ARTISTS
DISTORT- www.distoart.com
THENONE- www.thenoneart.com
NTEL- www.abstractnteligent.com
MR.MUSTART
Mustart is known throughout Jersey City as a prolific mural artist, gracing walls from Greenville to the Holland Tunnel area. His jazzy, color explosive, freeform style translates from wall to canvas in a seamless and evocative way. In addition to his more improvisation mural and canvas work, Mustart is skilled at collage with 3D elements. What inspires his narrative and compositional themes comes from a place of observation from this Russian-born, international artist. His work can be found in Russia, Germany, Miami, North Carolina, Philadelphia, and all around New Jersey and New York City.
TOBI KAHN- www.TobiKahn.com
Amze Emmons- www.amzeemmons.com
1996 BFA from ohio Wesleyan University and his MFA from Univ of Iowa, he is in many collections (BMA, Frogg and others) has been the subject of ten or so exhibitions since 2002, with reviews, has many awards (emerging artists award, BMA, 2004), exhibitions, group exhibitions, art fairs, has collaborated and illustrated books, and teaches.
PROCESS
My studio practice is built on systems of research; I scan the media-scape for cues, images or phrases that draw connections between human migration, community, mobility, transience and the over-arching politics of architecture. In making, I work at the point where drawing and the mechanical language of print intersect. The images have a sense of magical/minimal realism that is inspired by architectural illustration, comic books, cartoon language, graffiti removal, information graphics, news footage, consumer packaging, instructional manuals and cinematic space/time.
A RECENT EXPERIMENT
For the past several years my artwork has begun as an investigation of images found in documentary sources, such as the Sunday Edition of The New York Times, on-line news sources, and websites for international aid agencies. I start with clippings depicting the smoking shells of bombed buildings, wreckage left after receding flood waters, tsunami-mangled villages, car bombings, refugee migrations…. Through erasure, drawing and collage, the world of the source begins to change. My media-isolation experiment is intended not to glorify or monumentalize the dystopic events unfolding around us. My interest is in distilling and cataloging the patterns and forms of our daily world through an intuitive editing process. We normally see these kinds of documentary images as topical, disposable, something to process ad consume quickly. By sifting through the pictorial evidence of displacement and strife I discover what is hidden in plain view: essential visual elements that let the eye linger and keep the viewer from turning the page
Rodney White- www.rodney-white.com
Rodney White was born and raised in Augusta, Georgia and now lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. His work is about the dialogue that each person has with himself and others on both a subconscious and conscious level. Rodney’s art is a visual message that encourages each of us to look for something higher to which we can aspire, as opposed to settling for a pre-ordained path. It is a reflection of an individual’s dream and how it coincides with the sweeping dream of humanity.
When Rodney was a student of visual communications, he began to see the power that commercial advertising messages could wield. Instead of selling products, he decided to use the medium to offer a more beneficial gift to the viewers. Rodney uses visual cues from vintage advertising and Americana to convey the bygone era of optimism, one where advertising was meant to inspire. Rodney’s art is an open journal of his personal path of belief and optimism. It illustrates the moment of enlightenment that we all seek. One can see the methodology behind his thinking and experience, voyeuristically, his personal growth by looking at his art.
His work, painted mostly on wood panels, are hybrid compositions of the things he loves - typography, numerology, poetry, vintage advertising - all set to the tune of his own personal philosophy. “Being my best self” is how he modestly describes it. Playful, poetic, and genuinely inspiring, his art fuses the old with the new, and serves as a surprising catalyst for self-reflection.
Rodney’s paintings have been exhibited in national museums, galleries and Vinny Chase’s living room. In addition to HBO’s hit series Entourage, Rodney’s work has been featured in numerous television shows and movies, such as CBS’s How I Met Your Mother and The Good Wife, HBO’s Big Love and Sony Pictures’ 2012, to name a few.
