Rita Blitt

Last updated

Rita Blitt
Born
Rita Copaken

(1931-09-07) September 7, 1931 (age 92)
Alma mater University of Missouri–Kansas City
OccupationArtist
Movement Expressionism, Post-Impressionism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism
Spouse
Irwin Blitt
(m. 19512017)
Website ritablitt.com

Rita Blitt (born Rita Copaken, September 7, 1931) is an American painter, sculptor and filmmaker.

Contents

Biography

Rita Blitt is an American contemporary painter, sculptor and film collaborator. Born Rita Lea Copaken in Kansas City Missouri on September 7, 1931, to Dorothy Sofnas Copaken and Herman Copaken, Blitt was married for 66 years to Irwin Blitt, 1928-2017. Blitt attended Illinois University and received a degree in Fine Arts in 1952 from the University of Missouri at Kansas City. After her bachelor’s degree, Blitt continued her art studies at the Kansas City Art Institute with painter Wilbur Niewald. In 2010 Blitt received the UMKC Spotlight Alumnus Award. [1]

Blitt is known for her abstract organic lines and shapes inspired by nature, music and dance, such as her black line paintings and pastel "Oval" series. Blitt has used her drawings as inspiration for sculpture, the tallest being "One" standing at 60 feet in Overland Park, Kansas. [2] Blitt has been involved in the making of several films about her art practice and artistic collaborations. "Caught in Paint", 2003, is a 6 minute film following the collaboration of Blitt, David Parsons, the Parsons Dance Company, and Lois Greenfield, dance photographer. [3] The film received 16 awards and was shown at over 130 film festivals. Blitt is also known for her words, "Kindness is contagious. Catch it!", which have inspired kindness programs and awards including the Kindest Kansas Citian [4] and the Kindest School.

Aspen has been a source of inspiration for Blitt. Her drawing was featured on the cover of the 2011 Aspen Music festival's program book. [5] Also, she was honored by Aspen's Red Brick Art Center in 2012. [6]

Blitt's paintings and sculpture have been featured in over 70 solo exhibitions in the United States, Israel and Singapore. [7]

A five foot Blitt sculpture, "Sensuously Stacked Steel," placed fifth in the 2005 Florence Biennale. [8]

The Omni award winning book "Rita Blitt: The Passionate Gesture", 2000, ISBN   0-9630785-8-5, documents selected Blitt drawings, paintings and sculpture from a period of twenty years.

The Rita Blitt Gallery and Sculpture Garden housing her legacy collection opened November 3, 2017 at The Mulvane Art Museum, Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas. [9] In 2019, Washburn awarded Blitt an Honorary Doctoral Degree in Fine Arts. [10]

Museums

Awards and honours

Published works

Films

Related Research Articles

Blackbear Bosin was a self-taught Comanche/Kiowa sculptor, painter, and commercial artist. He is also known by his Kiowa name, Tsate Kongia, which means "black bear."

Karole Armitage is an American dancer and choreographer currently based in New York City. She is artistic director of Armitage Gone! Dance, a contemporary dance company that performs several times annually in New York City as well as touring internationally. She was dubbed the “punk ballerina” in the 1980s. She earned a Tony nomination for her choreography of the Broadway musical Hair.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joan Jonas</span> American visual artist (born 1936)

Joan Jonas is an American visual artist and a pioneer of video and performance art, and one of the most important artists to emerge in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Jonas' projects and experiments were influential in the creation of video performance art as a medium. Her influences also extended to conceptual art, theatre, performance art and other visual media. She lives and works in New York and Nova Scotia, Canada.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kiki Smith</span> German-born American artist

Kiki Smith is a German-born American artist whose work has addressed the themes of sex, birth and regeneration. Her figurative work of the late 1980s and early 1990s confronted subjects such as AIDS, feminism, and gender, while recent works have depicted the human condition in relationship to nature. Smith lives and works in the Lower East Side, New York City, and the Hudson Valley, New York State.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ursula von Rydingsvard</span> American sculptor (born 1942)

