John Currin is an American painter based in New York City. He is most recognised for his technically proficient satirical figurative paintings that explore controversial sexual and societal topics. His work shows a wide range of influences, including sources as diverse as the Renaissance, popular culture magazines, and contemporary fashion models. He often distorts or exaggerates the erotic forms of the female body, and has stressed that his characters are reflections of himself rather than inspired by real people.
Roxy Paine is an American painter and sculptor widely known for his installations that often convey elements of conflict between the natural world and the artificial plains man creates. He was educated at both the College of Santa Fe in New Mexico and the Pratt Institute in New York.
Laura McPhee is an American photographer known for making detailed large-format photographs of the cultural landscape—images which raise questions about human impacts on the environment and the nature of our complex and contested relationship to the earth.
Roger Brown was an American artist and painter. Often associated with the Chicago Imagist groups, he was internationally known for his distinctive painting style and shrewd social commentaries on politics, religion, and art.
David Hilliard is an American photographer. A fine arts photographer who works mainly with panoramic photographs, he draws inspiration from his personal life and those around him for his subject matter. Many of the scenes are staged, evoking a performative quality, a middle ground between fact and fiction.
Hugh O'Donnell is an English painter, printmaker and site-specific artist.
Howardena Pindell is an American artist, curator, and educator. She is known as a painter and mixed media artist, her work explores texture, color, structures, and the process of making art; it is often political, addressing the intersecting issues of racism, feminism, violence, slavery, and exploitation. She is known for the wide variety of techniques and materials used in her artwork; she has created abstract paintings, collages, "video drawings," and "process art."
Eric Aho is an American painter living in Vermont. DC Moore Gallery in New York City represents his work.
Betty Merken is an American painter and printmaker who lives and works in Seattle, Washington.
John Geldersma is known for his wooden sculptures of, what he calls, "contemporary tribalism".
Laylah Ali (born 1968) is a contemporary visual artist known for paintings in which ambiguous race relations are depicted with a graphic clarity and cartoon strip format.
Matthew Clay Baumgardner was an American contemporary artist and National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artist Fellow, whose work was featured in multiple public and private collections including the Gibbes Museum of Art and the Greenville Museum of Art in Greenville, SC. After graduating with a master of fine arts degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1982, he was involved for over three decades in New York City's art scene.
Michael James Stilkey Jr. is an American artist known for his book sculpture paintings.
Barbara Crane was an American artist photographer born in Chicago, Illinois. Crane worked with a variety of materials including Polaroid, gelatin silver, and platinum prints among others. She was known for her experimental and innovative work that challenges the straight photograph by incorporating sequencing, layered negatives, and repeated frames. Naomi Rosenblum notes that Crane "pioneered the use of repetition to convey the mechanical character of much of contemporary life, even in its recreational aspects."
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 Brooklyn, New York.
Lucy Fradkin is an American self-taught artist from New York who paints portraits which often include collage elements. She is inspired by Persian and Indian miniature paintings with bright palettes and flattened space as well as the ancient frescoes and mosaics of Etruria, Rome, and Byzantium. In addition, she visited the Brooklyn Museum as a young artist with her mother and was inspired by The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago, as a prominent piece of art by a living woman artist.
James Pringle Cook is an American painter based in Tucson, Arizona, known nationally for expressive, monumental landscapes and urban scenes that employ vigorous brushwork and thick, impasto surfaces and move between realism and passages of abstraction. He has explored a wide range of geographies across the United States and subjects from craggy mountains and seascapes to industrial accidents to the figure. Curators and critics, however, generally agree that his work is as much about pure painting as it is about his convincing recapitulations of the world and a sense of place. Museum Director Robert Yassin described Cook as "a painter who is in love with painting [whose] bravura use of paint is akin to the abstract expressionists; unlike them, however, he provides viewers with a recognizable reality, ordered by his own personal vision and controlled by his technical mastery." Discussing his urban works, Margaret Regan wrote, "Cook is so skilled a painter he can turn almost anything into a thing of beauty […] His bravura handling of the paint is what matters: his pure layers of color, slabbed in thick gobs onto his linen canvases with a palette knife, glistening like butter."
Chawky Frenn is a Lebanese-born American artist, author, and art professor. He currently teaches art at George Mason University in northern Virginia. His highly realistic paintings have strong narrative social and political elements. Frenn is a former Fulbright scholar, and currently resides in the Greater Washington, D.C. area.
David Onri Anderson is a Tennessee-born painter, musician and curator of French/Algerian ancestry, who emerged from the Nashville arts community in the mid-1990s. His large scale paintings are heavily influenced by nature, eastern Tantra artwork and Cosmic Philosophy and are sometimes accompanied by installation elements such as raw earth. His works frequently explore the spaces between oneness and variation. In 2016, he was awarded the Anny Gowa Purchase Award from Watkins College of Art, Design & Film and in 2017 considered by the publication Nashville Scene as Best Emerging Painter.