Junji Amano
Born 1949, Tottori Prefecture, Japan. After graduating from the Fine Art department of Tama Art University in 1976, Junji Amano launched on a very successful international career as a painter and printmaker. His work has won awards at several international juried print exhibitions, including San Francisco MOMA (1977, first prize), Lubijana (1978 in the 13th Print Biennial), and Venice (1988, premio internationale, Print Bienale) and has been the subject of solo shows in Tokyo, Kobe, San Francisco, and Philadelphia. His workcontinues to evolve, thanks in part to his active participation in workshops and international fellowships, including a recent residency at the University of Pennsylvania.
Tom Baril
A long collaborator with the late Robert Mapplethorpe, Baril reinvents many iconographic images through his printing techniques, which has made his work in high demand by photography dealers and collectors. Barils photographs are included in numerous private and public collections worldwide, including the Los Angeles County Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Fogg Museum at Harvard University, and the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson. The architectural prints, all selenium tone silver prints shot using a 4" x 5" view camera, are of bridges, buildings, and factories. Viewers will recognize colonial era and modern structures of Philadelphia, the Manhattan Bridge, and the TransAmerica Tower in San Francisco, plus others. The three images in the new portfolio have been printed using a gum bichromate over platinum process. A platinum print is created with watercolor suspended in a gum that adds a layer of color to the print. The pigment applied onto the watercolor paper creates a painterly quality. Each print is handmade and hand coated. The three images are a seascape, colored blue, of a cloud format off Martinique; a cityscape of the Chrysler Building in red; and an Echinacea flower in gold.
Jimi Gleason
Graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1986, and has had solo exhibitions in California and New York, most notably The World, NY, in 1988. He has had numerous group exhibitions all over the country as well as in Italy, dating back from 1984. He also has many corporate and residential clients. To view more of his works as well as availability.
Edward McHugh
Born 1969 in Philadelphia. Lives and works in Philadelphia. After graduating from the Hussian School of Art, McHugh began exhibiting at Works On Paper and the gallery began publishing his prints. His early work focused on automatic drawing and the creation of spatial ambiguity through surface texture. More recently, that project has taken a variety of forms, including manipulated photographs and bronze scultpure.
Janet Towbin
Artist living in Philadelphia whose work is exhibited regionally and nationally. She has won numerous awards for her paintings, drawings and prints. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Carnegie Museum of Art, The Westmoreland Museum of American Art, The Butler Institute of American Art, the Heinz Endowments Collection and the Cincinnati Bell Collection.
Janet's paintings have been selected for exhibition at four consecutive Annual National Midyear Exhibitions at the Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio. She has had solo exhibitions of her work at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art (The Seduction of Black), The Butler Institute of American Art in Salem, Ohio (Janet Towbin: Obsession and Reinvention), and at Tadu Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico. In 2004, Janet had a solo exhibit of her prints at Abington Art Center in Philadelphia in conjunction with the Institute of Contemporary Art’s city-wide exhibition The Big Nothing.
In 2002, she was an intern at The Fabric Workshop and Museum where she worked on the Leonardo Drew project casting paper for his installation. In 2003 she completed an apprenticeship at The Fabric Workshop and in 2004 had a residency at Cooper Union in Printmaking. Janet is an adjunct professor at Moore College of Art.
Heather Mcmordie
Artist Statement:
Geomorphology serves as my source of imagery as well as my guide to process.
Much as a landscape changes as a result of the erosion and deposition of the same material, the work I create is a slow morphology of the same ideas and imagery revisited again and again. Printmaking matrices become subjects for drawings and failed editions are later pieced together into new successes. Slowly evolving and self-referential, mine is a practice that mimics water over stone; caught in a steady and unrelenting current, textures and colors tumble against each other and and slowly re-shape one another.
