William E. F. Heeks, Jr. (born 1951), popularly known as Willy Heeks, is an American abstract expressionist painter.
Heeks was born in Providence, Rhode Island in 1951. During his childhood, he lived in both Providence and Bristol, Rhode Island.
He participated in the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1973 and earned a BFA from the University of Rhode Island that same year. He studied in the Tyler School of Art's Graduate Program in 1978, and received an honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from Rhode Island College in 1995.
Heeks lived and painted in New York City for many years before returning to his native Rhode Island in 1996. He currently resides there.
The following museums and institutions hold Heeks’s work:
Raymond Saunders is an American artist known for his multimedia paintings which often have sociopolitical undertones, and which incorporate assemblage, drawing, collage and found text. Saunders is also recognized for his installation, sculpture, and curatorial work.
Ursula von Rydingsvard is a sculptor who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She is best known for creating large-scale works influenced by nature, primarily using cedar and other forms of timber.
D. Wayne Higby is an American artist working in ceramics. The American Craft Museum considers him a "visionary of the American Crafts Movement" and recognized him as one of seven artists who are "genuine living legends representing the best of American artists in their chosen medium."
Linda Connor is an American photographer living in San Francisco, California. She is known for her landscape photography.
Mario Algaze was a Cuban-American photographer who photographed musicians and celebrities, in rural and urban areas, throughout Latin America.
Todd Hido is an American photographer. He has produced 17 books, had his work exhibited widely and included in various public collections. Hido is currently an adjunct professor at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco.
Steve Roden is an American contemporary artist and musician. He works in the fields of sound and visual art, and is credited with pioneering lowercase music, a compositional style where quiet and usually unheard sounds are amplified to create complex and rich soundscapes. Alongside multiple albums and works of sound art, his discography includes Forms of Paper, which was commissioned by the Los Angeles public library.
Edward Dugmore was an abstract expressionist painter with close ties to both the San Francisco and New York art worlds in the post-war era following World War II. Since 1950 he had more than two dozen solo exhibitions of his paintings in galleries across the United States. His paintings have been seen in hundreds of group exhibitions over the years.
Lari George Pittman is a Colombian-American contemporary artist and painter. Pittman is an Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Painting and Drawing at the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture.
Amy Feldman is an American abstract painter from Brooklyn, New York.
Polly E. Apfelbaum is an American contemporary visual artist, who is primarily known for her colorful drawings, sculptures, and fabric floor pieces, which she refers to as "fallen paintings". She currently lives and works in New York City, New York.
Nicole Cherubini is an American visual artist and sculptor. She lives and works in New York.
Annu Palakunnathu Matthew is a British photographer. Her work has been exhibited at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum; Harvard Art Museums; Guangzhou Biennial of Photography, China; Tang Museum, New York; and The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Matthew is a professor of art (photography) in the University of Rhode Island's Department of Art and Art History.
Sage Sohier is an American photographer and educator.
Kirk Mangus (1952–2013) was an internationally renowned ceramic artist and sculptor "known for his playful, gestural style, roughhewn forms, and experimental glazing". His murals, works in clay, on paper, in wood, and other media pull from a rich and diverse set of influences: ancient Greco-Roman art, mythology, Japanese woodblock prints, comic books, folk stories, from Meso-American through Middle-Eastern and Asian ceramic traditions as well as the people he saw, the places he travelled, and his own dreamworld. He loved experimenting with new mediums, local materials, clay bodies, slips, kiln-building and the firing process.
Emily Cheng is an American artist of Chinese ancestry. She is best known for large scale paintings with a center focus often employing expansive circular images... "radiantly colored, radially composed". She has won numerous awards including Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship, 2010, New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, 1996, Yaddo Residency, 1995, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, 1982–1983.
Painting for me, is the evidence of an inquiry…It is the postulation made physical….It is the wall that penetrates….It is the mind reminded. It is the hunch made vivid. It is the reworking of the familiar. It is the shadow of the unfamiliar. It is the acting out of desire. It is the probe of limits. It is the life imaged. It is the eye engaged. Painting is luxury bounded.
Matt Magee is an American contemporary artist who is best known for his minimal abstract geometric paintings, sculptures, prints, assemblages, murals and photographs. He was born in Paris, France in 1961 and moved from there to Tripoli, Libya and then to London. He moved to Brooklyn in 1984 to attend Pratt Institute for an MFA after completing a BA in Art History at Trinity University in San Antonio, TX. He maintained a studio on New York City until 2012 and currently lives in Phoenix, AZ.
SoHyun Bae is an American painter living and working in New York. Her iconography has been described as being shaped by "a history lived from afar, therefore colored by the absence/presence of memory, doubts of otherness, longing, mythologizing and an awareness of archetypal belonging.”
Deborah Roberts is an American contemporary artist living and working in Austin, Texas. Roberts is a mixed media collage artist whose figurative works depict the complexity of Black subjecthood and explores themes of race, identity, and gender politics taking on the subject of otherness as understood against the backdrop of existing societal norms of race and beauty. Her work has been exhibited internationally across the US and Europe. Roberts’s work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California. Roberts was named 2023 Texas Medal of Arts Award Honoree for the Visual Arts. Roberts was selected to participate in the Robert Rauschenberg Residency (2019) and is a recipient of the Anonymous Was A Woman Grant (2018), the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2016), and the Ginsburg-Klaus Award Fellowship (2014). She received her MFA from Syracuse University, New York. She lives and works in Austin, Texas. Roberts is represented by Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, and Vielmetter Los Angeles.
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.