Kristin Leachman is an American contemporary artist living and working in Los Angeles, California, United States. Born in Washington, D.C., Leachman spent her early years in rural Virginia. [1]
Leachman studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she received her BFA in Painting. She went on to study at The American Film Institute in Hollywood, receiving her MFA in Production Design and being awarded the Franklin J. Schaffner Fellowship. Leachman designed "Senzeni Na?" (“What Have We Done?”), nominated for the “Best Short Subject” Academy Award. After several years of working on studio productions in Hollywood, Leachman returned to painting.
Leachman's work is widely represented in museums and private collections including, among others, the San Diego Museum of Art and The National Museum of Women in the Arts. [2] [3] Her work was recently acquired by the U.S. Department of State for the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan. An interview with Leachman is included in the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art Oral History Program. [4]
The Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight wrote, "Leachman intensifies a sense of intimacy that is at once sensual and contemplative, stitching together the body and mind in ways our culture usually keeps split. … Like the universe glimpsed in a grain of sand, her work plays with scale in marvelous ways." [5] [6]
From late 2016 until early 2017, Leachman had a solo exhibition of her work, entitled 'Xylem Rays', displayed in the Laguna Art Museum in California. [7]
Lisa Adams is an American painter who emerged in the mid-1980s. She is best known for her oil paintings of imaginary worlds that address both personal and collective realities. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is in the public collections of LACMA, Eli Broad, the Denver Art Museum, the San Jose Museum of Art, the USC Fisher Museum of Art, the Long Beach Museum of Art, the Edward F. Albee Foundation, the Frederick R. Weisman Museum and the Laguna Museum of Art. She lives and works in downtown Los Angeles, California.
The Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA) is a modern and contemporary art museum located on the campus of the Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa, California. The museum's collection comprises more than 4,500 objects, with a concentration on the art of California and the Pacific Rim from the early 20th century to present. Exhibits include traditional paintings, sculptures, and photography, as well as new media in the form of video, digital, and installation art.
The Laguna Art Museum (LAM) is a museum located in Laguna Beach, California, on Pacific Coast Highway. LAM exclusively features California art and is the oldest cultural institution in the area. It has been known as the Laguna Beach Art Association, as well as the Laguna Beach Museum of Art.
Millard Owen Sheets was an American artist, teacher, and architectural designer. He was one of the earliest of the California Scene Painting artists and helped define the art movement. Many of his large-scale building-mounted mosaics from the mid-20th century are still extant in Southern California. His paintings are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum in New York, the Chicago Art Institute, the National Gallery in Washington D.C.; and the Los Angeles County Museum.
Judy Fiskin is an American artist working in photography and video, and a member of the art school faculty at California Institute of the Arts. Her videos have been screened in the Documentary Fortnight series at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles; her photographs have been shown at MOCA, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, at The New Museum in New York City, and at the Pompidou Center in Paris.
Helen Lundeberg (1908–1999) was an American painter. Along with her husband Lorser Feitelson, she is credited with establishing the Post-Surrealist movement. Her artistic style changed over the course of her career, and has been described variously as Post-Surrealism, Hard-edge painting and Subjective Classicism.
Joe Goode, is an American visual artist, known for his pop art paintings. Goode made a name for himself in Los Angeles, California, through his cloud imagery and milk bottle paintings which were associated with the Pop Art movement. The artist is also closely associated with Light and Space, a West Coast art movement of the early 1960s. He resides in Los Angeles, California.
Hans Gustav Burkhardt was a Swiss-American abstract expressionist artist.
Thelma Beatrice Johnson Streat (1912–1959) was an African-American artist, dancer, and educator. She gained prominence in the 1940s for her art, performance and work to foster intercultural understanding and appreciation.
Roger Edward Kuntz was a highly accomplished Southern California landscape painter and a member of the Claremont Group of painters - professors and graduates of Pomona College, Scripps College, and the Claremont Graduate School. A figurative artist with an eye for abstract form, he won critical acclaim for striking compositions that transform an unusual array of subjects, including tennis players, domestic interiors, freeways, road signs, bathtubs and the Goodyear Blimp. A retrospective exhibition of his work, at the Laguna Art Museum in Laguna Beach, CA in 2009, was aptly titled "Roger Kuntz: The Shadow Between Representation and Abstraction". In the exhibition catalogue, curator Susan M. Anderson wrote: "Kuntz's work of the late 1950s and early 1960s quintessentially embodied the experimentation, fragmentation, and paradox in American culture of the time."