Education
2013 Bachelor of Fine Arts, University of Pennsylvania
2012 Certificate in Printmaking, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA)
Residencies
2015 Fob Fellow, Second State Press, Philadelphia, PA
2014 Fob Holder, Second State Press, Philadelphia, PA
Alternate, Acadia AiR, Schoodic Institute Acadia National Park, ME
Gallery Representation
2012 - Present The Old Print Gallery, Washington, DC
2011 - 2013 Washington Printmakers Gallery, Silver Spring, MD
Select Exhibitions
2015 Artists in the Garden, PAFA at Morris Arboretum, Morris Arboretum, Philadelphia, PA
Winter Contemporary, The Old Print Gallery, Washington, DC
2014 International Juried Exhibition, New Ground Print Workshop & Gallery, Albuquerque, NM
2nd Annual Juried Exhibit, Cerulean Arts, Philadelphia, PA
Traditions of Excellence, Governor's Residence, Harrisburg, PA
Separate Spaces, Conservation Studios for Art, Philadelphia, PA
Visiting Artist: Heather McMordie, Stone Hill Church, Princeton, NJ
2013 Contemporary Printmaking, Old Print Gallery, Washington, DC
Black and White + One, Plastic Club, Philadelphia, PA
Absolutely Abstract, Philadelphia Sketch Club, Philadelphia, PA
Distant Voices, Washington Printmakers Gallery, Silver Spring, MD
1st Annual Juried Exhibition, Cerulean Arts, Philadelphia, PA
72nd Annual Juried Exhibition, Woodmere Art Museum, Woodmere, PA
Shared Space, Conservation Studios for Art, Philadelphia, PA
Editions, PAFA Alumni Gallery, Philadelphia, PA
2012 Nebraska National Collegiate Art Exhibition, University Of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE
111th Annual Student Exhibition, PAFA Museum, Philadelphia, PA
2nd National Exhibition of Intaglio Prints, National Arts Club, New York, NY
2011 110th Annual Student Exhibition, PAFA Museum, Philadelphia, PA
Anatomy Academy, PAFA Gallery 128, Philadelphia, PA
2010 National Small Works Exhibit, Washington Printmakers Gallery, Silver Spring, MD
Student Graphic Show, PAFA Gallery 128, Philadelphia, PA
Collections
PAFA Print Department, Philadelphia, PA
Anthropologie clothing stores, Philadelphia, PA
Private Collections
Awards
2014 2nd Prize, Cerulean Arts 2nd Annual Juried Exhibit
2013 Stella Drabkin Memorial Award
2012 The Print Center Prize
2011 Wickersham Purchase Prize for Lithography
Huldah Bender Kerner Scholarship
Megan McGlynn
Press:
Philadelphia Percent for Art Commission Press Release: Mural for Philadelphia International Airport. June 2015
Neurorexia Interview with Shelly Fan, official blogger for Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting. November 2014
EPerformance Magazine Vol. 10. Shanghai: ZhongXi Book Company. April 2014 article pages 24-33 (english version by Noah Hutton)
Essinova: Brain and Mind Interview with Beibei Song. April 2014
The Beautiful Brain Interview with Noah Hutton. Sept 2013
Selected Exhibitions:
WP Gallery "Daybreak" Philadelphia, PA
August 2015
Artists' House Gallery "Women Artists of Philadelphia" Philadelphia, PA
February 2015
Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting Washington D.C.
November 2014
Artists' House Gallery Philadelphia, PA
February, March, Apr 2014
Artists' House Gallery Philadelphia, PA
June, October, November, December 2013
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Museum Philadelphia, PA
Annual Student Exhibition, May 2013
Gallery 128 "In the Shadow of a Master: Frank Furness" Philadelphia, PA
Juried Show, November 2012
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Museum Philadelphia, PA
Annual Student Exhibition, May 2012
Goggle Works Reading, PA
Juried Show, August 2010
Wired Gallery Bethlehem, PA
Group Show, August -December 2009
Executive Director's Office Dept. of Arts and Humanities Washington D.C.
