Anne Truitt, born Anne Dean, was an American sculptor of the mid-20th century.
Lois Mailou Jones (1905–1998) was an artist and educator. Her work can be found in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Muscarelle Museum of Art, and The Phillips Collection. She is often associated with the Harlem Renaissance.
The Washington Color School, also known as the Washington, D.C., Color School, was an art movement starting during the 1950s–1970s in Washington, D.C., in the United States, built of abstract expressionist artists. The movement emerged during a time when society, the arts, and people were changing quickly. The founders of this movement are Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, however four more artists were part of the initial art exhibition in 1965.
Alma Woodsey Thomas was an African-American artist and teacher who lived and worked in Washington, D.C., and is now recognized as a major American painter of the 20th century. Thomas is best known for the "exuberant", colorful, abstract paintings that she created after her retirement from a 35-year career teaching art at Washington's Shaw Junior High School.
Paul (Allen) Reed was an American artist most associated with the Washington Color School and Color Field Painting.
Keith Anthony Morrison, Commander of Distinction (C.D.), born May 20, 1942), is a Jamaican-born painter, printmaker, educator, critic, curator and administrator.
Friedel Dzubas was a German-born American abstract painter.
Lowell Blair Nesbitt was an American painter, draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor. He served as the official artist for the NASA Apollo 9, and Apollo 13 space missions; in 1976 the United States Navy commissioned him to paint a mural in the administration building on Treasure Island spanning 26 feet x 251 feet, then the largest mural in the United States; and in 1980 the United States Postal Service honored Lowell Nesbitt by issuing four postage stamps depicting his paintings.
Janet Fish is a contemporary American realist artist. Through oil painting, lithography, and screenprinting, she explores the interaction of light with everyday objects in the still life genre. Many of her paintings include elements of transparency, reflected light, and multiple overlapping patterns depicted in bold, high color values. She has been credited with revitalizing the still life genre.
Bernice Cross (1912–1996) was an American artist and art instructor born in Iowa City, Iowa, who was based in Washington, D.C. for most of her professional career. Known for her originality, creative imagination, sense of humor, and love of fantasy, she painted with a deceptive simplicity and handled color and form with subtlety and a sure touch.
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.
Benjamin Abramowitz was an American painter, printmaker, and sculptor. First recognized for his contribution at age 19 as senior artist with the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in New York City, he is among the most respected Washington, D.C., artists of the past century.
Lilian Thomas Burwell is a Washington, DC sculptor and painter whose shaped paintings often blur the line between the two disciplines. Her artwork uses abstraction to create a personal response to the natural world.
James Frances Hilleary was a working architect and painter who gained prominence as a member of the Washington Color School movement.
Mavis Iona Pusey was a Jamaican-born American abstract artist. She was a printmaker and painter who was well known for her hard-edge, nonrepresentational images. Pusey drew inspirations from urban construction. She was a leading abstractionist and made works inspired by the constantly changing landscape.
Jack Boul is an artist and teacher based in Washington, D.C., whose oil paintings, monotypes and sculpture are included in museums including the National Gallery of Art and the Phillips Collection.
Amalie Rothschild (1916–2001) was an American artist who lived and worked within the art community of Baltimore, Maryland. An accomplished painter and sculptor, she was also an art teacher, philanthropist, patron, and cultural advocate. Over the course of a long career, she made oil and acrylic paintings as well as drawings, watercolors, and other paper works. She also sculpted using found objects, Plexiglas, metals, and particleboard. Originally working in a realist style, she became well known for geometric abstractions based on figurative subjects. In 1993 a critic described this approach as "[walking] a tightrope between the abstract and the representational with a suggestion of three-dimensional depth." Rothschild was by choice a regional artist. Although she occasionally exhibited elsewhere, she did not actively promote her career outside a mid-Atlantic region centered on Baltimore. Thus, in 1997 a critic wrote, "Amalie Rothschild is a fixture and ornament of the Baltimore art world." At the time of her death a critic gave this career summary: "She was one of the leading artists of her time in this area. Her work is thoroughly modern and related to geometric abstraction, but without losing the figure. It has emotional reserve, often contains a hint of humor and at times recalls the childlike sagacity of the great Paul Klee."
Minnie Klavans was an American artist whose work is held by the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the American University Museum, among others.
Mary Orwen (1913–2005) was an American artist known for paintings that appeared to be completely abstract but were usually inspired by objects in the natural world. Her goal, as she put it, was to "find an echo in the visible world of the order which I feel exists beneath the complexity of life." She spent much of her career painting and teaching art in and around Washington, D.C., and was a principal co-founder of an artists' cooperative called Jefferson Place Gallery, that one critic called "a gallery for serious creative work of progressive character" and that Orwen said would demonstrate that the city was not just a provincial backwater.
Joyce Wellman is an American artist who specializes in painting and printmaking. Born in Brooklyn, she attended community college before earning a degree at the City College of New York. She would later earn two master's degree, one in education and one in art. She initially focused on printmaking, but later turned her focus to painting. She briefly worked as a teacher before spending a few years on sabbatical. During that time she worked on her art portfolio, receiving help by artists including Valerie Maynard.
