Kennedy Yanko (born October 21, 1988, in St. Louis, Missouri) [1] [2] is an American sculptor, painter and installation artist known for working with "paint skins" and found metal. [3] Yanko sources discarded objects and other material from salvage yards and manipulates or modifies their form, shape, or structure into her vision. Her abstract work draws upon surrealism, abstract expressionism and physical austerities and her background in performance art. [3] [4]
To create “paint skins,” Yanko pours large amounts of paint and lets it dry into a tarp-like material. From there, she sculpts the paint skin, using her whole body to manipulate the heavy sheet of paint. The paint skin thus becomes a structural material not dissimilar from the metal she utilizes in her sculptures. At times, the two materials are indistinguishable. [5]
In 2019, Yanko installed her first public sculpture, titled 3 WAYS, as part of the Poydras Corridor Sculpture Exhibition, [6] funded by the Helis Foundation, in New Orleans. [7]
John Angus Chamberlain, was an American sculptor and filmmaker. At the time of his death he resided and worked on Shelter Island, New York.
Ida Rittenberg Kohlmeyer was an American painter and sculptor who lived and worked in Louisiana. Kohlmeyer took up painting in her 30s and achieved wide recognition for her work in art museums and galleries throughout the United States. Notably, her work is held by the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Speed Art Museum, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art and the New Orleans Museum of Art. Ms. Kohlmeyer, a member of the Reform Jewish movement, played an active role in the New Orleans Jewish community throughout her life. Touro Synagogue displays much of her artwork in their synagogue and in the social hall.
Mickalene Thomas is a contemporary African-American visual artist best known as a painter of complex works using rhinestones, acrylic, and enamel. Thomas's collage work is inspired from popular art histories and movements, including Impressionism, Cubism, Dada, the Harlem Renaissance, and selected works by the Afro-British painter Chris Ofili. Her work draws from Western art history, pop art, and visual culture to examine ideas around femininity, beauty, race, sexuality, and gender.
Purvis Young was an American artist from the Overtown neighborhood of Miami, Florida. Young's work, often a blend of collage and painting, utilizes found objects and the experience of African Americans in the south. Young gained recognition as a cult contemporary artist, with a collectors' following that included Jane Fonda, Damon Wayans, Jim Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, and others. In 2006 a feature documentary titled Purvis of Overtown was produced about his life and work. His work is found in the collections of the American Folk Art Museum, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the High Museum of Art, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Bakehouse Art Complex, and others. In 2018, he was inducted into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame.
Jen Stark is a multi-media American artist who lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Stark is best known for creating optical art using psychedelic colors in patterns and drips that mimic intricate motifs found in nature. On March 26, 2021, Stark became a notable non-fungible token maker when Farzin Fardin Fard (3fmusic) won a bid to buy her piece Multiverse for 150 Ethereum.
Cordy Ryman, an artist based in New York City. Ryman earned his BFA with Honors in Fine Arts and Art Education from The School of Visual Arts in New York in 1997. He is the son of artist Robert Ryman (1930-2019). Cordy Ryman is represented by Freight and Volume Gallery, New York, NY.
Lila Katzen, born Lila Pell, was an American sculptor of fluid, large-scale metal abstractions.
Oscar Murillo is an artist working within the painting tradition. He currently lives and works in various locations.
Shinique Smith is an American visual artist, known for her colorful installation art and paintings that incorporate found textiles and collage materials. She is based in Los Angeles, California.
Ryan Sullivan is an American painter.
Mark Flood is an American artist.
Kaari Upson was an American artist. The bulk of Upson’s career was devoted to a single series titled The Larry Project – paintings, installations, performances, and films inspired by a collection of one man's personal items she found in 2003. The Larry Project was exhibited at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in 2008, as part of their program Hammer Projects. Her work resides in the public collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston and is known for exploring themes of psychoanalysis, obsession, memory, and the body. She had lived and worked in Los Angeles.
Sonia Gomes is a Brazilian contemporary artist who lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil. Gomes frequently employs found objects and textiles in her sculptures, twisting, stretching, and bundling them to fashion wiry or knotty forms.
Jennifer Rubell is an American conceptual artist known for her participatory sculpture, video, and food performances. Rubell has held performances and exhibitions at Foundation Beyeler in Riehen, Switzerland, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Performa, Dallas Contemporary, The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto, Saatchi Gallery in London, and the Brooklyn Museum. Rubell lives and works in New York City.
Cy Gavin is an American artist, in paint, sculpture, performance art, and video, who lives and works in New York. Gavin has often incorporated unusual materials in his paintings such as tattoo ink, pink sand, diamonds, staples, and seeds.
Juana Valdés is a multi-disciplinary artist and an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her works examine Afro-Cuban migration through the lens of material culture and personal experience. Valdés's work in ceramics, printmaking, video, and installation explores the colonial and imperial economies that tie the transoceanic movement of people and political ideologies across Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Her installations and photographs of mass-produced decorative objects chart the history of colonial trade in conversation with her sub-Saharan and East Asian ancestry, demonstrating that the ancestry of black and brown populations is inextricably linked to trade and globalization. Valdés works with a wide range of source material that reflects the impact of global networks of exchange on contemporary issues of transcultural identity, displacement and migration, and the climate crisis.
Esperanza Cortés is a Colombian-born American visual artist who lives and works in New York City. Her paintings, sculptures and installations explore the themes of social injustice and cultural invisibility. She draws on the folk traditions of the Americas, including their rituals, music, dance and art.
Allison Zuckerman is an American contemporary artist and painter. Zuckerman's pop-surrealist work fuses painting with digital printing techniques and appropriates various art historical tropes and references to "recast the submissive, romanticized female muses painted by male artists throughout Western art history as commanding, empowered figures." Zuckerman creates an alternative narrative by remixing the female sitters of prominent male artists into a feminist 21st century.
Cullen Washington, Jr. is an African-American contemporary abstract painter. Washington lives and works in New York.
Thomas Amoako Boafo, known as Amoako Boafo, is a Ghanaian painter and visual artist.