Ursula von Rydingsvard is a sculptor who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She is best known for creating large-scale works influenced by nature, primarily using cedar and other forms of timber.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Huma Bhabha</span> American sculptor

Huma Bhabha is a Pakistani-American sculptor based in Poughkeepsie, New York. Known for her uniquely grotesque, figurative forms that often appear dissected or dismembered, Bhabha often uses found materials in her sculptures, including styrofoam, cork, rubber, paper, wire, and clay. She occasionally incorporates objects given to her by other people into her artwork. Many of these sculptures are also cast in bronze. She is equally prolific in her works on paper, creating vivid pastel drawings, eerie photographic collages, and haunting print editions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nathan Sawaya</span> American artist (born 1973)

Nathan Sawaya is an American artist who builds custom three-dimensional sculptures and large-scale mosaics from popular everyday items and is best known for his work with standard Lego building bricks.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Maria Lassnig</span> Austrian artist (1919–2014)

Maria Lassnig was an Austrian artist known for her painted self-portraits and her theory of "body awareness". She was the first female artist to win the Grand Austrian State Prize in 1988 and was awarded the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art in 2005. Lassnig lived and taught in Vienna from 1980 until her death.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carole Feuerman</span> American sculptor

Carole A. Feuerman is an American sculptor and artist working in hyperrealism. Feuerman utilizes a variety of media including resin, marble, and bronze. She has been included in exhibitions at the Smithsonian Institution's National Portrait Gallery; and Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, Italy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">K. M. Madhusudhanan</span>

Madhusudhanan is an Indian film maker and artist, also known as K. M. Madhusudhanan. His debut feature film, Bioscope has received many awards. He is working with different media in art, including sculpture, printmaking installation art and film.

William L. Haney is recognized for his narrative-realist paintings. His paintings were constructed as conceptual collages involving social-political issues of the late 20th century. Haney was intensely engaged in art history, often referencing other artists and the world around him. His artistic process consisted of drawing and collecting images from magazines, posters, and other sources. Usually, he would prepare watercolor first and then plan placement as per color attributes, finishing with an oil painting and print. His draftsman skills only allowed him to draw on canvas without the aid of a camera. He was also known as a super-realist and a post photo-realist. Other contemporary painters working in a super-realistic or hyper-realistic style are Richard Estes and Robert Birmelin.

Aïda Ruilova is an American contemporary artist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Polly Apfelbaum</span> American contemporary visual artist (born 1955)

Polly E. Apfelbaum is an American contemporary visual artist, who is primarily known for her colorful drawings, sculptures, and fabric floor pieces, which she refers to as "fallen paintings". She currently lives and works in New York City, New York.

Mary Sibande is a South African artist based in Johannesburg. Her art consists of sculptures, paintings, photography, and design. Sibande uses these mediums and techniques to help depict the human form and explore the construction of identity in a postcolonial South African context. In addition, Sibande focuses on using her work to show her personal experiences through Apartheid. Her art also attempts to critique stereotypical depictions of women, particularly black women.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kimsooja</span> South Korean conceptual artist

Kimsooja was born in Daegu, South Korea. Kimsooja is a multi-disciplinary conceptual artist who travels between her three homes and places of work in New York City, Paris, and Seoul. In 1980 Kim graduated with a B.F.A in Painting from Hong-Ik University, Seoul and continued to pursue her M.F.A there, obtaining the degree in 1984 at the age of 27. Her origin as a painter was a crucial starting point for the development of her art. That same year, she received a scholarship to study art at Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, France, where she studied Printmaking. Her first solo exhibition was held in 1988 at Gallery Hyundai, Seoul. Currently, her work is featured in countless international museums and galleries as well as public art fairs and other spaces. Her practice combines performance, film, photo, and site-specific installation using textile, light, and sound. Kimsooja's work investigates questions concerning the conditions of humanity, while engaging issues of aesthetics, culture, politics, and the environment. Her principle of ‘non-doing’ and ‘non-making,’ which follows a conceptual and structural investigation of performance through modes of mobility and immobility, inverts the notion of the artist as the predominant actor.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">NedRa Bonds</span>