Scholastic Art Awards, Oct 2008 - Oct 2009
Allentown Art Museum Allentown,
Scholastic Art Awards, 2008
Popmart Gallery Bethlehem, PA
several rolling group shows, 2007-2008
Justin Kingsley Bean
Born Detroit, MI 1985
Works in Philadelphia, PA
[email protected]
http://justinkingsleybean.com
2483204917
Education
2011-2013 Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
MFA, Painting and Drawing
2003-2007 University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
BA with Highest Honors, Anthropology
No current gallery affiliation.
Group Exhibitions
2015 Snippet and Frame “In The Round” Pop Up Show
East End Salon, Philadelphia, PA
2014 Aqua 13 Art Miami
w/ JAG Modern, Miami, FL
2013 215/610 Juried Exhibition
Delaware County Community College, Media, PA.
Juror-Donald Kuspit
112th Annual Student Exhibition MFA Thesis Show
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
Winter Juried Exhibition
The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA
Jurors Bill Scott, Jodi Pinto
2012 PAFA at the Philadelphia Insurance Company
Bala Cynwyd, PA
2011 B&W: Sixth Annual Community Juried Show
Off The Wall Gallery, Philadelphia, PA.
Drawn From PAFA
The Barbara Crawford Gallery, Philadelphia, PA.
2010 Winter Doldrums Part 4 Ann Arbor, MI.
Michigan Fine Arts Competition
Bloomfield Hills, MI. Juror – Sondra Freckelton.
Hatchback 4
Detroit, MI. Juror Travis Wright, Metro Times Arts and Culture Editor.
2009 Forth From Its Hinges, Ann Arbor, MI
Related Work Experience
2011-Present Philadelphia Museum of Art
Visitor Services Assistant. Philadelphia, PA
2012 Philadelphia Summer Arts Camp
Painting and drawing instructor. Philadelphia, PA
Teaching Assistant, PostBaccalaureate
Seminar, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts,
Philadelphia, PA. Instructor: Mark Blavat
Honors and Awards
2014 Finalist in Fleischer Art Memorial 37th Wind Challenge Exhibition Series
2013 Winner, 4th Wall Juried Competition
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
Jurors Adam Pendelton, Michelle Grabner, Fionn Meade
2011-2013 MFA Merit Scholarship
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts,
Bibliography
The Periphery Magazine
Issues III, IV, V. June, July, August 2014.
< http://www.theperipherymag.com/issueiii
< http://www.theperipherymag.com/issueiv
< http://www.theperipherymag.com/issuev
Collections
LGL Partners, Conshohocken, PA
Philadelphia Insurance Company, Bala Cynwyd, PA
Prince Media Co., New York, New York
PJ Smalley
pjsmalley@gmailÆcom
wwwÆpjsmalleyÆcom
PJ Smalley
b. 1987
Lives and works in Philadelphia
Education
2014 Bachelor of Fine Arts, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia PA
2013 Summer Session, Yale University School of Art, New Haven CT
2009 Certificate in Painting, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA), Philadelphia, PA
Select Group Exhibitions
2015 Philadelphia Contemporary Artists, Works on Paper Gallery, Philadelphia Pa
2015 Privacy Made Public, curated by Alex Cohen, New Hope Arts Center, New Hope PA
2014 PPAC Annual Members Show, 3rd St. Gallery, Philadelphia PA
2014 David Lynch Film Competition Screening, PAFA, Philadelphia PA
2014 Catching the Big Fish, Pterodactyl Art Space, Philadelphia PA
2013 Sampler of Small Works by 30 Artists curated by Bill Scott, Cerulean Gallery, Philadelphia PA
2012 Out of the Attic, Main Line Art Center, Haverford PA
2012 Trust Us, The Trust Venue, Philadelphia PA
2012 71st Annual Juried Exhibition, Juried by Alex Kanevsky, Woodmere Art Museum,
Philadelphia PA, Prize for Best Composition, Catalogue available
2011 Cradle to Crucible, Avery Galleries, Bryn Mawr PA, Catalogue available
2011 Expose, Bookspace, Philadelphia PA
2010 Gone Printin’, Projects Gallery, Philadelphia PA
2010 New Members Show Plastic Club, Philadelphia PA
2009 Offerings, Little Berlin, Philadelphia PA
2009 108th Annual Student Exhibition, PAFA Museum, Philadelphia PA
2009 Encore Selections from the 108th Annual Student Exhibition, PAFA, Philadelphia PA
2008 Green Light, S. Dillon Ripley Center, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC
-Traveled to the Kennedy Center and 10 university galleries from 20082010.
