Bruce Nauman is an American artist. His practice spans a broad range of media including sculpture, photography, neon, video, drawing, printmaking, and performance. Nauman lives near Galisteo, New Mexico.
Robert Walter Irwin was an American installation artist who explored perception and the conditional in art, often through site-specific, architectural interventions that alter the physical, sensory and temporal experience of space.
Neon lighting consists of brightly glowing, electrified glass tubes or bulbs that contain rarefied neon or other gases. Neon lights are a type of cold cathode gas-discharge light. A neon tube is a sealed glass tube with a metal electrode at each end, filled with one of a number of gases at low pressure. A high potential of several thousand volts applied to the electrodes ionizes the gas in the tube, causing it to emit colored light. The color of the light depends on the gas in the tube. Neon lights were named for neon, a noble gas which gives off a popular orange light, but other gases and chemicals called phosphors are used to produce other colors, such as hydrogen (purple-red), helium, carbon dioxide (white), and mercury (blue). Neon tubes can be fabricated in curving artistic shapes, to form letters or pictures. They are mainly used to make dramatic, multicolored glowing signage for advertising, called neon signs, which were popular from the 1920s to 1960s and again in the 1980s.
The Museum of Neon Art (MONA) is an institution that exists to encourage learning and curiosity through the preservation, collection, and interpretation of neon art. The first museum devoted to art that incorporates neon lighting, it exclusively exhibits art in electric media, including kinetic art and outstanding examples of historic neon signs. The collection includes neon signs from the Brown Derby and Grauman's Chinese Theatre.
Jonathan Borofsky is an American sculptor and printmaker who lives and works in Ogunquit, Maine.
Chryssa Vardea-Mavromichali was a Greek American artist who worked in a wide variety of media. An American art pioneer in light art and luminist sculpture, known for her neon, steel, aluminum and acrylic glass installations, she always used the mononym Chryssa professionally. She worked from the mid-1950s in New York City studios and worked since 1992 in the studio she established in Neos Kosmos, Athens, Greece.
Anthony James is a British/American artist, based in Los Angeles, known for his monumental and experiential sculptures and installations. His work gestures towards the theatricality of minimalism and formalism. Throughout his work, there is a focus on materiality, alchemy, and a deep respect for light and space.
Therman Statom is an American Studio Glass artist whose primary medium is sheet glass. He cuts, paints, and assembles the glass - adding found glass objects along the way – to create three-dimensional sculptures. Many of these works are large in scale. Statom is known for his site-specific installations in which his glass structures dwarf the visitor. Sound and projected digital imagery are also features of the environmental works.
Craig A. Kraft is an American sculptor. Over the course of his career, Kraft has gained national recognition for his neon light works, establishing him as one of the leading neon sculptors of today. In his earlier works, such as Seated/Unseated Woman and Light Figure Fragment, Kraft rendered sculptures incorporating details in neon. Since 2000, the main focus of Kraft's art has been privately commissioned pieces, such as Connective Ascension, and monumental public art works, such as Lightweb in Downtown Silver Spring, MD, that are abstract pieces made from rolled aluminum and neon tubing.
Mark Handforth is a sculptor based in Miami, Florida. Some of his works are attributed to site-specific art. In 2007 he installed a sculpture titled Dallas Snake in the park of the Dallas Museum of Art. Four works are exhibited outside the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago through October 2011.
Nancy Rubins is an American sculptor and installation artist. Her sculptural works are primarily composed of blooming arrangements of large rigid objects such as televisions, small appliances, camping and construction trailers, hot water heaters, mattresses, airplane parts, rowboats, kayaks, canoes, surfboards, and other objects. Works such as Big Edge at CityCenter in Las Vegas contain over 200 boat vessels. Stainless Steel, Aluminum, Monochrome I, Built to Live Anywhere, at Home Here, at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, contains 66 used aluminum boats and rises to a height of 30 ft.
Urban Light (2008) is a large-scale assemblage sculpture by Chris Burden located at the Wilshire Boulevard entrance to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). The 2008 installation consists of restored street lamps from the 1920s and 1930s. Most of them once lit the streets of Southern California.
Liz Larner is an American installation artist and sculptor living and working in Los Angeles.
Lila Katzen, born Lila Pell, was an American sculptor of fluid, large-scale metal abstractions.
The conservation and restoration of neon objects is the process of caring for and maintaining neon objects (artworks), and includes documentation, examination, research, and treatment to ensure their long-term viability, when desired.
Ann Gillen is an American sculptor.
Lisa Schulte is an American artist, also known as "The Neon Queen", who is best known for her work in expressive neon sculpture. Schulte started bending neon in the early 1980s, creating custom neon signs and neon prop rentals to the entertainment industry under her Los Angeles-based neon studio, Nights of Neon. She is recognized for working with light as an artist and designer, and owner of one of the largest neon collections in the world.
Mary Weatherford is a Los Angeles–based painter. She is known for her large paintings incorporating neon lighting tubes. Her work is featured in museums and galleries including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Brooklyn Museum, Museum of Modern Art, and the High Museum of Art. Weatherford's solo exhibitions include Mary Weatherford: From the Mountain to the Sea at Claremont McKenna College, I've Seen Gray Whales Go By at Gagosian West, and Like The Land Loves the Sea at David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles. Her work has been part of group exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art and the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University.
Phyllis Mark was an American modern artist. She was a leading proponent of kinetic sculpture, rotating indoor works on motors, outdoor works by wind or water. Mark also had an enduring interest in light. She first generated light within the work itself, using small electric bulbs. Later she began to work in polished metal, creating interactions between the work, its reflections, and cast shadows. She was an early proponent of sculptural editions, first in small scale, her Sculpture-to-wear, art conceived as jewelry, later in her larger kinetic works. Throughout her career, Mark explored concepts in her art alongside pure abstraction. An important example in two dimensions is a form of picture writing that she termed Color Alphabet. In her sculptures, conceptual interests, always implicit, became increasing explicit over time. In late career she executed a number of large-scale works, photographed the work and its intended site, and "sited" the work in photomontage.
Michael Robert Flechtner is an American artist known for his work in neon art. In 2009 he was commissioned by the United States Postal Service to create the first-ever neon postage stamp for the Forever Stamp series. The "Celebrate" stamp was released in 2011. The stamp was reissued in 2015, and the original 33” x 44” neon is on exhibit at the Smithsonian National Postal Museum.
