Lowbrow, or lowbrow art, is an underground visual art movement that arose in the Los Angeles, California area in the late 1960s. It is a populist art movement with its cultural roots in underground comix, punk music, tiki culture, graffiti, and hot-rod cultures of the street. It is also often known by the name pop surrealism. Lowbrow art often has a sense of humor – sometimes the humor is gleeful, impish, or a sarcastic comment.
Scarling. was an American noise pop band formed in Los Angeles in 2001. The band consisted of lead vocalist Jessicka Addams and guitarist Christian Hejnal.
Jessicka Addams is an American visual artist and former musician. Best known by her stage name Jessicka, she was the frontwoman for the rock band Jack Off Jill, and later for the noise-pop band Scarling.
Kenny Scharf is an American painter known for his participation in New York City's interdisciplinary East Village art scene during the 1980s, alongside Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. Scharf's do-it-yourself practice spanned painting, sculpture, fashion, video, performance art, and street art. Growing up in post-World War II Southern California, Scharf was fascinated by television and the futuristic promise of modern design. His works often includes pop culture icons, such as the Flintstones and the Jetsons, or caricatures of middle-class Americans in an apocalyptic science fiction setting.
Mike McGee is an American curator, art writer, educator, and arts administrator. He is the gallery director for the Nicholas and Lee Begovich Gallery at California State University, Fullerton (CSUF) in Fullerton, California.
Salomón Huerta is a painter based in Los Angeles, California. Huerta was born in Tijuana, Mexico, and grew up in the Boyle Heights Projects in East Los Angeles. Huerta received a full scholarship to attend the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and completed his MFA at UCLA in 1998. Huerta gained critical acclaim and commercial attention in the late 1990s for his minimalist portraits of the backs of people's heads and color-saturated depictions of domestic urban architecture. He was included in the 2000 Whitney Biennial and has been featured in numerous exhibitions around the US, Europe, Latin America, The Gagosian Gallery in London England, and Studio La Città in Verona, Italy.
William N. Copley also known as CPLY, was an American painter, writer, gallerist, collector, patron, publisher and art entrepreneur. His works as an artist have been classified as late Surrealist and precursory to Pop Art.
The Pasadena Museum of California Art (PMCA) was an art museum located in Pasadena, California, United States, showcasing art and design originating from California. The museum was founded by long-time Pasadena residents and art collectors Robert and Arlene Oltman. Ground was broken in 2000 and the museum officially opened in June 2002.
Walter "Chico" Hopps was an American museum director, gallerist, and curator of contemporary art. Hopps helped bring Los Angeles post-war artists to prominence during the 1960s, and later went on to redefine practices of curatorial installation internationally. He is known for contributing decisively to “the emergence of the museum as a place to show new art.”
Joe Goode is an American artist who attended the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles from 1959–1961. Originally born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Goode made a name for himself in Los Angeles 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 movement of the early 1960s. He currently creates and resides in Los Angeles, California.
Kenneth Price was an American artist who predominantly created ceramic sculpture. He studied at the Chouinard Art Institute and Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, before receiving his BFA degree from the University of Southern California in 1956. He continued his studies at Chouinard Art Institute in 1957 and received an MFA degree from New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University in 1959. Kenneth Price studied ceramics with Peter Voulkos at Otis and was awarded a Tamarind Fellowship.
Earring Magic Ken, also known as "Gay Ken" and "Fey Ken", is a model of the Ken doll introduced by Mattel in 1993 as a companion to its Earring Magic Barbie figure, one of five dolls in the Earring Magic Barbie line.
Elliot Handler was an American inventor, businessman, and the co-founder of Mattel. With his wife, Ruth Handler, he developed some of the biggest-selling toys in American history, including Barbie, Chatty Cathy, Creepy Crawlers, and Hot Wheels.
Rachel Feinstein is an American artist who specializes in sculpture. She is best known for baroque, fantasy-inspired sculptures like "The Snow Queen", which was drawn from a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale. There have been over two dozen group and solo showings of her work in the United States, Europe and Asia. She is married to painter John Currin. In 2011 the New York Times described them as "the ruling power couple in today's art world."
Mark Innerst is an American painter known for his luminous urban landscapes.
Brian McCarty is a contemporary artist and photographer known for his work with toys. McCarty's approach is based upon integrating toy characters into real-life situations through the use of forced perspective in carefully crafted scenes. Preferring to work in-camera and without compositing, McCarty creates his photographs by sometimes traveling to exotic locations, including active war zones. Although grounded in reality, because of his use of wit and whimsy, McCarty's work is often associated with the Art-Toy, Lowbrow, and Pop Surrealist movements.
Beau Dunn is an American actress, model, visual artist and entrepreneur. based in Los Angeles, California. Dunn’s work consists primarily of mixed media works including neon, paint, photography and sculpture. Next to tackling social and autobiographical issues, Dunn speaks to the contemporary art tradition of using toys and the concept of play as a means to reflect societies’ stereotypes, tastes, and desires. She is best known for her series of Barbie portraits, titled "Plastic", in addition to her appearances in modeling campaigns for Smashbox Cosmetics and as well as her roles in American television series Entourage, Up All Night, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and Melissa & Joey.
Tom Forsythe is an American artist and Tai Chi instructor who lives and works in Utah. He is known for his photographic work of Barbie dolls, which caused some controversy resulting from a lawsuit brought against him by Mattel. The company lost the case, Mattel Inc. v. Walking Mountain Prods., when the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that the images were original artwork in 2004.
Shay Kun is an Israeli-American painter known for post-modern interpretation of the Hudson River School movement. He is the son of Israeli painter Zeev Kun.
Bradford J. Salamon is an American multi-disciplinary artist who paints portraits in oils, depictions of human drama, and paintings of everyday objects. Salamon is also a sculptor, short filmmaker, curator and musician.