2008 107th Annual Student Exhibition, PAFA, Philadelphia PA
Awards, Honors & Residencies
2014 Artist in Residence, Vermont Studio Center, Johnson VT
2012 Fred and Naomi Gibson Hazell Prize for Best Composition, Woodmere Art Museum
2009 Daniel Garber Award for Excellence in Drawing, PAFA
Simone Titone Award, PAFA
The Plastic Club Prize, PAFA
John Galasso Memorial Prize, PAFA
2008 Award of Excellence, VSA Arts, Washington DC
Charles Topan Prize for Drawing, PAFA
Lambert and Emma Cadwalader Prize for Landscape, PAFA
Arthur De Costa Prize (Honorable Mention), PAFA
Franklin C. Watkins Memorial Grant, PAFA
Louis and Estelle Pearson Memorial Prize, PAFA
2007 Franklin C. Watkins Memorial Grant, PAFA
Relevant Teaching, Consulting, and Curating Experience
2014 Curator, Catching the Big Fish, Pterodactyl Art Space, Philadelphia PA
2014 Guest Lecturer titled Drawing as Thinking, Architecture 101, Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia PA
2012 Art Consultant on behalf of the estate of James D. Samter, Philadelphia PA
-Settling artist editions and inventories from artists including Kehinde Wiley and Maurizio Cattelan
2012 CoCurator with Joseph Lozano ¨Trust Us¨ The Trust Venue, Philadelphia PA
2010 Curation Team, TEDxPhilly¨ Kimmel Center, Philadelphia PA
2009 Lead Teaching Artist, Philadelphia Arts in Education Partnership, Logan Elementary, Philadelphia PA
Nathan Durnin
Artist Statement:
Observation is not the subject but rather a point of departure for a larger dialogue between myself and the canvas. The journey that dialogue takes, from whispers to screaming matches becomes a major role in the creative process, and the topics of discussion often transform from being about the nature of the world to the nature of painting. Freedom from the responsibility of observation resulted in a deeper exploration of color, gesture and rhythm. The sea can be purple and a cloud moves the way I want it to. The conversation carries on this way until either the canvas or I have nothing left to say.
