Linda Lee Alter | |
---|---|
Born | 1939 (age 84–85) Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S. |
Education | Philadelphia College of Art |
Website | www |
Linda Lee Alter (born 1939) is an American visual artist who is primarily known as an art collector and philanthropist. In 2010 Alter donated five hundred artworks by American female artists to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. [1] [2]
Alter graduated from Olney High School in 1957, and from the Philadelphia College of Art in 1961. After 30 years of being a fiber artist, painting with acrylics became her medium of choice. Alter's appliqués and paintings are represented in private and public collections including: Allentown Art Museum; Anheuser Busch Company of MO and FL; Historical Society of Pennsylvania; Lehigh Valley Health System Art Collection; National Museum of American Jewish History; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; Saint Charles Seminary; and the Woodmere Art Museum. In 2008 the Allentown Art Museum held a retrospective of Alter's artwork.
Alter made it her mission to collect art by women artists. Her intention was to donate the collection to an art museum so the general public could view and enjoy art by outstanding women artists.
In 2010, Alter donated her collection of 500 art by American female artists to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. [3] In 2012, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts exhibited Alter's collection in an exhibition entitled The Female Gaze: Women Artists Making Their World. [4] Artists in this exhibition included Louise Bourgeois, Kiki Smith, Joan Brown, Elizabeth Catlett, Viola Frey, Ana Mendieta, Christina Ramberg, Beatrice Wood, Alice Neel, Faith Ringgold, Louise Nevelson, Gertrude Abercrombie, Edna Andrade, and Sue Coe, amongst many others. [4] Chief Curator of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Robert Cozzolino, edited a book entitled The Female Gaze: Women Artists Making Their World about the collection.
In 1993, Alter started the Leeway Foundation to support women artists, particularly those of the greater Philadelphia area. Leeway has evolved into a community-led, grant making foundation that supports women and trans artists and cultural producers working in communities at the intersection of art, culture and social change. 2018 was Leeway's 25th consecutive year of grant making. In 1997, Alter founded the Bertha Dagan Berman Award in Women's Health at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School in honor of her Aunt Bert, and to increase the focus on the health and care of women. The endowment provides several medical students each year to study aspects of general women's health.
In 2013, Linda Lee Alter received an Honorary Doctorate of the Arts from Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA. In 2012, she won a Bebe Benoliel Founder's Award for an Outstanding Arts Contributor from Center for Emerging Visual Artists, Philadelphia, PA. [5] In 2008, Alter won a Robin Hood Was Right Award from Bread & Roses Community Fund's Tribute to Change, Philadelphia, PA. [6] In 1988, Alter received an Honorary Doctorate of the Arts from Moore College of Art & Design, Philadelphia, PA
Eliza Cecilia Beaux was an American artist and the first woman to teach art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Known for her elegant and sensitive portraits of friends, relatives, and Gilded Age patrons, Beaux painted many famous subjects including First Lady Edith Roosevelt, Admiral Sir David Beatty and Georges Clemenceau.
The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) is a museum and private art school in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was founded in 1805 and is the first and oldest art museum and art school in the United States.
Walter Emerson Baum was an American artist and educator active in the Bucks and Lehigh County areas of Pennsylvania in the United States. In addition to being a prolific painter, Baum was also responsible for the founding of the Baum School of Art and the Allentown Art Museum.
Ellen Day Hale was an American Impressionist painter and printmaker from Boston. She studied art in Paris and during her adult life lived in Paris, London and Boston. She exhibited at the Paris Salon and the Royal Academy of Arts. Hale wrote the book History of Art: A Study of the Lives of Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, and Albrecht Dürer and mentored the next generation of New England female artists, paving the way for widespread acceptance of female artists.
Thomas Pollock Anshutz was an American painter and teacher. Known for his portraiture and genre scenes, Anshutz was a co-founder of The Darby School. One of Thomas Eakins's most prominent students, he succeeded Eakins as director of drawing and painting classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.
Ella Sophonisba Hergesheimer was an American illustrator, painter, and printmaker who painted and illustrated Tennessee society, including the state's women and children. As a printmaker, she pioneered the white-line woodcut.
Judith Shea is an American sculptor and artist, born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1948. She was awarded a degree in fashion design from the Parsons School of Design in 1969 and earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree there in 1975. This dual education formed the basis for her figure based works.
Squeak Carnwath is an American contemporary painter and arts educator. She is a professor emerita of art at the University of California, Berkeley. She has a studio in Oakland, California, where she has lived and worked since 1970.
Susan Hannah Eakins was an American painter and photographer. Her works were first shown at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where she was a student. She won the Mary Smith Prize there in 1879 and the Charles Toppan prize in 1882.
Alice Barber Stephens was an American painter and engraver, best remembered for her illustrations. Her work regularly appeared in magazines such as Scribner's Monthly, Harper's Weekly, and The Ladies Home Journal.
Edna Andrade was an American abstract artist. She was an early Op Artist.
Cynthia Carlson is an American visual artist, living and working in New York.
Holly Trostle Brigham is an American figurative painter whose feminist self-portraiture focuses on female subjects drawn from mythology and history.
Sarah McEneaney is an American artist, painter, and community activist who lives and works in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Working primarily in egg tempera her paintings are characterized by their autobiographical content, detailed brushwork, and brilliant color. McEneaney's intimate subject matter focuses on daily scenes from her home, studio, travels, and neighborhood. Her work is included in public collections such as the Philadelphia Museum of Art and she has received numerous grants and awards. McEneaney is also active in community work, including the formation of the Callowhill Neighborhood Association in 2001, and the co-founding of the Reading Viaduct Project in 2003.
Elizabeth Osborne is an American painter who lives and works in Philadelphia. Working primarily in oil paint and watercolor, her paintings are known to bridge ideas about formalist concerns, particularly luminosity with her explorations of nature, atmosphere and vistas. Beginning with figurative paintings in the 1960s and '70s, she moved on to bold, color drenched, landscapes and eventually abstractions that explore color spectrums. Her experimental assemblage paintings that incorporated objects began an inquiry into psychological content that she continued in a series of self-portraits and a long-running series of solitary female nudes and portraits. Osborne's later abstract paintings present a culmination of ideas—distilling her study of luminosity, the landscape, and light.
Inez Mary Romanoff, known as Inez Storer, is an American painter and mixed-media artist who creates work in the magical realism genre.
Edith Emerson was an American painter, muralist, illustrator, writer, and curator. She was the life partner of acclaimed muralist Violet Oakley and served as the vice-president, president, and curator of the Woodmere Art Museum in the Chestnut Hill section of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, from 1940 to 1978.
Jeanne Jaffe is an American multidisciplinary artist known for her sculpture and installations.
Barbara J. Bullock is an African American painter, collagist, printmaker, soft sculptor and arts instructor. Her works capture African motifs, African and African American culture, spirits, dancing and jazz in abstract and figural forms. She creates three-dimensional collages, portraits, altars and masks in vibrant colors, patterns and shapes. Bullock produces artworks in series with a common theme and style.
Dorothy Grafly was an American journalist, art critic, author, curator and philanthropist. Grafly wrote extensively for a wide variety of newspapers and magazines, and was described in Time magazine as "the ablest art critic in the city" of Philadelphia. Her book A History of the Philadelphia Print Club appeared in 1929. She served as the editor of Art Outlook (1943–1949) and the publisher and editor of Art in Focus (1949–1980).