Joy Episalla (born in 1957 in Bronxville, New York) [1] is an American visual artist known for her hybrid photographic and sculptural works.
Episalla was born in Bronxville, and grew up in Yonkers, New York. She received a BFA degree from the California College of the Arts. Following graduation she moved to the East Village of New York City. [1]
In the 1990s she became involved with AIDS activism, and worked with groups such as ACT UP, fierce pussy and The Marys. Episalla has been a member of the fierce pussy art collective from 1991 to the present. [2] Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art [3] and other museums and galleries. In 2003 she received a fellowship from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation. [4]
Her work is represented in the permanent collections of the Centre Pompidou, [5] the Rose Art Museum, [6] the Victoria and Albert Museum (with fierce pussy) [7] among other venues.
Her oral history is held in the Smithsonian Institution Archives of American Art. [1]
Louis Comfort Tiffany was an American artist and designer who worked in the decorative arts and is best known for his work in stained glass. He is the American artist most associated with the Art Nouveau and Aesthetic movements. He was affiliated with a prestigious collaborative of designers known as the Associated Artists, which included Lockwood de Forest, Candace Wheeler, and Samuel Colman. Tiffany designed stained glass windows and lamps, glass mosaics, blown glass, ceramics, jewellery, enamels, and metalwork. He was the first design director at his family company, Tiffany & Co., founded by his father Charles Lewis Tiffany.
Beatrice Wood was an American artist and studio potter involved in the Avant Garde movement in the United States; she founded and edited The Blind Man and Rongwrong magazines in New York City with French artist Marcel Duchamp and writer Henri-Pierre Roché in 1917. She had earlier studied art and theater in Paris, and was working in New York as an actress. She later worked at sculpture and pottery. Wood was characterized as the "Mama of Dada".
The Federal Art Project (1935–1943) was a New Deal program to fund the visual arts in the United States. Under national director Holger Cahill, it was one of five Federal Project Number One projects sponsored by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and the largest of the New Deal art projects. It was created not as a cultural activity, but as a relief measure to employ artists and artisans to create murals, easel paintings, sculpture, graphic art, posters, photography, theatre scenic design, and arts and crafts. The WPA Federal Art Project established more than 100 community art centers throughout the country, researched and documented American design, commissioned a significant body of public art without restriction to content or subject matter, and sustained some 10,000 artists and craft workers during the Great Depression. According to American Heritage, “Something like 400,000 easel paintings, murals, prints, posters, and renderings were produced by WPA artists during the eight years of the project’s existence, virtually free of government pressure to control subject matter, interpretation, or style.”
Lee Bontecou was an American sculptor and printmaker and a pioneer figure in the New York art world. She kept her work consistently in a recognizable style, and received broad recognition in the 1960s. Bontecou made abstract sculptures in the 1960s and 1970s and created vacuum-formed plastic fish, plants, and flower forms in the 1970s. Rich, organic shapes and powerful energy appear in her drawings, prints, and sculptures. Her work has been shown and collected in many major museums in the United States and in Europe.
Samuel Colman was an American painter, interior designer, and writer, probably best remembered for his paintings of the Hudson River.
Lowery Stokes Sims is an American art historian and curator of modern and contemporary art known for her expertise in the work of African, African American, Latinx, Native and Asian American artists such as Wifredo Lam, Fritz Scholder, Romare Bearden, Joyce J. Scott and others. She served on the curatorial staff of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Museum of Arts and Design. She has frequently served as a guest curator, lectured internationally and published extensively, and has received many public appointments. Sims was featured in the 2010 documentary film !Women Art Revolution.
Audrey L. Flack is an American artist. Her work pioneered the art genre of photorealism and encompasses painting, sculpture, and photography.
Sarah Morris is an American and British artist. She lives in New York City in the United States.
Renee Stout is an American sculptor and contemporary artist known for assemblage artworks dealing with her personal history and African-American heritage. Born in Kansas, raised in Pittsburgh, living in Washington, D.C., and connected through her art to New Orleans, her art reflects this interest in African diasporic culture throughout the United States. Stout was the first American artist to exhibit in the Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art.
Robert Ebendorf is an American metalsmith and jeweler, known for craft, art and studio jewelry, often using found objects. In 2003–2004, the Smithsonian American Art Museum organized an exhibition of 95 pieces, titled The Jewelry of Robert Ebendorf: A Retrospective of Forty Years.
Mary Ping is an American fashion designer based in New York City. She is best known for her conceptual label "Slow and Steady Wins the Race", although she has also designed under her own label.
Marcia Kurepronunciation is a Nigerian visual artist known primarily for her mixed media paintings and drawings that engage with postcolonial existentialist conditions and identities.
Paul J. Smith was an arts administrator, curator, and artist based in New York. Smith was professionally involved with the art, craft, and design fields since the early 1950s and was closely associated with the twentieth-century studio craft movement in the United States. He joined the staff of the American Craftsmen's Council in 1957, and in 1963 was appointed Director of the Museum of Contemporary Crafts, a position he held for the next 24 years. In September 1987, he assumed the title of director emeritus and continued to work as an independent curator and consultant for museums, arts organizations, and collectors.
Cynthia Schira is an American textile artist and former university professor. Her work is represented in the collections of many major public museums.
Lisa Corinne Davis is an American visual artist known for abstract paintings and works on paper that suggest maps and other encoded forms of knowledge. She employs abstraction as a means of rendering the complexities of contemporary experience—including her own as an African-American woman—often questioning preconceived notions about identity, classification, and rationality versus subjectivity. Her densely layered, colorful work merges contrasting schemas, visual elements and formal languages, blurring distinctions between figuration and abstraction, real and fictive spaces and concepts, and microcosmic or macrocosmic reference. Brooklyn Rail critic Joan Waltemath wrote, "The urban experiences of space and time that Davis presents are subtle distillations of moment and coincidence ... Her attempt to map the shattered terrain of contemporary life points both to an awareness of other times and a belief in navigating the present one."
Henry Hobart Nichols Jr. was an American landscape painter and illustrator. Nichols was born to Henry Hobart and Indiana Jay Nichols on May 1, 1869, in Washington, DC.
Beth Lipman is a contemporary artist working in glass. She is best known for her glass still-life compositions which reference the work of 16th- and 17th-century European painters.
Myra Mimlitsch-Gray is an American metalsmith, artist, critic, and educator living and working in Stone Ridge, New York. Mimlitsch-Gray's work has been shown nationally at such venues as the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Museum of the City of New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, and Museum of Arts and Design. Her work has shown internationally at such venues as the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, Stadtisches Museum Gottingen, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, and is held in public and private collections in the U.S, Europe, and Asia.
Alice Carmen Gouvy was a designer at Tiffany Studios and worked closely with Clara Driscoll, the head of the Women's Glass Cutting Department.
Linda Sormin is a Canadian artist known for her ceramics and installations. As a young girl Sikora immigrated from Thailand to Canada. She attended Andrews University, Sheridan College, and Alfred University. She teaches at New York University. In 2011 her work was included in the exhibition Overthrown: Clay Without Limits at the Denver Art Museum. In 2013 she was selected one of the 5 partcipants in the RBC Emerging Artist People’s Choice Award competition held at the Gardiner Museum. In 2018 She held a solo exhibition entitled Fierce Passengers at the Carleton University Art Gallery. In 2021 Sikora was included in the exhibition No Boundaries: Contemporary Canadian Ceramics at Messum's London and Wiltshire locations. The same year her work was included in the exhibition Ceramics in the Expanded Field at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.