Edward Biberman was an American artist active in the mid-twentieth century. His work ranged from stylised portraits to history-inspired murals, and drew on the emerging urban landscapes of southern California, and on current events such as the Great Depression, the Second World War, and labour unrest.
Maxwell Hendler is an American painter. In 1975, he became the first contemporary artist to have pictures in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
John Dwyer McLaughlin was an American abstract painter. Based primarily in California, he was a pioneer in minimalism and hard-edge painting. Considered one of the most significant Californian postwar artists, McLaughlin painted a focused body of geometric works that are completely devoid of any connection to everyday experience and objects, inspired by the Japanese notion of the void. He aimed to create paintings devoid of any object hood including but not limited to a gestures, representations and figuration. This led him to the rectangle. Leveraging a technique of layering rectangular bars on adjacent planes, McLaughlin creates works that provoke introspection and, consequently, a greater understanding of one's relationship to nature.
Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A., 1945–1980 was a scholarly initiative funded by the J. Paul Getty Trust to historicize the contributions to contemporary art history of artists, curators, critics, and others based in Los Angeles. Planned for nearly a decade, PST, as it was called, granted nearly 60 organizations throughout Southern California a total of $10 million to produce exhibitions that explored the years between 1945 and 1980. Underscoring the significance of this project, art critic Roberta Smith wrote in The New York Times:
Before [PST], we knew a lot [about the history of contemporary art], and that lot tended to greatly favor New York. A few Los Angeles artists were highly visible and unanimously revered, namely Ed Ruscha and other denizens of the Ferus Gallery, that supercool locus of the Los Angeles art scene in the 1960s, plus Bruce Nauman and Chris Burden, but that was about it. After, we know a whole lot more, and the balance is much more even. One of the many messages delivered by this profusion of what will eventually be nearly 70 museum exhibitions is that New York did not act alone in the postwar era. And neither did those fabulous Ferus boys.
James Hayward is a contemporary abstract painter who lives and works in Moorpark, California. Hayward's paintings are usually divided in two bodies of work: flat paintings (1975-1984) and thick paintings. He works in series, some of which are ongoing, and include The Annunciations, The Stations of the Cross, the Red Maps, Fire Paintings, Smoke Paintings, Sacred and Profane and Nothing's Perfect series.
George Herms is an American artist best known for creating assemblages out of discarded, often rusty, dirty or broken every-day objects, and juxtaposing those objects so as to infuse them with poetry, humor and meaning. He is also known for his works on paper, including works with ink, collage, drawing, paint and poetry. The prolific Herms has also created theater pieces, about which he has said, "I treat it as a Joseph Cornell box big enough that you can walk around in. It's just a continuation of my sculpture, one year at a time." Legendary curator Walter Hopps, who met Herms in 1956, "placed Herms on a dazzling continuum of assemblage artists that includes Pablo Picasso, Kurt Schwitters, Marcel Duchamp, and Joseph Cornell, as well as California luminaries Wallace Berman and Edward Kienholz." Often called a member of the West Coast Beat movement, Herms said that Wallace Berman taught him that "any object, even a mundane cast-off, could be of great interest if contextualized properly." "That’s my whole thing," Herms says. "I turn shit into gold. I just really want to see something I've never seen before." George Herms lives and works in Los Angeles.
Jean Stern, Director Emeritus of The Irvine Museum is an art historian and retired museum director who specializes in paintings of the California Impressionist period (1890-1930).
Florence Arnold was an American hard-edge abstract painter from North Orange County, California. She had become active in Fullerton's art community by establishing organizations and showcases to promote interest of art in youth. She has had works installed in California and internationally.
Allison Schulnik is an American painter, sculptor and animated filmmaker. She is known for her heavily textured, impasto oil paintings and her animated short videos. Schulnik is married to fellow artist Eric Yahnker. They live and work in Sky Valley, California.
Frank Edward Romero is an American artist considered to be a pioneer in the Chicano art movement. Romero's paintings and mural works explore Chicano and Los Angeles iconography, often featuring palm trees and bright colors.