Kenny Scharf is an American painter known for his participation in New York City's interdisciplinary East Village art scene during the 1980s, alongside Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. Scharf's do-it-yourself practice spanned painting, sculpture, fashion, video, performance art, and street art. Growing up in post-World War II Southern California, Scharf was fascinated by television and the futuristic promise of modern design. His works often includes pop culture icons, such as the Flintstones and the Jetsons, or caricatures of middle-class Americans in an apocalyptic science fiction setting.
Roger Brown was an American artist and painter. Often associated with the Chicago Imagist groups, he was internationally known for his distinctive painting style and shrewd social commentaries on politics, religion, and art.
Salomón Huerta is a painter based in Los Angeles, California who comes from Tijuana, Mexico, and grew up in the Boyle Heights Projects in East Los Angeles. Huerta received a full scholarship to attend the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and completed his MFA at UCLA in 1998. Huerta gained critical acclaim and commercial attention in the late 1990s for his minimalist portraits of the backs of people's heads and color-saturated depictions of domestic urban architecture. He was included in the 2000 Whitney Biennial and has been featured in numerous exhibitions around the US, Europe, and Latin America such as The Gagosian Gallery in London, England, and Studio La Città in Verona, Italy. Salomón Huerta is currently represented by Louise Alexander Gallery/There There in Los Angeles, California, and Porto Cervo, Italy.
Lawrence Gipe, is an American painter, independent curator, and Associate Professor of 2D studies at The University of Arizona, Tucson. He received a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University (1984) and an MFA from the Otis/Parsons Institute of Art and Design, Los Angeles (1986). He maintains a studio practice in Los Angeles, splitting his time between California and Arizona.
Allan Sekula was an American photographer, writer, filmmaker, theorist and critic. From 1985 until his death in 2013, he taught at California Institute of the Arts. His work frequently focused on large economic systems, or "the imaginary and material geographies of the advanced capitalist world."
Idelle Lois Weber was an American artist most closely aligned with the Pop art and Photorealist movements.
Anne Wilson is a Chicago-based visual artist. Wilson creates sculpture, drawings, Internet projects, photography, performance, and DVD stop motion animations employing table linens, bed sheets, human hair, lace, thread and wire. Her work extends the traditional processes of fiber art to other media. Wilson is a professor in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Ed Moses was an American artist based in Los Angeles and a central figure of postwar West Coast art.
Martin Beck is an American painter who live and works in Lexington, Kentucky.
Roland Conrad Petersen is a Danish-born American painter, printmaker, and professor. His career spans over 50 years, primarily in the San Francisco Bay Area and is perhaps best-known for his "Picnic series" beginning in 1959 to today. He is part of the Bay Area Figurative Movement.
George Earl Ortman was an American painter, printmaker, constructionist and sculptor. His work has been referred to as Neo-Dada, pop art, minimalism and hard-edge painting. His constructions, built with a variety of materials and objects, deal with the exploration off visual language derived from geometry—geometry as symbol and sign.
Renée Petropoulos is a contemporary artist who currently lives and works in Venice, California.
Moira Dryer (1957–1992) was a Canadian artist known for her abstract paintings on wood panel.
Barbara Crane was an American artist photographer born in Chicago, Illinois. Crane worked with a variety of materials including Polaroid, gelatin silver, and platinum prints among others. She was known for her experimental and innovative work that challenges the straight photograph by incorporating sequencing, layered negatives, and repeated frames. Naomi Rosenblum notes that Crane "pioneered the use of repetition to convey the mechanical character of much of contemporary life, even in its recreational aspects."
Charles Gaines is an American artist whose work interrogates the discourse of aesthetics, politics, and philosophy. Taking the form of drawings, photographic series and video installations, the work consistently involves the use of systems, predominantly in the form of the grid, often in combination with photography. His work is rooted in Conceptual Art – in dialogue with artists such as Sol LeWitt, Lawrence Weiner and Mel Bochner – and Gaines is committed to its tenets of engaging cognition and language. As one of the only African-American conceptual artists working in the 1970s, a time when political expressionism was a prevailing concern among African-American artists, Gaines was an outlier in his pursuit of abstraction and non-didactic approach to race and politics. There is a strong musical thread running through much of Gaines' work, evident in his repeated use of musical scores as well in his engagement with the idea of indeterminacy, as similar to John Cage and Sol LeWitt.
Deana Lawson (1979) is an American artist, educator, and photographer based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work is primarily concerned with intimacy, family, spirituality, sexuality, and Black aesthetics.
Julia Fish is an American artist whose paintings have a deceptive simplicity. She paints in oil on stretched rectangular canvases of varying size. By means of close observation of everyday subjects—leaves of a tree seen through a window, a section of floor tiles, an old fashioned light fixture— she makes, as one critic says, "quiet, abstract manifestations of observed realities." She is a studio artist who paints not what she sees in an instant but rather what she observes continuously, day after day. The result, she says, is not so much temporal as durational. Her paintings compress many instances of observation so as to become, as she sees it, "a parallel system to a lived experience." The paintings lack spatial orientation and, as a critic says, can "be described as both highly realistic and abstract without compromising either term." In 2008, Alan G. Artner, writing in the Chicago Tribune, said "This is work of small refinements and adjustments. The world of everyday things generates it, but Fish's qualities of seeing and touch elevate the things to a plane on which they leave behind their humble character."
Daniel Wiener is an American sculptor currently living and working in New York. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a New York Foundation for the Arts Grant.
Judy Ledgerwood is an American abstract painter and educator, who has been based in Chicago. Her work confronts fundamental, historical and contemporary issues in abstract painting within a largely high-modernist vocabulary that she often complicates and subverts. Ledgerwood stages traditionally feminine-coded elements—cosmetic and décor-related colors, references to ornamental and craft traditions—on a scale associated with so-called "heroic" abstraction; critics suggest her work enacts an upending or "domestication" of modernist male authority that opens the tradition to allusions to female sexuality, design, glamour and pop culture. Critic John Yau writes, "In Ledgerwood’s paintings the viewer encounters elements of humor, instances of surprise, celebrations of female sexuality, forms of vulgar tactility, and intense and unpredictable combinations of color. There is nothing formulaic about her approach."
The National Association of Artists' Organizations (NAAO) was, from 1982 through the early 2000s, a Washington, D.C.-based arts service organization which, at its height, had a constituency of over 700 artists' organizations, arts institutions, artists and arts professionals representing a cross-section of diverse aesthetics, geographic, economic, ethnic and gender-based communities especially inclusive of the creators of emerging and experimental work in the interdisciplinary, literary, media, performing and visual arts. At the apex of its activities, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, NAAO served as a catalyst and co-plaintiff on the Supreme Court case, National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley having spawned the National Campaign for Freedom of Expression. NAAO's dormancy in the early years of the 21st century led to the formation of Common Field.