NedRa Bonds is an American quilter, activist, and retired teacher, born and raised in the historic Quindaro neighborhood in Kansas City, Kansas. Bonds creates quilts and mixed media fiber dolls using fabric, beads, and symbolism to explore issues dealing with human rights, race, women, politics, and the environment. She is best known for her Quindaro Quilt, a quilt measuring 4 by 6 feet, detailing the important history of the Quindaro neighborhood and its role as part of the National Underground Railroad System of Historic Trails. As a community activist and educator, Bonds advocates for legislation, taught workshops locally and internationally, and attended the Earth Summit Conference on Environment and Development of the United Nations as a delegate in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992. Bonds is a practicing artist and retired teacher in Kansas City, Kansas. Her recent projects include her Common Threads quilt, commissioned by the Kansas City Chiefs for their Arrowhead Arts Collection, the Wak’ó Mujeres Phụ nữ Women Mural collaboration, sponsored by the Charlotte Street Foundation's Rocket Grant Program, in Lawrence, Kansas, and her recent cancer project. Bonds was appointed to the Kansas Arts Commission by Kansas Governor Joan Finney in 1992.

James Pringle Cook is an American painter based in Tucson, Arizona, known nationally for expressive, monumental landscapes and urban scenes that employ vigorous brushwork and thick, impasto surfaces and move between realism and passages of abstraction. He has explored a wide range of geographies across the United States and subjects from craggy mountains and seascapes to industrial accidents to the figure. Curators and critics, however, generally agree that his work is as much about pure painting as it is about his convincing recapitulations of the world and a sense of place. Museum Director Robert Yassin described Cook as "a painter who is in love with painting [whose] bravura use of paint is akin to the abstract expressionists; unlike them, however, he provides viewers with a recognizable reality, ordered by his own personal vision and controlled by his technical mastery." Discussing his urban works, Margaret Regan wrote, "Cook is so skilled a painter he can turn almost anything into a thing of beauty […] His bravura handling of the paint is what matters: his pure layers of color, slabbed in thick gobs onto his linen canvases with a palette knife, glistening like butter."

Colette Stuebe Bangert is an American artist and new media artist who has created both computer-generated and traditional artworks. Her computer-generated artworks are the product of a decades-long collaboration with her husband, Charles Jeffries "Jeff" Bangert (1938–2019), a mathematician and computer graphics programmer. Bangert's work in traditional media includes painting, drawing, watercolor and textiles.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hasna Sal</span> American glass sculptor

Hasna Sal is an American glass sculptor known for designing and sculpting large-scale glass sculptures and glass jewelry.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jack Edward Barber</span> American artist (1918–2003)

Jack Edward Barber was an American artist working in oil, egg tempera, acrylics, watercolor, lithography, and sculpture. 

References

  1. "Honoring the 2010 Alumni Award recipients". University of Missouri-Kansas City Alumni Magazine. 3 March 2010.
  2. "Monumental Art". ritablitt.com.
  3. "Caught in Paint (2005)". imdb.com.
  4. "Ep. 165 - Rita Blitt on Small Changes Big Shifts". smallchangesbigshifts.com.
  5. "Reception for international award-winning artist Rita Blitt". Colorado Mountain College News. 6 July 2015.
  6. Stewart Oksenhorn (20 July 2012). "Rita Blitt to Be Honored by Aspen's Red Brick Center for the Arts". The Aspen Times.
  7. T.K. Sabapathy (16 April 1991). "Dances of Life". Straits Times. p. 7.
  8. 1 2 "Awarded Artists 2005 - Florence Biennale". florencebiennale.org.
  9. "Rita Blitt Gallery". Mulvane Art Museum.
  10. "Rita Blitt receives honorary doctorate". The Kansas City Jewish Chronicle.