Yayoi Kusama is a Japanese contemporary artist who works primarily in sculpture and installation, and is also active in painting, performance, video art, fashion, poetry, fiction, and other arts. Her work is based in conceptual art and shows some attributes of feminism, minimalism, surrealism, Art Brut, pop art, and abstract expressionism, and is infused with autobiographical, psychological, and sexual content. She has been acknowledged as one of the most important living artists to come out of Japan, the world's top-selling female artist, and the world's most successful living artist. Her work influenced that of her contemporaries, including Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg.
Betty Roodish Goodwin, was a multidisciplinary Canadian artist who expressed the complexity of human experience through her work.
Mariko Mori is a Japanese multidisciplinary artist. She is known for her photographs and videos of her hybridized future self, often presented in various guises and featuring traditional Japanese motifs. Her work often explores themes of technology, spirituality and transcendence.
Tara Donovan is an American sculptor who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Her large-scale installations, sculptures, drawings, and prints utilize everyday objects to explore the transformative effects of accumulation and aggregation. Known for her commitment to process, she has earned acclaim for her ability to exploit the inherent physical characteristics of an object in order to transform it into works that generate unique perceptual phenomena and atmospheric effects. Her work has been conceptually linked to an art historical lineage that includes Postminimalism and Process artists such as Eva Hesse, Jackie Winsor, Richard Serra, and Robert Morris, along with Light and Space artists such as Mary Corse, Helen Pashgian, Robert Irwin, and James Turrell.
Janet Laurence is an Australian artist, based in Sydney, who works in photography, sculpture, video and installation art. Her work is an expression of her concern about environment and ethics, her "ecological quest" as she produces art that allows the viewer to immerse themselves to strive for a deeper connection with the natural world. Her work has been included in major survey exhibitions, nationally and internationally and is regularly exhibited in Australia, Japan, Germany, Hong Kong and the UK. She has exhibited in galleries and outside in site-specific projects, often involving collaborations with architects, landscape architects and environmental scientists. Her work is held in all major Australian galleries as well as private collections in Australia and overseas.
Mary Frank is an English visual artist who works as a sculptor, painter, printmaker, draftswoman, and illustrator.
Muriel Nezhnie Helfman, known professionally as Nezhnie, was an American artist, primarily weaving large tapestries throughout 1956–1992. She gained international attention in the late 1980s with a series of six tapestries, Images of the Holocaust, completed between 1979 and 1989. They were first exhibited as a series at the "Sazama-Brauer Gallery" in Chicago in 1988. Their imagery and texts are based on historical photographs of victims of Nazi persecution, such as ones by Mendel Grossman, and other materials that Nezhnie collected from the Library of Congress, National Archives, The Pentagon and the Yad Vashem Archives in Israel.
Ellen Gallagher is an American artist. Her work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions and is held in the permanent collections of many major museums. Her media include painting, works on paper, film and video. Some of her pieces refer to issues of race, and may combine formality with racial stereotypes and depict "ordering principles" society imposes.
Ellen Lanyon was a painter and printmaker from Chicago, Illinois. She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), her MFA from the University of Iowa School of Art and Art History and studied restoration at the Courtauld Institute of Art. She also received an honorary doctorate from SAIC. Her works are in the permanent collections of many major American museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Ulrich Museum.
Christina Ramberg was an American painter associated with the Chicago Imagists, a group of representational artists who attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the late 1960s. The Imagists took their cues from Surrealism, Pop, and West Coast underground comic illustration, and were "enchanted with the abject status of sex in post-war America, particularly as writ on the female form." Ramberg is best known for her depictions of partial female bodies forced into submission by undergarments and imagined in odd, erotic predicaments.
Kay Sekimachi is an American fiber artist and weaver, best known for her three-dimensional woven monofilament hangings as well as her intricate baskets and bowls.
Rebecca Kamen is an American artist. Kamen's artwork is influenced and inspired by scientific work in many areas, from medieval alchemical manuscripts to the periodic table, to theories of black holes. Informed by science, her works attempt to illuminate its hidden beauty.
Jennie C. Jones is an African-American artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has been described, by Ken Johnson, as evoking minimalism, and paying tribute to the cross-pollination of different genres of music, especially jazz. As an artist, she connects most of her work between art and sound. Such connections are made with multiple mediums, from paintings to sculptures and paper to audio collages. In 2012, Jones was the recipient of the Joyce Alexander Wien Prize, one of the biggest awards given to an individual artist in the United States. The prize honors one African-American artist who has proven their commitment to innovation and creativity, with an award of 50,000 dollars. In December 2015 a 10-year survey of Jones's work, titled Compilation, opened at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, Texas.
Kitamura Junko is a Japanese ceramic artist. Examples of her work are in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Brooklyn Museum, the British Museum, the Museum of Fine Art, Boston, and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian. She has won prizes for her work from the Siga Prefecture Art Exhibition in 1983, the Kyoto Art and Crafts Exhibition in 1984 and 1985, and the World Triennial Exhibition of Small Ceramics in Zagreb, Croatia in 1997. Kitamura completed her MFA at the Kyoto City University of Art. She is married to artist Yo Akiyama, and was the student of two prominent Japanese artists: Suzuki Osamu and Kondo Yutaka.
Nalini Malani is an Indian artist, among the country's first generation of video artists.
The Fresno Art Museum is an art museum in Fresno, California. The museum's collection includes contemporary art, modern art, Mexican and Mexican-American art, and Pre-Columbian sculpture.
Gina Beavers is an American artist based in the New York area. She first gained attention in the early 2010s for thickly painted, relief-like acrylic images of food, cosmetics techniques and bodybuilders appropriated from Instagram snapshots and selfies found using hashtags such as #foodporn, #sixpack and #makeuptutorial. Her later work has continued to recombine these recurrent subjects, as well as explore memes, irreverent conflations of genres or art history and kitsch, identity, fandom and celebrity-worship. In 2019, New York Times critic Martha Schwendener described her paintings as "canny statements on contemporary bodies, beauty and culture … [that] tackle the weirdness of immaterial images floating through the ether, building them up into something monumental, rather than dismissing them."
Nancy Genn is an American artist living and working in Berkeley, California known for works in a variety of media, including paintings, bronze sculpture, printmaking, and handmade paper rooted in the Japanese washi paper making tradition. Her work explores geometric abstraction, non-objective form, and calligraphic mark making, and features light, landscape, water, and architecture motifs. She is influenced by her extensive travels, and Asian craft, aesthetics and spiritual traditions.
Margaret Anne Dredge was an Australian painter and printmaker, active from the mid-1950s until 1997, and teacher of art.
Jill O'Bryan is an American contemporary artist whose work draws upon breath, bodily movement and the natural environment in order to examine the experience of being, time and place. She is most known for her "Breath Drawings," in which she records each of her breaths with an individual mark thousands of times, and her ground rubbings (frottages), which document her physical engagement with the New Mexico desert mesa. Southwest Contemporary wrote, "O’Bryan’s artmaking is not an act of representational picture-making but a practice of accumulating the residue of recorded time and place through the physical actions of her body. Her process is performative, specifically located in time and space, and records moment-to-moment interactions with the elements."