Education
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA, Certificate, 2011
Teaching
Wayne Art Center, Wayne, PA, 2011 –
Living Bridges Program, Bridgeport, PA, 2006 – 2007
Group Exhibitions
November Exhibition, Artist House Gallery, Philadelphia, PA, 2011
34th Annual Berks Art Alliance Exhibition, Reading Museum, Reading, PA, 2011
New Faces, Artist House Gallery, Philadelphia, PA, 2011
Annual Student Exhibition, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA, 2011
Celebration of Music, Artists House Gallery, Philadelphia, PA, 2011
Small Works Show, Artists House Gallery, Philadelphia, PA, 2010
Summer Exhibit, Artists House Galley, Philadelphia, PA, 2010
Annual Student Exhibition, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA, 2010
32nd Annual Berks Art Alliance Exhibition, Goggle Works, Reading, PA, 2009
Awards
Benjamin West Prize for Figurative Painting, 2011
Artists House Gallery Award, 2010
Earl T. Donalson Prize, 2010
The Charles Toppan Prize, 2010
The Irma H. Cook Prize, 2010
Watkins Memorial Grant, 2009
CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS
Christo
Born Christo Javacheff in 1935 in Gabrovo, Bulgaria. Between 1953 and 1956 he studied painting, sculpture and stage design at the Academy of Fine Arts, Sofia. In 1956 he lived briefly in Prague, Czechoslovakia. In 1957 he studied sculpture for one term under Fritz Wotruba at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. In 1958 he settled in Paris. He became temporarily associated with the Nouveau R?alistes. In 1958 he began to package objects. His assemblages of oil drums were shown in Cologne in 1961. He exhibited in 1963 at the Galerie Schmela, Düsseldorf. In 1964 he moved to New York where he made his first "store fronts". In 1966 his "store fronts" were shown at the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, and at the Leo Castelli Gallery, New York. In 1968 he packaged the Berner Kunsthalle - his first pacakaged building. He was represented at the documenta exhibitions "4", "5" and "6" in Kassel in 1968, 1972 and 1974, and in 1972 and 1976 at the Venice Biennale. He produced overdimensional packaging projects for buildings, skyscrapers and landscapes. His especially well-known largescale projects were Valley Curtain, Rifle, Colorado in 1972 and Running Fence, California, in 1976. In 1977 his exhibition Christo - The Running Fence toured Rotterdam, Bonn, Hanover, Humblebaek, Hövikoden, Zurich, Brussels and Grenoble. In 1971 he began the project Wrapped Reichstag with his artistic partner Jeanne-Claude, which was completed in 1995. In 1980 he took part in the exhibition Mein Kölner Dom for the 100th anniversary of the cathedral. In 1983 Christo and Jeanne-Claude produced the project Surrounded Islands: eleven islands in Biscayne Bay near Miami, Florida, were surrounded by wide collars of floating pink polypropylene fabric. The documentation of all Christo and Jeanne-Claude projects went on tour.
Chuck Close
Born July 5, 1940 in Monroe, Washington. This New York Photorealist painter and printmaker is most famous for his images of the human face. After experimenting with a variety of styles, by the mid 1960s Close had left the gestural art tradition to begin using photographs and grid patterns as the basis for his portraits and self-portraits. Since 1988, he has worked from a wheelchair, having adapted to partial paralysis resulting from a collapsed spinal artery. Collected in major museums throughout the world--including the Tate, the Whitney, the Museum of Modern Art and the National Gallery of Art--Close is one of the most important living artists.
Robert Cottingham
Urban American landscape artist Robert Cottingham calls his work "facades," Photo Realist prints and paintings influenced by Pop Art of the 60s and 70s as well as the earlier styles of masters like Demuth and Hopper. With a background in advertising, Cottingham often shoots numerous color photographs in prepration for his image-making. Now famous for his depiction of signs, storefronts and distinctive marquees, Cottingham sites his long-term fascination with "letter forms as symbols and my interest in the use of language as a means of persuasion." Born in 1935 and residing in western Connecticut, Cottingham studied art at the Pratt Institute in New York and worked in London and New York as an art director for an advertising agency.
Jim Dine
Born in 1935 at Cincinnati, Ohio. The son of a hardware store owner, Dine studied at the University of Cincinnati and at the Boston School of Fine and Applied Arts in Boston, Massachusetts from 1953 to 1957. In 1957 he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Ohio University, Athens. He moved to New York in 1959. He staged his first Happenings with Claes Oldenburg and Allan Kaprow at the Judson Gallery, New York. He had his first one-man exhibition at the Reuben Gallery, New York. Between 1960 and 1965 he had various guest professorships, among others at Yale University, New Haven, and Oberlin College, Ohio. He was represented at the Venice Biennale in 1964, and at the documenta "4" in Kassel in 1968. Since 1967 he has taught at the College of Architecture, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. He lives in New York and London. In his paintings, drawings, sculptures, graphics, collages and assemblages he combined different techniques with handwritten texts and words and set real everyday objects against undefined beckgrounds. The objects were both commonplace and personal, both poetic and ironic, reflecting his own feelings about life. His constantly varied bathrobe, window to the gaze of the world, was a kind of metaphor for a self-portrait. In the 70s he turned to representational painting of a traditional kind.
