Helen Frankenthaler was an American abstract expressionist painter. She was a major contributor to the history of postwar American painting. Having exhibited her work for over six decades, she spanned several generations of abstract painters while continuing to produce vital and ever-changing new work. Frankenthaler began exhibiting her large-scale abstract expressionist paintings in contemporary museums and galleries in the early 1950s. She was included in the 1964 Post-Painterly Abstraction exhibition curated by Clement Greenberg that introduced a newer generation of abstract painting that came to be known as color field. Born in Manhattan, she was influenced by Greenberg, Hans Hofmann, and Jackson Pollock's paintings. Her work has been the subject of several retrospective exhibitions, including a 1989 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and been exhibited worldwide since the 1950s. In 2001, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts.
Tara Donovan is an American sculptor who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Her large-scale installations, sculptures, drawings, and prints utilize everyday objects to explore the transformative effects of accumulation and aggregation. Known for her commitment to process, she has earned acclaim for her ability to exploit the inherent physical characteristics of an object in order to transform it into works that generate unique perceptual phenomena and atmospheric effects. Her work has been conceptually linked to an art historical lineage that includes Postminimalism and Process artists such as Eva Hesse, Jackie Winsor, Richard Serra, and Robert Morris, along with Light and Space artists such as Mary Corse, Helen Pashgian, Robert Irwin, and James Turrell.
Inka Essenhigh is an American painter based in New York City. Throughout her career, Essenhigh has had solo exhibitions at galleries such as Deitch Projects, Mary Boone Gallery, 303 Gallery, Stefan Stux Gallery, and Jacob Lewis Gallery in New York, Kotaro Nukaga, Tomio Koyama Gallery in Tokyo, and Il Capricorno in Venice.
Rina Banerjee is an Indian-American artist and sculptor. She currently lives and works in New York City. Her ambitious mid-career survey exhibition, Make Me a Summary of the World––co-organized by and exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the San Jose Museum of Art––opened in 2018 and is slated to travel to the Fowler Museum at UCLA, the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, TN, and the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC through July 2021.
Dan Owen Dailey is an American artist and educator, known for his sculpture. With the support of a team of artists and crafts people, he creates sculptures and functional objects in glass and metal. He has taught at many glass programs and is professor emeritus at the Massachusetts College of Art, where he founded the glass program.
Alvin D. Loving Jr., better known as Al Loving, was an African-American abstract expressionist painter. His work is known for hard-edge abstraction, dyed fabric paintings, and large paper collages, all exploring complicated color relationships.
Gaia is an American street artist who has received significant museum showings and critical recognition. Based in Baltimore, he has created large-scale murals worldwide to engage the community where he works in a dialogue by using historical and sociological references to these neighborhoods. Besides continuing to do commissions for private and corporate clients, Gaia is teaching two classes a semester- Drawing and Professional Development at his alma mater MICA.
Alex Brewer, also known as HENSE, is an American contemporary artist, best known for his dynamic, vivid and colorful abstract paintings and monumental wall pieces. He has been active since the 1990s. In 2002 he began accepting commissions for artwork and over the course of the last decade has established a solid reputation as a commissioned artist, having appeared in several solo and group shows.
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.
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.
Dianne Smith is an abstract painter, sculptor, and installation artist. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in New York City's Soho and Chelsea art districts as well as, numerous galleries and institutions throughout the United States, and abroad. She is an arts educator in the field of Aesthetic Education at Lincoln Center Education, which is part of New York City's Lincoln Center For the Performing Arts. Since the invitation to join the Institute almost a decade ago she has taught pre k-12 in public schools throughout the Tri-State area. Her work as an arts educator also extends to undergraduate and graduate courses in various colleges and universities in the New York City area. She has taught at Lehman College, Brooklyn College, Columbia University Teachers College, City College, and St. John's University.
The Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative was a five-year program, supported by Swiss bank UBS in which the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation identified and works with artists, curators and educators from South and Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East and North Africa to expand its reach in the international art world. For each of the three phases of the project, the museum invited one curator from the chosen region to the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum in New York City for a two-year curatorial residency, where they worked with a team of Guggenheim staff to identify new artworks that reflect the range of talents in their parts of the world. The resident curators organized international touring exhibitions that highlight these artworks and help organize educational activities. The Foundation acquired these artworks for its permanent collection and included them as the focus of exhibitions that open at the museum in New York and subsequently traveled to two other cultural institutions or other venues around the world. The Foundation supplemented the exhibitions with a series of public and online programs, and supported cross-cultural exchange and collaboration between staff members of the institutions hosting the exhibitions. UBS reportedly contributied more than $40 million to the project to pay for its activities and the art acquisitions. Foundation director Richard Armstrong commented: "We are hoping to challenge our Western-centric view of art history."
Moira Dryer (1957–1992) was a Canadian artist known for her abstract paintings on wood panel.
Carol Brown Goldberg is an American artist working in a variety of media. While primarily a painter creating heavily detailed work as large as 10 feet by 10 feet, she is also known for sculpture, film, and drawing. Her work has ranged from narrative genre paintings to multi-layered abstractions to realistic portraits to intricate gardens and jungles.
Paula Wilson is an African American "mixed media" artist creating works examining women's identities through a lens of cultural history. She uses sculpture, collage, painting, installation, and printmaking methods such as silkscreen, lithography, and woodblock. In 2007 Wilson moved from Brooklyn, New York, to Carrizozo, New Mexico, where she currently lives and works with her woodworking partner Mike Lagg.
Lovie Olivia is an American multidisciplinary visual artist. She uses the media of printmaking, painting, and installations to explore themes of gender, sexuality, race, class and power.
Franklin Sirmans is an American art critic, editor, writer, curator and has been the director of the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) since October 2015. His initiatives there include ensuring that PAMM's art program reflects the community in Miami and securing donations. In his first six months at PAMM, he managed to secure the largest donation of works in the museum's short history, over a hundred pieces of art were donated by Design District developer Craig Robins.
Rachel Owens is an American artist. She is best known for her multi-media sculptures and installations, which often incorporate a social component. Many of her works are made from crushed glass. She lives and works in New York, NY, and is an assistant professor of art and design at Purchase College, SUNY.
LaToya M. Hobbs is an American painter and printmaker best known for her large-scale portraits of Black women. She was born and raised in Little Rock, Arkansas. She earned her BA from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and her MFA from Purdue University. Hobbs moved to Baltimore, Maryland later in her life, where she works as a professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art. She gained recognition for her portraiture and figurative imagery in the 2010s, receiving several travel grants and awards.
Lucia Hierro is a Dominican American multimedia artist known for soft-assemblage, painting, sculpture, and digital media collages that represent the intersectionality between Dominican American identity, capitalism, and community through a culturally relevant lens. Her most notable works infuse "bodega aesthetics" with pop art, minimalism and Dutch still life styles. She has a studio in South Bronx.
