The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) is a modern and contemporary art museum located in San Francisco, California. A nonprofit organization, SFMOMA holds an internationally recognized collection of modern and contemporary art, and was the first museum on the West Coast devoted solely to 20th-century art. The museum's current collection includes over 33,000 works of painting, sculpture, photography, architecture, design, and media arts, and moving into the 21st century. The collection is displayed in 170,000 square feet (16,000 m2) of exhibition space, making the museum one of the largest in the United States overall, and one of the largest in the world for modern and contemporary art.
László Moholy-Nagy was a Hungarian painter and photographer as well as a professor in the Bauhaus school. He was highly influenced by constructivism and a strong advocate of the integration of technology and industry into the arts. The art critic Peter Schjeldahl called him "relentlessly experimental" because of his pioneering work in painting, drawing, photography, collage, sculpture, film, theater, and writing.
Marianne Brandt was a German painter, sculptor, photographer, metalsmith, and designer who studied at the Bauhaus art school in Weimar and later became head of the Bauhaus Metall-Werkstatt in Dessau in 1928. Today, Brandt's designs for household objects such as lamps and ashtrays are considered timeless examples of modern industrial design. She also created photomontages.
James Turrell is an American artist known for his work within the Light and Space movement. Much of Turrell's career has been devoted to a still-unfinished work, Roden Crater, a natural cinder cone crater located outside Flagstaff, Arizona, that he is turning into a massive naked-eye observatory; and for his series of skyspaces, enclosed spaces that frame the sky.
The High Museum of Art is the largest museum for visual art in the Southeastern United States. Located in Atlanta, Georgia, the High is 312,000 square feet and a division of the Woodruff Arts Center.
A photogram is a photographic image made without a camera by placing objects directly onto the surface of a light-sensitive material such as photographic paper and then exposing it to light.
Olafur Eliasson is an Icelandic–Danish artist known for sculptured and large-scaled installation art employing elemental materials such as light, water, and air temperature to enhance the viewer's experience.
Teddy Lo is a Hong Kong-based artist known for his work with the medium and technology of light, especially LED light. His work explores neo-transcendental ideas in the physical-scientific world.
LED art is a form of light art constructed from light-emitting diodes. LEDs are very inexpensive to purchase and have become a new way to make street art. Many artists who use LEDs are guerrilla artists, incorporating LEDs to produce temporary pieces in public places. LEDs may be used in installation art, sculptural pieces and interactive artworks.
Light and Space denotes a loosely affiliated art movement related to op art, minimalism and geometric abstraction originating in Southern California in the 1960s and influenced by John McLaughlin. It is characterized by a focus on perceptual phenomena, such as light, volume and scale, and the use of materials such as glass, neon, fluorescent lights, resin and cast acrylic, often forming installations conditioned by the work's surroundings. Whether by directing the flow of natural light, embedding artificial light within objects or architecture, or by playing with light through the use of transparent, translucent or reflective materials, Light and Space artists make the spectator's experience of light and other sensory phenomena under specific conditions the focus of their work. From the movement's inception, artists were incorporating into their work the latest technologies of the Southern California-based engineering and aerospace industries to develop sensuous, light-filled objects. Turrell, who has spread the movement worldwide, summed up its philosophy in saying, "We eat light, drink it in through our skins."
The Neues Sehen, also known as New Vision or Neue Optik, was a movement, not specifically restricted to photography, which was developed in the 1920s. The movement was directly related to the principles of the Bauhaus. Neues Sehen considered photography to be an autonomous artistic practice with its own laws of composition and lighting, through which the lens of the camera becomes a second eye for looking at the world. This way of seeing was based on the use of unexpected framings, the search for contrast in form and light, the use of high and low camera angles, etc. The movement was contemporary with New Objectivity with which it shared a defence of photography as a specific medium of artistic expression, although Neues Sehen favoured experimentation and the use of technical means in photographic expression.
The GLOW festival is a light art festival held every November in the Dutch city of Eindhoven. Artists and designers from home and abroad present light art and design applications by using new media technologies, such as computers, sensors, animations, and also the well-known projection techniques.
Brigitte Kowanz was an Austrian artist. Kowanz studied from 1975 to 1980 at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. She was Professor of Transmedial Art there from 1997.
Lumia is a form of art that uses light; originally associated with music but was later associated with painting. The term was coined by a twentieth-century artist, Thomas Wilfred. In the early twentieth century, artists began to promote colors and light together in their works. Wilfred worked towards establishing lumia as a new form of art, but the medium has yet to achieve popular recognition.
The Centre for International Light Art is an art museum in Unna, Germany. It is the world's only museum which is exclusively dedicated to the collection and presentation of light art.
Regine Schumann is a German artist who is classified as a light artist and a contemporary art painter and installation artist.
Susan Rankaitis is an American multimedia artist working primarily in painting, photography and drawing. Rankaitis began her career in the 1970s as an abstract painter. Visiting the Art Institute of Chicago while in graduate school, she had a transformative encounter with the photograms of the artist László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946), whose abstract works of the 1920s and 1940s she saw as "both painting and photography." Rankaitis began to develop her own experimental methods for producing abstract and conceptual artworks related both to painting and photography.
Molitor & Kuzmin are a collaborative duo of visual artists, who are classified as light art and installation artists.
Mel Tanner was an American light sculptor, painter, installation artist, and videographer. His wife, Dorothy Tanner, was an American light sculptor, installation artist, musician, videographer, and spoken word artist based in Denver, Colorado. The couple worked very closely for over 40 years. Their main project was the creation of Lumonics that consists of their light sculptures, live projection, video, electronics, and music as a total art installation. Author and art historian, Michael Betancourt, described this visual music performance work as a Gesamtkunstwerk in his book, The Lumonics Theater: The Art of Mel & Dorothy Tanner, published in 2004.
