Kazimir Severinovich Malevich was a Russian avant-garde artist and art theorist, whose pioneering work and writing influenced the development of abstract art in the 20th century. Born in Kiev to an ethnic Polish family, his concept of Suprematism sought to develop a form of expression that moved as far as possible from the world of natural forms (objectivity) and subject matter in order to access "the supremacy of pure feeling" and spirituality. Malevich is also considered to be part of the Ukrainian avant-garde that was shaped by Ukrainian-born artists who worked first in Ukraine and later over a geographical span between Europe and America.
Op art, short for optical art, is a style of visual art that uses optical illusions.
Josef Albers was a German-born artist and educator. The first living artist to be given a solo show at MoMA and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, he taught at the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College, headed Yale University's department of design, and is considered one of the most influential teachers of the visual arts in the twentieth century.
Morris Louis Bernstein, known professionally as Morris Louis, was an American painter. During the 1950s he became one of the earliest exponents of Color Field painting. While living in Washington, D.C., Louis, along with Kenneth Noland and other Washington painters, formed an art movement that is known today as the Washington Color School.
Solomon "Sol" LeWitt was an American artist linked to various movements, including conceptual art and minimalism.
Ernest Martin Skinner was an American pipe organ builder. His electro-pneumatic switching systems advanced the technology of organ building in the first part of the 20th century.
The term color organ refers to a tradition of mechanical devices built to represent sound and accompany music in a visual medium. The earliest created color organs were manual instruments based on the harpsichord design. By the 1900s they were electromechanical. In the early 20th century, a silent color organ tradition (Lumia) developed. In the 1960s and 1970s, the term "color organ" became popularly associated with electronic devices that responded to their music inputs with light shows. The term "light organ" is increasingly being used for these devices; allowing "color organ" to reassume its original meaning.
Brice Marden is an American artist generally described as Minimalist, although his work may be hard to categorize. He lives and works in New York City; Tivoli, New York; Hydra, Greece; and Eagles Mere, Pennsylvania.
Visual music, sometimes called color music, refers to the creation of a visual analogue to musical form by adapting musical structures for visual composition, which can also include silent films or silent Lumia work. It also refers to methods or devices which can translate sounds or music into a related visual presentation. An expanded definition may include the translation of music to painting; this was the original definition of the term, as coined by Roger Fry in 1912 to describe the work of Wassily Kandinsky. There are a variety of definitions of visual music, particularly as the field continues to expand. In some recent writing, usually in the fine art world, visual music is often confused with or defined as synaesthesia, though historically this has never been a definition of visual music. Visual music has also been defined as a form of intermedia.
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.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to photography:
Clavilux is the term coined by the artist Thomas Wilfred to refer to his mechanical invention that allowed the creation and performance of lumia, which was Wilfred's term for light art.
The Memorial Art Gallery is a civic art museum in Rochester, New York. Founded in 1913, it is part of the University of Rochester and occupies the southern half of the University's former Prince Street campus. It is a focal point of fine arts activity in the region and hosts the biennial Rochester-Finger Lakes Exhibition and the annual Clothesline Festival.
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.
Lumia is a form of art that uses light; originally associated with music but was later associated with painting. The term was coined by a twentieth-century artist, Thomas Wilfred. In the early twentieth century, artists began to promote colors and light together in their works. Wilfred worked towards establishing lumia as a new form of art, but the medium has yet to achieve popular recognition.
Joshua White is an American artist, video maker and broadcast television director. Best known for The Joshua Light Show, a 1960s and 1970s liquid light show, his work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and has been exhibited at Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Hirshhorn Museum, the New Museum, the Hayden Planetarium, the Barbican Center in London, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, The Broad Museum in Los Angeles, and the New-York Historical Society as well as many other venues.
Lisa Brice is a South African painter and visual artist from Cape Town. She lives in London and cites some of her influences as her experiences growing up in South Africa during a time of political upheaval, and from time spent living and working in Trinidad.
Mel Tanner was an American light sculptor, painter, installation artist, and videographer. His wife, Dorothy Tanner, was an American light sculptor, installation artist, musician, videographer, and spoken word artist based in Denver, Colorado. The couple worked very closely for over 40 years. Their main project was the creation of Lumonics that consists of their light sculptures, live projection, video, electronics, and music as a total art installation. Author and art historian, Michael Betancourt, described this visual music performance work as a Gesamtkunstwerk in his book, The Lumonics Theater: The Art of Mel & Dorothy Tanner, published in 2004.
Robert Yasuda is an American abstract painter, most known for contemplative, atmospheric works that straddle painting, sculpture and architecture. He first attracted wide attention in the 1970s for large wall works merging painting and installation art, mounted at MoMA PS1, the Corcoran Museum of Art, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Since the 1990s, he has focused on paintings that disrupt conventional formats using hand-carved wood panels and custom framing elements, upon which he builds multi-layered iridescent surfaces that respond dynamically to shifting conditions of light, time and vantage. Reviewing this later work, ARTnews critic Barbara MacAdam described Yasuda as a "romantic minimalist" whose paintings present an intangible, fleeting reality that is nonetheless referential, showing his roots in their construction, shifting tones and titles.
Nathaniel J. Jacobson (1916–1996) was an American artist, educator and color theorist based in Boston. He began his studies Museum of Fine Arts School, followed by the Massachusetts School of Art. After graduating in 1938, Jacobson enrolled in Yale University's School of the Fine Arts, receiving his BFA in 1941. Jacobson enlisted in the army in 1943 and after serving, the themes of his paintings turned towards his experience in Europe during World War II.
