William Hemmerdinger is an American artist, gallery owner, critic, and educator. For most of his artistic career he lived and worked in Los Angeles. He now teaches at the Boston Architectural college. [1]
Hemmerdinger earned an Associate of Arts degree at College of the Desert. He received his Bachelor of Arts in 1973 from the University of California, Riverside, where he studied art, architecture, art history, and Asian languages. In 1975, Hemmerdinger earned his MFA from Claremont Graduate School. [2] He returned to Claremont to complete his PhD in philosophy with an emphasis on aesthetics. [3]
Hemmerdinger was a member of the California Watercolor Society from 1971 to 1996. He studied Asian brush painting under J. Ma Leung and sculpture and design with Hovak Najarian. After graduating from UC Riverside, Hemmerdinger was the recipient of a fellowship at the National Palace Museum in China and a residency at the Myoshinji Monastery in Japan. During his time in Asia he associated with the Fifth Moon Group (Fong Chung-ray and Liu Kuo-sung), Running Rain Group, Hideo Sakata, and Bong Tae Kim. [4]
In addition to his work with watercolors, Hemmerdinger found success with mixed media paintings, sculpture, and printmaking. [5] His works are held by a number of institutions throughout the nation and internationally.
Together with his wife Catherine, William Hemmerdinger opened the William and Catherine Hemmerdinger Gallery in Palm Desert, California. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the gallery appraised and exhibited European and American painting, sculpture, prints, and photographs in addition to Native American art and non-western art. [6] [7]
William Hemmerdinger's reviews for exhibitions and galleries in Southern California have been published in Artweek, Art Scene, and Arts Magazine. He has taught at Claremont Graduate School, Pomona College, Otis Art College, and California Institute of the Arts. Hemmerdinger currently teaches Design Media at Boston Architectural College. [1]
Scott Benzel, is an American visual artist, musician, performance artist, and composer. Benzel is a member of the faculty of the School of Art at California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA.
Jeff Soto is an American contemporary artist. His distinct color palette, subject matter and technique have been said to bridge the gap between Pop Surrealism and Street Art.
Millard Owen Sheets was an American artist, teacher, and architectural designer. He was one of the earliest of the California Scene Painting artists and helped define the art movement. Many of his large-scale building-mounted mosaics from the mid-20th century are still extant in Southern California. His paintings are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum in New York, the Chicago Art Institute, the National Gallery in Washington D.C.; and the Los Angeles County Museum.
James Milford Zornes was an American watercolor artist and teacher known as part of the California Scene Painting movement.
Judy Fiskin is an American artist working in photography and video, and a member of the art school faculty at California Institute of the Arts. Her videos have been screened in the Documentary Fortnight series at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles; her photographs have been shown at MOCA, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, at The New Museum in New York City, and at the Pompidou Center in Paris.
The Getty Foundation, based in Los Angeles, California at the Getty Center, awards grants for "the understanding and preservation of the visual arts". In the past, it funded the Getty Leadership Institute for "current and future museum leaders", which is now at Claremont Graduate University. Its budget for 2006–07 was $27.8 million. It is part of the J. Paul Getty Trust.
Jack Zajac is a Californian West Coast artist who has been concerned with the “Romantic Surrealist tradition”.
Grant Mudford, is an Australian photographer.
James Edward Grant was an American painter and sculptor active from the late 1950s into the early 1970s. Best known for his sculptural work in plastics, this work by no means defined him, but was rather a natural endpoint of an exploration into increased dimensionality—starting from abstract canvases, moving through collages and bas-reliefs until the work finally came off the wall in sculptural form.
Roger Edward Kuntz was a highly accomplished Southern California landscape painter and a member of the Claremont Group of painters - professors and graduates of Pomona College, Scripps College, and the Claremont Graduate School. A figurative artist with an eye for abstract form, he won critical acclaim for striking compositions that transform an unusual array of subjects, including tennis players, domestic interiors, freeways, road signs, bathtubs and the Goodyear Blimp. A retrospective exhibition of his work, at the Laguna Art Museum in Laguna Beach, CA in 2009, was aptly titled "Roger Kuntz: The Shadow Between Representation and Abstraction". In the exhibition catalogue, curator Susan M. Anderson wrote: "Kuntz's work of the late 1950s and early 1960s quintessentially embodied the experimentation, fragmentation, and paradox in American culture of the time."
Robert H. Hudson is an American visual artist. He is known for his funk art assemblage metal sculptures, but he has also worked in painting and printmaking.
Maxwell Hendler is an American painter. In 1975, he became the first contemporary artist to have pictures in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Suzanne Muchnic is an art writer who was a staff art reporter and art critic at the Los Angeles Times for 31 years. She has also written books on artists, collectors, and museums.
Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A., 1945–1980 was a scholarly initiative funded by the J. Paul Getty Trust to historicize the contributions to contemporary art history of artists, curators, critics, and others based in Los Angeles. Planned for nearly a decade, PST, as it was called, granted nearly 60 organizations throughout Southern California a total of $10 million to produce exhibitions that explored the years between 1945 and 1980. Underscoring the significance of this project, art critic Roberta Smith wrote in The New York Times:
Before [PST], we knew a lot [about the history of contemporary art], and that lot tended to greatly favor New York. A few Los Angeles artists were highly visible and unanimously revered, namely Ed Ruscha and other denizens of the Ferus Gallery, that supercool locus of the Los Angeles art scene in the 1960s, plus Bruce Nauman and Chris Burden, but that was about it. After, we know a whole lot more, and the balance is much more even. One of the many messages delivered by this profusion of what will eventually be nearly 70 museum exhibitions is that New York did not act alone in the postwar era. And neither did those fabulous Ferus boys.
George Herms is an American artist best known for creating assemblages out of discarded, often rusty, dirty or broken every-day objects, and juxtaposing those objects so as to infuse them with poetry, humor and meaning. He is also known for his works on paper, including works with ink, collage, drawing, paint and poetry. The prolific Herms has also created theater pieces, about which he has said, "I treat it as a Joseph Cornell box big enough that you can walk around in. It's just a continuation of my sculpture, one year at a time." Legendary curator Walter Hopps, who met Herms in 1956, "placed Herms on a dazzling continuum of assemblage artists that includes Pablo Picasso, Kurt Schwitters, Marcel Duchamp, and Joseph Cornell, as well as California luminaries Wallace Berman and Edward Kienholz." Often called a member of the West Coast Beat movement, Herms said that Wallace Berman taught him that "any object, even a mundane cast-off, could be of great interest if contextualized properly." "That’s my whole thing," Herms says. "I turn shit into gold. I just really want to see something I've never seen before." George Herms lives and works in Los Angeles.
Deepak Shimkhada is a Nepali American educator, artist, art historian, author and community leader. He currently serves as an adjunct professor at Chaffey College in Rancho Cucamonga, California. He has previously held visiting and adjunct appointments at several universities in the United States, including Scripps College, Claremont Graduate University, California State University, Northridge, University of the West and Claremont School of Theology. His teaching career began in 1980 and although he is fully retired from full-time teaching, he currently teaches Asian art part-time at Chaffey College.
Coleen Sterritt is an American sculptor known for abstracted, hybrid works made from a myriad of everyday objects and materials, combined in unexpected ways. Writers root her work in the tradition of post-minimalists Jackie Winsor, Eva Hesse and Nancy Graves, and assemblage artists such as Louise Nevelson, Robert Rauschenberg and Marisa Merz; she is sometimes associated with contemporaries Jessica Stockholder, Nancy Rubins, and Tony Cragg. Sculpture critic Kay Whitney suggests Sterritt's work "expands and reinterprets three of the most important artistic inventions of the 20th Century—collage, abstraction and the readymade"— in play with the traditions of Arte Povera bricolage and Surrealist psychological displacement. Curator Andi Campognone considers Sterritt one of the most influential post-1970s artists in establishing "the Los Angeles aesthetic" in contemporary sculpture, while others identify her as an inspiration for later West Coast artists creating hand-made, free-standing sculpture counter to trends toward interventions, public art and environmental works. Constance Mallinson writes that Sterritt's work "walks a line between charm and threat, the natural, the industrial and the hand fabricated, rejecting easy associations for complex reads." Los Angeles Times critic David Pagel calls it smart, funky and "subtly rebellious" in its refashioning of discarded material, dumpster finds, and art-historical lineages.
Harrison Edward McIntosh was an American ceramic artist. He was an exponent of the Mid-century Modern style of ceramics, featuring simple symmetrical forms. His work has been exhibited in venues in the United States including the Smithsonian and internationally including at the Louvre in France.
Rexford Elson Brandt was an American artist and educator. Much of his oeuvre consists of paintings inspired by the life and geography of the West Coast of the United States, particularly California. Brandt worked in multiple mediums including print making, oil painting and watercolor painting. He gained national recognition for his watercolor painting during the period from the mid 1930s to the 1990s. Early in his career he was associated with California Scene Painting but after World War II Brandt focused on complex, semi-abstract works. The depiction of the regenerative warmth of the sun was a central focus of his painting; he wrote that "Everyone has hang-ups, I suppose. Mine is sunshine. Not sunlight -- although I like to paint sunlight too."
Michael Leslie Brewster was an American artist, recognized for coining the term “acoustic sculpture.” He worked with sound to create sonic environments beginning in the 1970s until 2016. His works were shown across the United States and Europe, and are in permanent collections, notably the Solomon Guggenheim Museum, the Fondo per Arte Italiano, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, and the Giuseppe Panza Collection.