Percy Martin | |
---|---|
Born | |
Nationality | American |
Occupation(s) | Artist, retired art teacher |
Known for | Allegorical printmaking |
Percy Martin is an American artist and teacher. [1] Martin has lived in Washington, D.C. since 1947 and has taught several generations of Washington area art students, including the University of Maryland, the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design and finally at the Sidwell Friends School, where he taught from 1979 to 2009. [2] [3] [4]
Martin studied art and graduated from the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design. [5] [6]
For over three decades, Martin has been working on a series of highly technical prints which detail the life, culture and history of an imaginary Bushmen people born out of Martin's imagination. [5] [7] [8]
Scenes from the Bushworld play out in Martin's mind as sharply as a movie. The most mundane objects can send him into a cross-dimensional corkscrew. While vacationing in the Ukraine in 1995, for instance, he picked up a smooth, oval stone on a river bank and immediately fell into a quasi-hallucination wherein angry Bushwomen were trying to crack a sacred bird's stone egg with a crystal egg to become High Priestess. "If I could've gotten a jet helicopter, I would've left that second," says Martin. [8]
His work is in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, [9] The Washington Post [10] [7] , the City of Washington, DC, [11] and the University of Maryland, [10] [7] and has been exhibited widely in galleries, [12] [5] museums, universities, [13] [14] and arts organization such as the Washington Project for the Arts. [5] [15]
Martin was awarded a Ford Foundation Fellowship in 1966, [2] and nine years later, in 1975 he was also awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Artist-in-Residence award. [2]
William Wilson Corcoran was an American banker, philanthropist, and art collector. He founded the Corcoran Gallery of Art.
Arthur Cotton Moore was an American architect who was notable for the restoration of Washington Harbour and modernization of the Thomas Jefferson Building.
The Corcoran School of the Arts and Design is the professional art school of the George Washington University, in Washington, D.C. Founded in 1878, the school is housed in the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the oldest private cultural institution in Washington, located on The Ellipse, facing the White House. The Corcoran School is part of GW's Columbian College of Arts and Sciences and was formerly an independent college, until 2014.
The Washington Color School, also known as the Washington, D.C., Color School, was an art movement starting during the 1950s–1970s in Washington, D.C., in the United States, built of abstract expressionist artists. The movement emerged during a time when society, the arts, and people were changing quickly. The founders of this movement are Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, however four more artists were part of the initial art exhibition in 1965.
Paul (Allen) Reed was an American artist most associated with the Washington Color School and Color Field Painting.
Lowell Blair Nesbitt was an American painter, draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor. He served as the official artist for the NASA Apollo 9, and Apollo 13 space missions; in 1976 the United States Navy commissioned him to paint a mural in the administration building on Treasure Island spanning 26 feet x 251 feet, then the largest mural in the United States; and in 1980 the United States Postal Service honored Lowell Nesbitt by issuing four postage stamps depicting his paintings.
Washington Project for the Arts, founded in 1975, is a non-profit organization dedicated to the support and aid of artists in the Washington, D.C. area.
Prentiss Taylor was an American illustrator, lithographer, and painter. Born in Washington D.C., Taylor began his art studies at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, followed by painting classes under Charles Hawthorne in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and training at the Art Students League in New York City. In 1931, Taylor began studying lithography at the League. He became a member of one of the most important printmaking societies in America at that time, the Society of American Graphic Artists. Taylor interacted and collaborated with many writers and musicians in his time in New York in the late 1920s and early 30s. This was in the emergence of the Harlem Renaissance. Among his close friends and colleagues were Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten.
Martha Jackson Jarvis is an American artist known for her mixed-media installations that explore aspects of African, African American, and Native American spirituality, ecological concerns, and the role of women in preserving indigenous cultures. Her installations are composed using a variety of natural materials including terracotta, sand, copper, recycled stone, glass, wood and coal. Her sculptures and installations are often site-specific, designed to interact with their surroundings and create a sense of place. Her works often focus on the history and culture of African Americans in the southern United States. In her exhibition at the Corcoran, Jarvis featured over 100 big collard green leaves, numerous carp and a live Potomac catfish.
Joyce J. Scott is an African-American artist, sculptor, quilter, performance artist, installation artist, print-maker, lecturer and educator. Named a MacArthur Fellow in 2016, and a Smithsonian Visionary Artist in 2019, Scott is best known for her figurative sculptures and jewelry using free form, off-loom beadweaving techniques, similar to a peyote stitch. Each piece is often constructed using thousands of glass seed beads or pony beads, and sometimes other found objects or materials such as glass, quilting and leather. In 2018, she was hailed for working in new medium — a mixture of soil, clay, straw, and cement — for a sculpture meant to disintegrate and return to the earth. Scott is influenced by a variety of diverse cultures, including Native American and African traditions, Mexican, Czech, and Russian beadwork, illustration and comic books, and pop culture.
Kevin John MacDonald was a Washington DC-based artist best known for his large scale drawings in color pencil. The artist is also known for oil paintings and fine art prints, especially lithography and silkscreen printing.
Jefferson Pinder is an African-American performance artist whose work provokes commentary about race and struggle.
Benjamin Abramowitz was an American painter, printmaker, and sculptor. First recognized for his contribution at age 19 as senior artist with the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in New York City, he is among the most respected Washington, D.C., artists of the past century.
Maggie Michael is an American painter. Born in Milwaukee, Michael has spent much of her career in Washington, D.C. A 1996 graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, from which she received a BFA, with honors, she received her MA from San Francisco State University in 2000 and her MFA from American University in 2002. She has received numerous awards during her career, including a grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation in 2004, the same year in which she was given a Young Artist Grant by the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities; she has also worked with the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Michael is married to the sculptor Dan Steinhilber. She has served on the faculty of the Corcoran College of Art and Design.
Luther McKinley Stovall was an American visual artist who resided in Washington, D.C.
Susana Raab is an American fine art and documentary photographer based in Washington, D.C. She was born in Lima, Peru.
Allen Dester Carter, known as 'Big Al' Carter, was an Alexandria, Virginia artist and public school art teacher in Washington, D.C.
Ed McGowin is an American painter and sculptor based in New York City. Throughout his career, McGowin has produced works in a wide variety of media that have been installed and exhibited in galleries, museums and public spaces. He has taught at institutions such as the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, the University of Southern Mississippi, and the State University of New York system. The first major publication of his work, Name Change: One Artist – Twelve Personas – Thirty Five Years, was published by the Mobile Museum of Art in 2006 and distributed by the University Press of Mississippi.
Minnie Klavans was an American artist whose work is held by the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the American University Museum, among others.