Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture; Finnish: Aalto-yliopiston taiteiden ja suunnittelun korkeakoulu; Swedish: Aalto-universitetets högskola för konst, design och arkitektur), was formed of two separate schools: the faculty of architecture and the University of Art and Design Helsinki. TaiK, founded in 1871, was the largest art university in the Nordic countries. The university awards the following academic degrees: Bachelor of Science in Technology, Architect, Bachelor of Arts, Master of Arts, and Doctor of Arts.
Vija Celmins is a Latvian American visual artist best known for photo-realistic paintings and drawings of natural environments and phenomena such as the ocean, spider webs, star fields, and rocks. Her earlier work included pop sculptures and monochromatic representational paintings. Based in New York City, she has been the subject of over forty solo exhibitions since 1965, and major retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London and the Centre Pompidou, Paris.
Kaj Gabriel Franck was one of the leading figures of Finnish design and an influential figure in design and applied arts between 1940 and 1980.
Anni Albers was a German textile artist and printmaker credited with blurring the lines between traditional craft and art.
Besides surface qualities, such as rough and smooth, dull and shiny, hard and soft, textiles also includes colour, and, as the dominating element, texture, which is the result of the construction of weaves. Like any craft it may end in producing useful objects, or it may rise to the level of art.
Vuokko Hillevi Lilian Eskolin-Nurmesniemi is a Finnish textile designer. She is best known for her work as one of the two leading designers of the Marimekko company. Her signature striped Jokapoika shirt helped to make the company's name.
Scandinavian design is a design movement characterized by simplicity, minimalism and functionality that emerged in the early 20th century, and subsequently flourished in the 1950s throughout the five Nordic countries: Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, and Iceland.
Iittala, founded as a glassworks in 1881, is a Finnish design brand specialising in design objects, tableware and cookware. Iittala's official i-logo was designed by Timo Sarpaneva in 1956.
Anne Wilson is a Chicago-based visual artist. Wilson creates sculpture, drawings, Internet projects, photography, performance, and DVD stop motion animations employing table linens, bed sheets, human hair, lace, thread and wire. Her work extends the traditional processes of fiber art to other media. Wilson is a professor in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Esteri Tomula was a ceramic artist and designer who worked at the Arabia ceramics factory in Helsinki, Finland from 1947 to 1984.
Ellen Lesperance is an American artist and educator, known for her paintings. Her works are typically gouache paintings that pattern the full-body garments of female activists engaged in Direct Action protests. She is based in Portland, Oregon, and has three children.
Marianne Strengell was an influential Finnish-American Modernist textile designer in the twentieth century. Strengell was a professor at Cranbrook Academy of Art from 1937 to 1942, and she served as department head from 1942 to 1962. She was able to translate hand-woven patterns for mechanized production, and pioneered the use of synthetic fibers.
Catherine Elizabeth Cooke is an American designer whose career has lasted more than 73 years. She is principally known for her jewelry. She has been called "an icon within the tradition of modernist jewelry" and "a seminal figure in American Modernist studio jewelry". Her pieces have been shown nationally and internationally and are included in a number of museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York. She is regarded as an important role model for other artists and craftspeople.
Ilonka Karasz, was a Hungarian-American designer and illustrator known for avant-garde industrial design and for her many New Yorker magazine covers.
Lia Cook is an American fiber artist noted for her work combining weaving with photography, painting, and digital technology. She lives and works in Berkeley, California and is known for her weavings which expanded the traditional boundaries of textile arts. She has been a professor at California College of the Arts since 1976.
Françoise Grossen is a textile artist known for her braided and knotted rope sculptures. She lives and works in New York City. Grossen’s work has been acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; and the State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia.
Betty Joel was a British furniture, textile and interior designer, active in England from c. 1921 until 1937. Her work was featured in The Studio, the illustrated fine arts and decorative arts magazine, from 1927 to 1937. Examples of her work can be seen in the Victoria & Albert Museum, London and the Geffrye Museum, London.
Johanna Rytkölä is a Finnish sculptor who works in stoneware ceramics. She studied at the University of Art and Design in Helsinki, Finland, receiving a Master of Arts degree in the Department of Art Education in 1982, and in 1986, a Master of Arts degree in the Department of Ceramics and Glass Design. The University of Art and Design became part of the Aalto University in 2010. She received the state artist grant for a five-year period in 2008 and for one year in 2015. She lives and works in the city of Vantaa in her studio house renovated from a former grocery store building.
Minna Carolina Mathilde Louise "Loja" Gesellius(March 15, 1879 – April 21, 1968) was a Finnish-American textile artist and sculptor. She founded the weaving department at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. She also led her own studio, the Studio Loja Saarinen, which designed many of the textiles used in buildings designed by her husband, the architect Eliel Saarinen.
Joan Livingstone is an American contemporary artist, educator, curator, and author based in Chicago. She creates sculptural objects, installations, prints, and collages that reference the human body and bodily experience.
Heather Goodchild is a Canadian artist and costume designer who produces paintings and textile art installations. She has exhibited in Berlin, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Toronto and throughout Canada. Recurring themes in her work include symbolism, rituals, regalia, societies, traditions, morality, and personal fulfilment.
