Keith Antar Mason (born 1956) is an American writer, performance artist, and playwright. He is the founding artistic director of the Black theatrical company Hittite Empire. [1]
Mason was born on November 3, 1956, in St. Louis, Missouri. [1] He moved to Los Angeles, California in 1985 and founded Hittite Empire in 1987. [2]
James Witherspoon was an American jump blues singer.
Leimert Park is a neighborhood in the South Los Angeles region of Los Angeles, California.
Michael Kelley was an American artist whose work involved found objects, textile banners, drawings, assemblage, collage, performance, photography, sound and video. He also worked on curatorial projects; collaborated with many other artists and musicians; and left a formidable body of critical and creative writing. He often worked collaboratively and had produced projects with artists Paul McCarthy, Tony Oursler, and John Miller. Writing in The New York Times, in 2012, Holland Cotter described the artist as "one of the most influential American artists of the past quarter century and a pungent commentator on American class, popular culture and youthful rebellion."
Mendi Obadike and Keith Obadike are a Black American couple who are artists and educators, of Igbo Nigerian heritage. They create music, writing, and art. Their music, performance art, and conceptual internet artwork have been exhibited internationally. They are both professors at Cornell University.
Ivan Nathaniel Dixon III was an American actor, director, and producer best known for his series role in the 1960s sitcom Hogan's Heroes, and for his starring roles in the 1964 independent drama Nothing But a Man and the 1967 television film The Final War of Olly Winter. In addition, he directed many episodes of television series.
Kenny Scharf is an American painter known for his participation in New York City's interdisciplinary East Village art scene during the 1980s, alongside Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. Scharf's do-it-yourself practice spanned painting, sculpture, fashion, video, performance art, and street art. Growing up in post-World War II Southern California, Scharf was fascinated by television and the futuristic promise of modern design. His works often includes pop culture icons, such as the Flintstones and the Jetsons, or caricatures of middle-class Americans in an apocalyptic science fiction setting.
William Pope.L, also known as Pope.L, was an accomplished American visual artist recognized for his contributions to performance art and interventionist public art. He also created pieces in painting, photography, and theater. He was featured in the 2002 Whitney Biennial and was the recipient of the Creative Capital Visual Arts Award, as well as a Guggenheim Fellow. Notably, Pope.L was also highlighted in the 2017 Whitney Biennial for his work.
Alison Saar is a Los Angeles-based sculptor, mixed-media, and installation artist. Her artwork focuses on the African diaspora and black female identity and is influenced by African, Caribbean, and Latin American folk art and spirituality. Saar is well known for "transforming found objects to reflect themes of cultural and social identity, history, and religion." Saar credits her parents, collagist and assemblage artist Betye Saar and painter and art conservator Richard Saar, for her early exposure to are and to these metaphysical and spiritual practices. Saar followed in her parents footsteps along with her sisters, Lezley Saar and Tracye Saar-Cavanaugh who are also artists. Saar has been a practicing artist for many years, exhibiting in galleries around the world as well as installing public art works in New York City. She has received achievement awards from institutions including the New York City Art Commission as well as the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston.
Jason Fayette Rhoades was an American installation artist. Better known in Europe, where he exhibited regularly for the last twelve years of his life, Rhoades was celebrated for his combination dinner party/exhibitions that feature violet neon signs and his large scale sculptural installations inspired by his rural upbringing in Northern California and Los Angeles car culture. His work often incorporates building materials and found objects assembled with "humor and conceptual rigor." He was known for by-passing conventional ideas of taste and political correctness in his pursuit of the creative drive.
My Barbarian is a Los Angeles based collaborative theatrical group consisting of Malik Gaines, Jade Gordon and Alexandro Segade. The trio makes site-responsive performances and video installations that use theatrical play to draw allegorical narratives out of historical dilemmas, mythical conflicts, and current political crises.
Prof. Abdul Rahim Nagori was a Pakistani painter known for his socio-political themes. He has held one-man exhibitions since 1958. He taught at the University of Sindh in Jamshoro, Pakistan where he founded and headed the department of Fine Arts.
The Ramón C. Cortines School of Visual and Performing Arts, known unofficially as “VAPA” by students, is a performing arts public high school in the Los Angeles Unified School District in the United States. It is located on the site of the old Fort Moore at the corner of Grand Avenue and Cesar E. Chavez Avenue in Downtown Los Angeles, adjacent to Chinatown. Grand Arts anchors the north end of Los Angeles' "Grand Avenue Cultural Corridor". The school's distinctive architecture has made the facility noteworthy beyond the Los Angeles area.
