Robert Laurent was a French-American modernist figurative sculptor, printmaker and teacher. His work, the New York Times wrote,"figured in the development of an American sculptural art that balanced nature and abstraction." Widely exhibited, he took part in the Whitney's 1946 exhibition Pioneers of Modern Art. Credited as the first American sculptor to adopt a "direct carving" sculpting style that was bolder and more abstract than the then traditional fine arts practice, which relied on models, Laurent's approach was inspired by the African carving and European avant-garde art he admired, while also echoing folk styles found both in the U.S. and among medieval stone cutters of his native Brittany. Best known for his virtuoso mastery of the figure, Laurent sculpted in multiple media, including wood, alabaster, bronze, marble and aluminum. His expertise earned him major commissions for public sculpture, most famously for the Goose Girl for New York City's Radio City Music Hall, as well as for Spanning the Continent for Philadelphia's Fairmount Park. After the Depression, he was also the recipient of several Works Progress Administration (WPA) Federal Art Project commissions under the New Deal, including a bas-relief called Shipping for the exterior of Washington, D.C.'s Federal Trade Commission Building, commissioned by the Treasury Department's Section of Fine Arts in 1938.
William Zorach was an American sculptor, painter, printmaker, and writer. He won the Logan Medal of the Arts in 1927. He was at the forefront of American artists embracing cubism.
Charles Herbert Woodbury, was an American marine painter.
Yasuo Kuniyoshi was a Japanese-American painter, photographer and printmaker.
Marguerite Zorach was an American Fauvist painter, textile artist, and graphic designer, and was an early exponent of modernism in America. She won the 1920 Logan Medal of the Arts.
The Portland Museum of Art, or PMA, is the largest and oldest public art institution in Maine. Founded as the Portland Society of Art in 1882. It is located in the downtown area known as The Arts District in Portland, Maine.
Samuel Halpert was an American painter.
The Delaware Art Museum is an art museum located on the Kentmere Parkway in Wilmington, Delaware, which holds a collection of more than 12,000 objects. The museum was founded in 1912 as the Wilmington Society of the Fine Arts in honor of the artist Howard Pyle. The collection focuses on American art and illustration from the 19th to the 21st century, and on the English Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood movement of the mid-19th century.
Joseph Benjamin Davol was an American marine painter and art teacher.
Lois Dodd, is an American painter and educator. Dodd was a key member of New York's postwar art scene. She played a large part and was involved in the wave of modern artists including Alex Katz and Yvonne Jacquette who explored the coast of Maine in the latter half of the 20th century.
Dahlov Ipcar was an American painter, illustrator and author. She was best known for her colorful, kaleidoscopic-styled paintings featuring animals – primarily in either farm or wild settings.
Kenneth Hayes Miller was an American painter, printmaker, and teacher.
Edith Halpert or Edith Gregor Halpert was a pioneering New York City dealer of American modern art and American folk art. She brought recognition and market success to many avant-garde American artists. Her establishment, the Downtown Gallery, was the first commercial art space in Greenwich Village. When it was founded in 1926, it was the only New York gallery dedicated exclusively to contemporary American art by living artists. Over her forty-year career, Halpert showcased such modern art luminaries as Elie Nadelman, Max Weber, Marguerite and William Zorach, Stuart Davis, Peggy Bacon, Charles Sheeler, Marsden Hartley, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Ben Shahn, Jack Levine, William Steig, Jacob Lawrence, Walter Meigs, Arthur Dove, John Marin, Georgia O'Keeffe, and many others. Halpert later expanded her business to include American folk art, and certain nineteenth-century American painters, including Raphaelle Peale, William Michael Harnett, and John Frederick Peto, whom she considered to be precursors to American modernism.
Henry Heydenryk Jr. (1905–1994) was a Dutch American frame maker, historian, writer and designer. He was the fourth generation descendant of a family-run business, The House of Heydenryk (Heijdenrijk). Founded in Amsterdam in 1845, the company is one of the world’s oldest framing companies. The firm made and supplied reproductions and antiques to the Tate and National Gallery museums in England, the Rijksmuseum in the Netherlands and for many other important museums and private collectors including Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza and members of the Rothschild family.
Katherine Schmidt was an American artist and art activist. Early in her career, the figure studies, landscapes, and still lifes she painted drew praise for their "purity and clarity of color," "sound draftsmanship," and "individual choice of subject and its handling." During the 1930s she was known mainly for the quality of her still life paintings which showed, one critic said, "impeccable artistry." At the end of her career, in the 1960s and 1970s, she produced specialized and highly disciplined still lifes of objects such as dead leaves and pieces of crumpled paper, which, said a critic, approached a "magical realism." As an art activist she helped promote the rights of artists for fair remuneration.
Charles Goeller (1901–1955) was an American artist best known for precise and detailed paintings and drawings in which, he once said, he aimed to achieve "emotion expressed by precision." Employing, as one critic wrote, an "exquisitely meticulous realism," he might take a full year to complete work on a single picture. Early in his career he achieved critical recognition for his still lifes, in which one critic saw an "acumen of genius" working to produce "truly superb achievement of team work between eyes that see and hands that do." Later, he also became known for cityscapes in which he employed precisionist flat planes and geometric forms to show the physical structures of his subjects.
Jason Lloyd Schoener was an American painter and teacher.
Jessica F. Nicoll is an American museum director and curator and an authority on American art and culture. She serves as Director and Louise Ines Doyle '34 Chief Curator of the Smith College Museum of Art. She was previously the Chief Curator and Curator of American Art of the Portland Museum of Art.
Henry "Mike" Strater was an American painter and illustrator. He was a friend of Ernest Hemingway and other figures of the Lost Generation. He was best known for his portraiture, figurative, and landscape drawings and paintings. Strater founded the Ogunquit Museum of American Art in Ogunquit, Maine in either 1952 or 1953.
