Romare Bearden was an American artist, author, and songwriter. He worked with many types of media including cartoons, oils, and collages. Born in Charlotte, North Carolina, Bearden grew up in New York City and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and graduated from New York University in 1935.
Max Ernst was a German painter, sculptor, printmaker, graphic artist, and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst was a primary pioneer of the Dada movement and Surrealism in Europe. He had no formal artistic training, but his experimental attitude toward the making of art resulted in his invention of frottage—a technique that uses pencil rubbings of textured objects and relief surfaces to create images—and grattage, an analogous technique in which paint is scraped across canvas to reveal the imprints of the objects placed beneath. Ernst is noted for his unconventional drawing methods as well as for creating novels and pamphlets using the method of collages. He served as a soldier for four years during World War I, and this experience left him shocked, traumatised and critical of the modern world. During World War II he was designated an "undesirable foreigner" while living in France.
Isamu Noguchi was an American artist and landscape architect whose artistic career spanned six decades, from the 1920s onward. Known for his sculpture and public artworks, Noguchi also designed stage sets for various Martha Graham productions, and several mass-produced lamps and furniture pieces, some of which are still manufactured and sold.
Louise Nevelson was an American sculptor known for her monumental, monochromatic, wooden wall pieces and outdoor sculptures. Born in the Poltava Governorate of the Russian Empire, she emigrated with her family to the United States in the early 20th century. Nevelson learned English at school, as she spoke Yiddish at home.
Adolph Friedrich Reinhardt was an abstract painter active in New York for more than three decades. He was a member of the American Abstract Artists (AAA) and part of the movement centered on the Betty Parsons Gallery that became known as abstract expressionism. He was also a member of The Club, the meeting place for the New York School abstract expressionist artists during the 1940s and 1950s. He wrote and lectured extensively on art and was a major influence on conceptual art, minimal art and monochrome painting. Most famous for his "black" or "ultimate" paintings, he claimed to be painting the "last paintings" that anyone can paint. He believed in a philosophy of art he called Art-as-Art and used his writing and satirical cartoons to advocate for abstract art and against what he described as "the disreputable practices of artists-as-artists".
Fritz William Scholder V was a Native American artist, who produced paintings, monotypes, lithographs, and sculptures. Scholder was an enrolled member of the La Jolla Band of Luiseno Indians, a federally recognized tribe of Luiseños, a California Mission tribe. Scholder's most influential works were post-modern in sensibility and somewhat Pop Art in execution as he sought to deconstruct the mythos of the American Indian. A teacher at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe in the late 1960s, Scholder instructed prominent Native American students.
Conrad Marca-Relli was an American artist who belonged to the early generation of New York School Abstract Expressionist artists whose artistic innovation by the 1950s had been recognized across the Atlantic, including Paris. New York School Abstract Expressionism, represented by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, John Ferren, Marca-Relli and others became a leading art movement of the postwar era.
Kenzo Okada was a Japanese-born American painter and the first Japanese-American artist working in the Abstract Expressionist style to receive international acclaim. At the 29th Venice Biennale in 1958, Okada’s work was exhibited in the Japan Pavilion and he won the Astorre Meyer Prize and UNESCO Prize.
Herbert Ferber was an American Abstract Expressionist, sculptor and painter, and a "driving force of the New York School."
Yokohama Museum of Art, founded in 1989, is located in the futuristic Minato Mirai 21 district of the Japanese city Yokohama, next to the Yokohama Landmark Tower.
The Stable Gallery, originally located on West 58th Street in New York City, was founded in 1953 by Eleanor Ward. The Stable Gallery hosted early solo New York exhibitions for artists including Marisol Escobar, Robert Indiana and Andy Warhol.
Sinai is a public artwork by the Japanese American artist Isamu Noguchi, located at the Lynden Sculpture Garden, which is near Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United States. Sinai is a cast-iron sculpture measuring 36 inches (910 mm) high, 21 inches (530 mm) wide, and 11 inches (280 mm) deep. It is part of a series of work created between the 1967 and 1969, during which time Noguchi was collaborating with the Japanese stone carver Masatoshi Izumi.
Nancy Grossman is an American artist. Grossman is best known for her wood and leather sculptures of heads.
Modern sculpture is generally considered to have begun with the work of Auguste Rodin, who is seen as the progenitor of modern sculpture. While Rodin did not set out to rebel against the past, he created a new way of building his works. He "dissolved the hard outline of contemporary Neo-Greek academicism, and thereby created a vital synthesis of opacity and transparency, volume and void". Along with a few other artists in the late 19th century who experimented with new artistic visions in sculpture like Edgar Degas and Paul Gauguin, Rodin invented a radical new approach in the creation of sculpture. Modern sculpture, along with all modern art, "arose as part of Western society's attempt to come to terms with the urban, industrial and secular society that emerged during the nineteenth century".
Mary Lum is an American visual artist whose paintings, collages and works on paper reference the urban environment, architectural forms and systems. Critic John Yau writes, "Mary Lum’s paintings on paper are based on collages, which are made from things she uses or encounters in her everyday life as well as photographs she takes of the places she visits. "
Saburō Hasegawa was a Japanese-born American calligrapher, painter, art writer, curator, and teacher. He was an early advocate of abstract art in Japan and an equally vocal supporter of the Japanese traditional arts and Zen Buddhism. Throughout his career he argued for the connection between East Asian classical arts and Western abstract painting.
Ahron Ben-Shmuel, also known as Ben Shmuel, Aaron Ben Shmuel (1903–1984) was an American artist, known for his direct carvered stone sculptures, figural granite work and paintings. He worked for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and he was associated with left-wing politics despite his art having no clear political references.
Death is a statue by Isamu Noguchi, depicting a dead body of a person who had been lynched, inspired by the 1930 lynching of George Hughes in Texas. The almost life-sized statue was exhibited at one of two 1935 New York anti-lynching exhibitions, where its bad and overtly racist reception caused its creator to change career direction.
Ansei Uchima was an American artist and teacher primarily known as a sōsaku-hanga woodblock printmaker who employed traditional ukiyo-e Japanese techniques to produce abstract works covering a range of distinct personal styles.
Toshiko Uchima was a Japanese-American artist. She worked in a variety of media, including collage, box assemblage, oil paintings, woodblock prints and drawings.
