Jack Tworkov was an American abstract expressionist painter.
Leon Polk Smith (1906–1996) was an American painter. His geometrically oriented abstract paintings were influenced by Piet Mondrian and he is a follow er of the Hard-edge school. His best-known paintings constitute maximally reduced forms, characterized by just two colors on a canvas meeting in a sharply delineated edge, often on an unframed canvas of unusual shape. His work is represented in many museums in the United States, Europe, and South America. Thanks to a generous bequest from the artist, the Brooklyn Museum has 27 of his paintings on permanent display.
The Art of This Century gallery was opened by Peggy Guggenheim at 30 West 57th Street in Manhattan, New York City on October 20, 1942. The gallery occupied two commercial spaces on the seventh floor of a building that was part of the midtown arts district including the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, Helena Rubinstein's New Art Center, and numerous commercial galleries. The gallery exhibited important modern art until it closed in 1947, when Guggenheim returned to Europe. The gallery was designed by architect, artist, and visionary Frederick Kiesler.
Phong H. Bui is an artist, writer, independent curator, and Co-Founder and Artistic Director of The Brooklyn Rail, a free monthly arts, culture, and politics journal. Bui was named one of the "100 Most Influential People in Brooklyn Culture" by Brooklyn Magazine in 2014. In 2015, The New York Observer called him a "ringmaster" of the "Kings County art world." Bui was the recipient of the 2021 American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts. He lives in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
Yun-Fei Ji is a Chinese-American painter who has been based largely in New York City since 1990. His art synthesizes old and new representational modes, subverting the classical idealism of centuries-old Chinese scroll and landscape painting traditions to tell contemporary stories of survival amid ecological and social disruption. He employs metaphor, symbolic allusion and devices such as caricature and the grotesque to create tumultuous, Kafka-esque worlds that writers suggest address two cultural revolutions: the first, communist one and its spiritual repercussions, and a broader capitalist one driven by industrialization and its effects, both in China and the US. ARTnews critic Lilly Wei wrote, "Ancestral ghosts and skeletons appear frequently in Ji’s iconography; his work is infused with the supernatural and the folkloric as well as the documentary as he records with fierce, focused intensity the displacement and forced relocation of people, the disappearance of villages, and the environmental upheavals of massive projects like the controversial Three Gorges Dam."
Richard Humann is a New York City-based American neo-conceptual artist. His art delves deep into concept and ideas, and he uses a multitude of materials to create his installations, sculptures, videos, and sound projects. Richard Humann's influences are as broad ranging as from Donald Judd, and Nam June Paik, to Jonathan Borofsky. His artwork bears conceptual similarities and to that of Joseph Kosuth, Sol LeWitt, Lawrence Weiner, Edward Ruscha, and Robert Morris.
Kathleen Kucka is an American visual artist whose practice includes abstract paintings, works on paper and prints. She is known for work that combines a conceptual approach with unique, sometimes unpredictable processes of mark-making such as the burning of canvas, pouring paint, and sewing. Critics note her work for its highly associative, open-ended quality, which evokes modernist formalism and natural phenomena from the microcosmic to the macrocosmic. Critic Stephanie Buhmann wrote that Kucka's work is inspired by nature and contemporary abstraction with attention to geometry, and leaves viewers "wondering if we are witnessing a scene documented through a microscope or captured from an aerial view ... we find ourselves reminded of the interrelations between all things, be they of a natural or man-made origin."
Cora Cohen was an American artist whose works include paintings, drawings, photographs, and altered x-rays. Cohen is most known for her abstract paintings and is often identified as continuing the tradition of American Abstraction. In a 2023 review in Artforum Barry Schwabsky suggested that "Cohen’s determination to evade stylistic consistency has made her one of the most underrated painters in New York." The New York Times' critic Michael Brenson wrote of her 1984 exhibition, Portraits of Women: "The works are dense, brooding and yet elated. The turbulence of the paint not only looks but also feels like freedom." Cohen interviewed many other artists also associated with continuing the tradition of American Abstraction for Bomb Magazine including; Ralph Humphrey, Dona Nelson, Craig Fisher, Carl Ostendarp, and Joan Mitchell. Her work has also been identified with traditions of European abstraction, and specifically German abstraction, including the work of Wols, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter. She began exhibiting in Germany in the early nineties and continued to show at some of its most prestigious institutions.
Deanna Sirlin is an American contemporary artist best known for her large-scale installations and paintings. Sirlin's art has been shown all over the world and includes massive installations that dominate entire buildings in Venice, Italy, Atlanta, Georgia, London, England, Antalya, Turkey, New Orleans, Louisiana and Evora, Portugal.
Katherine Bradford, née Houston, is an American artist based in New York City, known for figurative paintings, particularly of swimmers, that critics describe as simultaneously representational, abstract and metaphorical. She began her art career relatively late and has received her widest recognition in her seventies. Critic John Yau characterizes her work as independent of canon or genre dictates, open-ended in terms of process, and quirky in its humor and interior logic.
Greg Lindquist is an American artist, painter and sculptor based in New York City.
Elena Sisto is an American painter based in New York.
Leslie Wayne is a visual artist who lives and works in New York. Wayne is best known for her "highly dimensional paintings".
Charles Florian Cajori was an abstract expressionist painter who, through his drawing, painting and teaching, made a significant contribution to the New York School of artists that emerged in the 1950s.
Sharon Butler is an American artist and arts writer. She is known for teasing out ideas about contemporary abstraction in her art and writing, particularly a style she called "new casualism" in a 2011 essay. Butler uses process as metaphor and has said in artist's talks that she is keenly interested in creating paintings as documentation of her life. In a 2014 review in the Washington Post, art critic Michael Sullivan wrote that Butler "creates sketchy, thinly painted washes that hover between representation and abstraction.Though boasting such mechanistic titles as 'Tower Vents' and 'Turbine Study,' Butler’s dreamlike renderings, which use tape to only suggest the roughest outlines of architectural forms, feel like bittersweet homages to urban decay." Critic Thomas Micchelli proposed that Butler's work shares "Rauschenberg’s dissolution of the barriers between painting and sculpture," particularly where the canvases are "stapled almost willy-nilly to the front of the stretcher bars, which are visible along the edges of some of the works."
Thomas Nozkowski was an American contemporary painter. He achieved a place of prominence through his small scale paintings and drawings that push the limits of visual language.
Elana Herzog is an American installation artist and sculptor based in New York City. She is most known for abstract, tactile works in which she disassembles, reconfigures and embeds second-hand textiles in walls, modular panels and architectural spaces with industrial-grade metal staples. Herzog has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship, Anonymous Was a Woman Award and Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, among others. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the Brooklyn Museum, Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), Tang Museum, Weatherspoon Art Museum, Sharjah Art Museum, and Reykjavik Art Museum.
John Beech is a British-American artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York.
John Newman is an American sculptor. He was born in Flushing, Queens in 1952. He received his B.A. from Oberlin College (1973). He attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in 1972 and received his M.F.A. in 1975 from the Yale School of Art. He was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT from 1975 to 1978. He is based in New York City.
Michelle Jaffé is an American interdisciplinary artist, known for her immersive participatory installations combining sculpture, sound, and performative video. Symbols, forms, and concepts in her work are often influenced by political, spiritual, and psychological themes. Prior to her career as an artist, Jaffé was notable in the New York City fashion scene for her hat and accessory designs.
