Morton Wayne Thiebaud was an American painter known for his colorful works depicting commonplace objects—pies, lipsticks, paint cans, ice cream cones, pastries, and hot dogs—as well as for his landscapes and figure paintings. Thiebaud is associated with the pop art movement because of his interest in objects of mass culture, although his early works, executed during the fifties and sixties, slightly predate the works of the classic pop artists. Thiebaud used heavy pigment and exaggerated colors to depict his subjects, and the well-defined shadows characteristic of advertisements are almost always included in his work.
The Watts Towers, Towers of Simon Rodia, or Nuestro Pueblo are a collection of 17 interconnected sculptural towers, architectural structures, and individual sculptural features and mosaics within the site of the artist's original residential property in Watts, Los Angeles, California, United States. The entire site of towers, structures, sculptures, pavement and walls were designed and built solely by Sabato Rodia, an Italian immigrant construction worker and tile mason, over a period of 33 years from 1921 to 1954. The tallest of the towers is 99.5 feet (30.3 m). The work is an example of outsider art and Italian-American naïve art.
The culture of Los Angeles is rich with arts and ethnically diverse. The greater Los Angeles metro area has several notable art museums including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the J. Paul Getty Museum on the Santa Monica Mountains overlooking the Pacific, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), and the Hammer Museum. In the 1920s and 1930s Will Durant and Ariel Durant, Arnold Schoenberg and other intellectuals were the representatives of culture, in addition to the movie writers and directors. As the city flourished financially in the middle of the 20th century, culture followed. Boosters such as Dorothy Buffum Chandler and other philanthropists raised funds for the establishment of art museums, music centers and theaters. Today, the Southland cultural scene is as complex, sophisticated and varied as any in the world.
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.
Arthur F. Mathews was an American Tonalist painter who was one of the founders of the American Arts and Crafts Movement. Trained as an architect and artist, he and his wife Lucia Kleinhans Mathews had a significant effect on the evolution of Californian art in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His students include Granville Redmond, Xavier Martinez, Armin Hansen, Percy Gray, Gottardo Piazzoni, Ralph Stackpole, Mary Colter, Maynard Dixon, Rinaldo Cuneo and Francis McComas.
Millard Owen Sheets was an American artist, teacher, and architectural designer. He was one of the earliest of the California Scene Painting artists and helped define the art movement. Many of his large-scale building-mounted mosaics from the mid-20th century are still extant in Southern California. His paintings are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum in New York, the Chicago Art Institute, the National Gallery in Washington D.C.; and the Los Angeles County Museum.
Mowry Baden is an American sculptor who has lived and worked in Canada since 1975. He is known for his gallery-based kinaesthetic sculptures and for his public sculpture, both of which require a strong element of bodily interaction on the part of the viewer.
Jules Tavernier was a French painter, illustrator, and an important member of Hawaii’s Volcano School.
Francis de Erdely was a Hungarian-American artist who was renowned in Europe and the United States for his powerful figure paintings and drawings as well as for his teaching abilities.
Alan de Veritch is an American violist and viola teacher. He studied with William Primrose and performed in the Los Angeles Philharmonic for at least ten years. He has taught viola in various universities and was the president of the American Viola Society from 1990 to 1994.He played Jago peternella modern italian Viola
Edwin Bryant Crocker was a California Supreme Court Justice and founder of the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, California.
Grafton Tyler Brown was an American painter, lithographer and cartographer. Brown was the first African-American artist to create works depicting the Pacific Northwest and California.
Eli Harvey was an American sculptor, painter and animalier.
Pratapaditya Pal is an Indian scholar of Southeast Asian and Himalayan art and culture, specializing particularly in the history of art of India, Nepal and Tibet. He has served as a curator of South Asian art at several prominent US museums including Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago, where he has organized more than 22 major exhibitions and helped build the museums' collection. He has also written over 60 books and catalogs, and over 250 articles on the subject, taught at several universities, and served as the editor of the Indian art magazine, Marg. In 2009 he was awarded Padma Shri by the Government of India for his contributions to the study of Indian art.
John Hubbard Rich was an American illustrator, painter and art educator. He was the president of the California Art Club from 1944 to 1945.
Jacques Schnier (1898–1988) was a Romanian-born American artist, sculptor, author, educator, and engineer. He was a sculpture professor at the University of California, Berkeley from 1936 to 1966.
Arthur Millier was a British-born American painter, etcher, printmaker, and art critic. He was the art critic for the Los Angeles Times from 1926 to 1958. His work is in the permanent collections of many museums in the United States.
Clarence Keiser Hinkle was an American painter and art educator. His art studio was in Laguna Beach, California and later in Santa Barbara, California.
Edouard Vysekal was a Bohemia-born American painter and art educator. He was active in Chicago and Southern California.
Nell Walker Warner was an American artist. Born in Nebraska, she was an oil painter in La Cañada Flintridge, California until she moved to Carmel-by-the-Sea in 1950. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Nebraska Art.
