crushed automobile scrap metal into energetic moving torsos, horses, and flying draperies. "One of the things that made Judy stand out as an artist was her ability to work in many different mediums. Some of this was by choice, and sometimes it was by necessity. Her surroundings often dictated what medium she could work with at any given time. After all, you can't bring you're welding gear with you to Rome."
Mary Callery was an American artist known for her Modern and Abstract Expressionist sculpture. She was part of the New York School art movement of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s.
William T. Williams is an American painter and educator. He is recognized as one of the "foremost abstract painters" of the past century. His work has been exhibited in more than 100 exhibitions in the United States, France, Germany, Ivory Coast, Japan, Nigeria, People's Republic of China, Russia, and Venezuela. Williams is credited with being the first Black painter to be included in H. W. Janson's History of Art, and is part of the Black Abstractionism canon. From 1971 to 2008, Williams was a Professor of Art at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. A Guggenheim Fellow, Williams he received the Murray Reich Distinguished Artist Award from the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2024. Williams lives in both New York City and Connecticut.
Judith Shea is an American sculptor and artist, born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1948. She was awarded a degree in fashion design from the Parsons School of Design in 1969 and earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree there in 1975. This dual education formed the basis for her figure based works.
John "Jack" H. White is an American artist known for his work as a sculptor, fresco painter and photographer.
Richard Erdman is an American artist living and working in Williston, Vermont, and Carrara, Italy. Primarily working in marble and bronze abstract sculpture, Erdman's prolific body of work ranges from intimately sized maquettes to the largest sculpture ever carved from a single block of travertine. His works belong to collections in 52 countries across 6 continents, including the United Nations, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Princeton University, the Rockefeller Collection, and many others. Erdman specializes in collaborating with esteemed architectural firms for custom commissions, and has partnered with Antonio Citterio, Richard Meier & Partners, Enzo Enea, and Whipple Russell, among others.
Terry Lee Dill is an American artist and sculptor, specializing in large unique sculptures.
Kate Clark is a New York-based sculptor, residing and working in Brooklyn. Her work synthesizes human faces with the bodies of animals. Clark's preferred medium is animal hide. Mary Logan Barmeyer says Clark's work is "meant to make you think twice about what it means to be human, and furthermore, what it means to be animal." Writer Monica Ramirez-Montagut says Clark's works "reclaim storytelling and vintage techniques as strategies to address contemporary discourses on welfare, the environment, and female struggles."
Joe Minter is an African American sculptor based in Birmingham, Alabama. His African Village in America, on the southwest edge of Birmingham, is an ever-evolving art environment populated by sculptures he makes from scrap metal and found materials; its theme is recognition of African American history from the first arrivals of captured Africans to the present. Individual pieces from Minter's thirty-year project have been in major exhibitions in the United States and are in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, among others.