Maren Hassinger is an African-American artist and educator whose career spans four decades. Hassinger uses sculpture, film, dance, performance art, and public art to explore the relationship between the natural world and industrial materials. She incorporates everyday materials in her art, like wire rope, plastic bags, branches, dirt, newspaper, garbage, leaves, and cardboard boxes. Hassinger has stated that her work “focuses on elements, or even problems—social and environmental—that we all share, and in which we all have a stake…. I want it to be a humane and humanistic statement about our future together.”
Charles Gaines is an American visual artist, whose work interrogates the discourse of aesthetics, politics, and philosophy. Taking the form of drawings, photographic series and video installations, the work consistently involves the use of systems, predominantly in the form of the grid, often in combination with photography. His work is rooted in conceptual art – in dialogue with artists such as Sol LeWitt, Lawrence Weiner and Mel Bochner – and Gaines is committed to its tenets of engaging cognition and language. As one of the only African-American conceptual artists working in the 1970s, a time when political expressionism was a prevailing concern among African-American artists, Gaines was an outlier in his pursuit of abstraction and non-didactic approach to race and politics. There is a strong musical thread running through much of Gaines' work, evident in his repeated use of musical scores as well in his engagement with the idea of indeterminacy, as similar to John Cage and Sol LeWitt. He lives in Los Angeles, California.
Eileen Cowin is a Los Angeles–based artist known for photography, video and mixed-media installations that draw on the language of mass media and art history and explore the relationship between narrative, fiction and non-fiction, memory and experience. Associated with the 1970s Los Angeles experimental photography scene and the Pictures Generation artists, her work combines familiar human situations and carefully chosen gestures, expressions and props to create enigmatic images whose implied, open-ended stories viewers must complete. Cowin has exhibited in more than forty solo shows in the United States and abroad, including at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Museum of Contemporary Photography, Armory Center for the Arts and Contemporary Arts Center. Her work is included in more than forty institutional collections, including LACMA, the J. Paul Getty Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), and Smithsonian American Art Museum. She has been recognized with awards and commissions from the National Endowment for the Arts, LACMA, the City of Los Angeles (COLA), Public Art Fund, and the Sundance and USA film festivals. New York Times critic Andy Grundberg wrote that her multi-image work "sets up a tension between the familiar and the mysterious, creating a climate of implied danger, sexual intrigue and violence" in which clues abound to intimate various narratives. Jody Zellen observed that Cowin "manipulates the conventions of photography, film, and video to tell a different kind of story—one that explores where truth and fiction merge, yet presents no conclusions. Cowin's work provokes."
Jacki Apple (1941-2022) was an American artist, writer, composer, producer and educator based in New York and Los Angeles. She worked in multiple disciplines such as performance art and installation art. As well as art making, Apple was also a writer, penning around 200 reviews and critical essays on topics such as performance art, media arts, installation art and dance. Her writing has appeared in publications such as Performing Arts Journal, Public Art Review and The Drama Review.
Henry Taylor is an American artist and painter who lives and works in Los Angeles, California. He is best known for his acrylic paintings, mixed media sculptures, and installations.
The Highways Performance Space is a performance venue in Santa Monica, California, which focuses on new works and alternative pieces. The organization is a space for LGBTQ artists to experiment with form and content. Performed work includes theatre, music, dance, spoken word, interactive media, and visual arts.
Rodeo Caldonia also known as Rodeo Caldonia High Fidelty Performance Theater was a black feminist arts collective based in Fort Greene, Brooklyn during the 1980s. The collective, which operated from about 1985-1988, included nearly 20 African American women who wanted to create feminist work that focused on their identities as Black women. The collective was founded by Lisa Jones and Alva Rogers.
Malik Gaines is an American artist, writer, and professor who is one of three members of the artist collective My Barbarian. The group formed in 2000 and includes Jade Gordon and Alexandro Segade as they perform musical/theatrical and critical techniques to act out social difficulties. They have exhibited internationally, including at the Whitney Museum, New York in 2021. Gaines's practice includes events and exhibitions, music composition, video work, scholarly research and collaboration. He is the author of the book Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left: A History of the Impossible and is the co-artistic director of The Industry opera company in Los Angeles.