Paul Rand was an American art director and graphic designer. He was best known for his corporate logo designs, including the logos for IBM, UPS, Enron, Morningstar, Inc., Westinghouse, ABC, and NeXT. He was one of the first American commercial artists to embrace and practice the Swiss Style of graphic design.
Biddy Mason was an African-American nurse and a Californian real estate entrepreneur and philanthropist. She was one of the founders of the First African Methodist Episcopal Church in Los Angeles, California. Enslaved upon birth, she developed a variety of skills and developed knowledge of medicine, child care, and livestock care. A California court granted freedom to her and her three daughters in 1856.
Betye Irene Saar is an African American artist known for her work in the medium of assemblage. Saar is a visual storyteller and an accomplished printmaker. Saar was a part of the Black Arts Movement in the 1970s, which engaged myths and stereotypes about race and femininity. Her work is considered highly political, as she challenged negative ideas about African Americans throughout her career; Saar is best known for her artwork that critiques American racism toward Black people.
April Greiman is an American designer widely recognized as one of the first designers to embrace computer technology as a design tool. Greiman is also credited, along with early collaborator Jayme Odgers, with helping to import the European New Wave design style to the US during the late 70s and early 80s." According to design historian Steven Heller, “April Greiman was a bridge between the modern and postmodern, the analog and the digital.” “She is a pivotal proponent of the ‘new typography’ and new wave that defined late twentieth-century graphic design.” Her art combines her Swiss design training with West Coast postmodernism.
An eye bolt is a bolt with a loop at one end. They are used to firmly attach a securing eye to a structure, so that ropes or cables may then be tied to it.
The Woman's Building was a non-profit arts and education center located in Los Angeles, California. The Woman's Building focused on feminist art and served as a venue for the women's movement and was spearheaded by artist Judy Chicago, graphic designer Sheila Levrant de Bretteville and art historian Arlene Raven. The center was open from 1973 until 1991. During its existence, the Los Angeles Times called the Woman's Building a "feminist mecca."
Arlene Raven was a feminist art historian, author, critic, educator, and curator. Raven was a co-founder of numerous feminist art organizations in Los Angeles in the 1970s.
The feminist art movement in the United States began in the early 1970s and sought to promote the study, creation, understanding and promotion of women's art. First-generation feminist artists include Judy Chicago, Miriam Schapiro, Suzanne Lacy, Judith Bernstein, Sheila de Bretteville, Mary Beth Edelson, Carolee Schneeman, Rachel Rosenthal, and many other women. They were part of the Feminist art movement in the United States in the early 1970s to develop feminist writing and art. The movement spread quickly through museum protests in both New York and Los Angeles, via an early network called W.E.B. that disseminated news of feminist art activities from 1971 to 1973 in a nationally circulated newsletter, and at conferences such as the West Coast Women's Artists Conference held at California Institute of the Arts and the Conference of Women in the Visual Arts, at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C..
Vanalyne Green is an American artist who also teaches and writes about culture. She has screened her video work extensively in the United States and abroad, including The Whitney Biennial (1991), American Film Institute, Rotterdam International Film Festival, the Videotheque de Paris, The Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, The Guggenheim Museum and many other museums, universities and film festivals. She has received a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, as well as grants from Creative Capital, the Jerome Foundation, the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation (2003), the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council of the Arts, and a Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome (2001–2002). Her work has been covered in the Village Voice, the Los Angeles Weekly, The Chicago Reader, and Artforum. Publications by and about, and interviews with, Green also can be found in "Performance Artists Talking in the Eighties" by Linda M. Montano, "Women of Vision" by Alexandra Juhasz, in addition to M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An Anthology of Artists' Writings, Theory, and Criticism. Green's videotape "A Spy in the House that Ruth Built" was listed as one of the 1,000 best films ever made by film critic and author Jonathan Rosenbaum.
Lorraine Wild is a Canadian-born American graphic designer, writer, art historian, and teacher. She is an AIGA Medalist and principal of Green Dragon Office, a design firm that focuses on collaborative work with artists, architects, curators, editors and publishers. Wild is based in Los Angeles, California.
Alvin Eisenman was an American graphic designer and educator throughout the last half of the 20th century. He was most notable for founding and heading the Yale School of Art's graduate program in graphic design beginning in 1951 — the first graduate program in graphic design in the United States. He remained the director of that program until his retirement in 1990, at which point he was succeeded by Sheila Levrant de Bretteville. Eisenman continued to teach in the program through the 1990s.
Deborah Sussman was an American designer and a pioneer in the field of environmental graphic design. Her work incorporated graphic design into architectural and public spaces.
Louise Sandhaus is an American graphic designer and design educator. She is a professor at the California Institute of the Arts and is the principal of Louise Sandhaus Design.
The Feminist Art Program (FAP) was a college-level art program for women developed in 1970 by artist Judy Chicago and continued by artists Rita Yokoi, Miriam Schapiro, and others. The FAP began at Fresno State College, as a way to address gender inequities in art education, and the art world in general. In 1971, Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro brought the FAP to the newly formed California Institute of the Arts, leaving Rita Yokoi to run the Fresno FAP until her retirement in 1992. The FAP at California Institute of the Arts was active until 1976. The students in the Feminist Art Program read women writers, studied women artists, and made art about being a woman based on group consciousness-raising sessions. Often, the program was separate from the rest of the art school to allow the women to develop in a greenhouse-like environment and away from discerning critiques. While the separatist ideology has been critiqued as reinforcing gender, the FAP has made a lasting impression on feminist art which can be seen in retrospectives, group exhibitions, and creative re-workings of the original projects.
Kim Anno is a Japanese-American artist and educator. She is known for her work as an abstract painter, photographer, and filmmaker. Anno has served as a professor, and as the chair of the painting department at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco.
Susan E. King is an American artist, educator, and writer who is best known for her artist's books.
Nontsikelelo Mutiti is a graphic designer, artist and educator. Her work focuses on web design, video, print, and book art. She often includes hair braiding in her design work, and is "interested in the nuanced differences between black cultures". Her work includes printed materials for Black Lives Matter. Since 2022, Mutiti has served as the Director of Graduate Studies in Graphic Design at the Yale School of Art.
Ginger Wolfe-Suarez is an American artist, writer, and curator who has worked out of Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Atlanta. Her practice includes installation art, sculpture, drawings, and artist books. She has been featured in exhibitions in Paris, Berlin, Vienna, and throughout the United States, at venues including Silverman Gallery, Luckman Fine Arts Complex, Southern Exposure, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and High Desert Test Sites. Her work has been reviewed in Artforum, the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Sculpture, Art Papers and Art Practical, among other publications. Wolfe-Suarez draws on the traditions of feminist sculpture, Latin American installation art, conceptualism, and minimalism in works that function phenomenologically to explore the perception of space and materials, body-object relationships, ephemerality, and negotiations of memory. Artforum reviewer Annie Buckley described her show at Ltd Los Angeles as one in which "the cerebral [was] incidental to the sensory," with subtle images, fleeting reflections and lingering scents indicating the intangible.
Laurie Haycock Makela is an American graphic designer and educator. She co-chaired the design program at Cranbrook Academy of Art in the 1990s along with her husband, P. Scott Makela. Both were honored with the AIGA medal in 2000.
The New Women's Survival Catalog is a 1973 book, the collective outcome of an influential survey of second-wave feminist network activities across the United States. It was assembled in five months by Kirsten Grimstad and Susan Rennie. The book was promoted as a "feminist Whole Earth Catalog", referring to Stewart Brand's famous 1968–1972 counterculture magazine. The book was reissued by art book publisher Primary Information in September 2019.
