Richard Diebenkorn was an American painter and printmaker. His early work is associated with abstract expressionism and the Bay Area Figurative Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. In the late 1960s he began his extensive series of geometric, lyrical abstract paintings. Known as the Ocean Park paintings, these paintings were instrumental to his achievement of worldwide acclaim.
David Park was an American painter and a pioneer of the Bay Area Figurative Movement in painting during the 1950s.
Elmer Nelson Bischoff was a visual artist in the San Francisco Bay Area. Bischoff, along with Richard Diebenkorn and David Park, was part of the post-World War II generation of artists who started as abstract painters and found their way back to figurative art.
Raymond Saunders is an American artist known for his multimedia paintings which often have sociopolitical undertones, and which incorporate assemblage, drawing, collage and found text. Saunders is also recognized for his installation, sculpture, and curatorial work.
The Bay Area Figurative Movement was a mid-20th Century art movement made up of a group of artists in the San Francisco Bay Area who abandoned working in the prevailing style of Abstract Expressionism in favor of a return to figuration in painting during the 1950s and onward into the 1960s. Spanning two decades, this art movement is often broken down into three groups, or generations: the First Generation, the Bridge Generation, and the Second Generation.
Manuel John Neri Jr. was an American sculptor who is recognized for his life-size figurative sculptures in plaster, bronze, and marble. In Neri's work with the figure, he conveys an emotional inner state that is revealed through body language and gesture. Since 1965 his studio was in Benicia, California; in 1981 he purchased a studio in Carrara, Italy, for working in marble. Over four decades, beginning in the early 1970s, Neri worked primarily with the same model, Mary Julia Klimenko, creating drawings and sculptures that merge contemporary concerns with Modernist sculptural forms.
Virgil David Cantini was an American enamelist, sculptor and educator. He was well known for innovation with enamel and steel and received both local and national recognition for his work, including honorary awards, competitive prizes and commissions, along with a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1957. Cantini long served as a faculty member at the University of Pittsburgh, where he helped to create the Department of Studio Arts. A longtime resident of the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Cantini died on May 2, 2009 at the age of 90. Today, many of his large scale works are on display throughout the city of Pittsburgh.
Robert H. Hudson is an American visual artist. He is known for his funk art assemblage metal sculptures, but he has also worked in painting and printmaking.
Henry Pierre Villierme was an American Californian painter associated with abstract expressionism and the Bay Area Figurative Movement. Villierme was considered one of the "Second Generation" members of the Bay Area Figurative Movement. Villierme first rose to prominence with a series of successful exhibitions in the late 1950s. From the 1960s to the 1980s Villierme continued to paint and sculpt in his studio, and in the late 1980s returned to public exhibitions.
Ernest P. Briggs Jr. (1923–1984) was a second-generation Abstract Expressionist painter known for his expressive, sometimes calligraphic brushwork, his geometric compositions, and revolution in abstract painting that secured New York City's position as the art capital of the world in the post-World War II period.
William Theophilus Brown was an American artist. He became prominent as a member of the Bay Area Figurative Movement.
American Figurative Expressionism is a 20th-century visual art style or movement that first took hold in Boston, and later spread throughout the United States. Critics dating back to the origins of Expressionism have often found it hard to define. One description, however, classifies it as a Humanist philosophy, since it's human-centered and rationalist. Its formal approach to the handling of paint and space is often considered a defining feature, too, as is its radical, rather than reactionary, commitment to the figure.
Frank Lobdell was an American painter, often associated with the Bay Area Figurative Movement and Bay Area Abstract Expressionism.
Lawrence Calcagno was a San Francisco Bay area abstract expressionist painter. He described his artistic motivation in the following words
Ron Donoughe is a southwestern Pennsylvania regional artist based in Pittsburgh, PA. He paints realistic landscapes, cityscapes, and industrial scenes en plein air. In addition to documenting the emotion of a particular time and place, his paintings emphasize shifting patterns of light and shadow, as well as how colors change over distances.
Albert Swinden (1901–1961) was an English-born American abstract painter. He was one of the founders of the American Abstract Artists, and he created significant murals as part of the Federal Art Project.
Robert Lepper (1906-1991) was an American artist and art professor at Carnegie Institute of Technology, now Carnegie Mellon University, who developed the country's first industrial design degree program. Lepper's work in industrial design, his fascination with the impact of technology on society and its potential role for artmaking formed the background for his class "Individual and Social Analysis", a two semester class focusing on community and personal memory as factors in artistic expression, which with his theoretical dialogues with his most promising students outside the classroom fostered the intellectual environment from which such diverse artists as Andy Warhol, Philip Pearlstein, Mel Bochner, and Jonathan Borofsky would later build their art practices.
Vicky A. Clark is an American independent curator of contemporary art, art historian, and writer based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
James Darrell Northrup Weeks was an American artist and an early member of the Bay Area Figurative Movement. Unlike many artists in the movement, Weeks was never known for painting in a non-representational style, instead using abstraction in the "ideas of painting." He further diverged from his colleagues in the rigidity of his figures, a characteristic that Anita Ventura described as "[painting] not for expression so much as comprehension."
Bruce McGaw is a Bay Area Figurative Movement artist and professor emeritus of the San Francisco Art Institute. He was born in Berkeley, California in 1935 and studied at the California College of the Arts with Richard Diebenkorn and others in the 1950's.