Richard Estes
Richard Estes was born in Kewanee, Illinois and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1952 to 1956. From 1959 onwards he made New York his home. Estes started out as a graphic artist, not concentrating on his painting full-time until 1966. His early work focused mainly on people but in 1967 the urban landscape became his main interest. By 1968 he had his first one-man exhibition at the Allen Stone Gallery in New York and by the end of the decade he had already become known as a leading figure. Superrealism or Photorealism are the terms used to describe his work and that of related artists. Names associated with this movement include Chuck Close (who specialises in enormous portraits), Howard Kanovitz, Robert Cottingham and Audrey Flack. The Superrealists' aim was to depict their subjects with immense attention to detail. Their subject matter included American diners and trucks, gum-ball machines and neon signs - all typifying images of both urban and suburban life in 1970s America. Estes, unlike most Superrealists, used traditional brushes rather than airbrushes to achieve his depiction of reality, often using acrylic paint and then oils. He also made very elaborate screenprints. Estes presents the city as visual spectacle. The landscape of New York was clearly inspirational to the painter. The movement is a direct descendant of Pop Art with its depictions of the commonplace, except the humour of Pop Art is distinctly lacking in Superrealist works with their cool and impersonal points of view. Many critics see paintings of this type as admirable only for their displays of technical prowess, with very little else to appreciate.
Shepard Fairey
(born February 15, 1970) is an American contemporary graphic designer, and illustrator who emerged from the skateboarding scene. He first became known for his "André the Giant Has a Posse" (…OBEY…) sticker campaign, in which he appropriated images from the comedic supermarket tabloid Weekly World News. His work became more widely known in the 2008 U.S. presidential election, specifically his Barack Obama "Hope" poster. The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston calls him one of today's best known and most influential street artists. His work is included in the collections at The Smithsonian, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
In 1992, while still an illustration student at RISD, Fairey started his first business venture, Alternate Graphics, to showcase his emerging design and silk-screen printing talents. He created stickers, t-shirts, skateboards, and posters which were all available via black and white mail order catalogs that he distributed.
Jasper Johns
Born Augusta, GA, 1930. Johns is one of America's foremost painters, sculptors, and printmakers, who has played a leading role in the development of mid-20th-century American art. In 1954 he began painting works in a manner radically different from the abstract expressionist style that then dominated American art. His canvases were devoted to such familiar objects as targets, American flags, numbers, and alphabet letters. He painted these subjects with objectivity and precision, applying paint very thickly, so that the paintings became objects in themselves rather than reproductions of recognizable items. This idea of art-as-object became a potent influence on later sculpture as well as painting; he often integrated three-dimensional objects into his paintings. By the end of the 1950s Johns's paintings showed a freer, looser arrangement. In some of them, he attached real objects—such as rulers and compasses—to the canvas. False Start (1959, Scull Collection, New York City)—in which he stenciled intentionally incorrect labels over painted objects and patches of color—is a playful, punning work that was an immediate forerunner of pop art. Johns broke ground again with a four-painting cycle entitled “The Seasons,” shown in New York City in early 1987. These mammoth (75 by 50-inch) paintings are considered especially significant in American art.
Donald Judd
Born June 3, 1928 in Excelsior Springs, MO, and died in New York February 12, 1994. American sculptor, painter and writer. He studied philosophy and art history at the Art Students League (1947–8; 1950–53) and Columbia University (1949–53; 1957–62), a training that encompassed art theory as well as painting and sculpture. His first works, which he later termed ‘half-baked abstractions’, were untitled paintings in which he sought to simplify composition and to eliminate the balancing of forms that he felt characterized post-war European art. From 1959 to 1965 he wrote art criticism for American journals such as Arts Magazine, championing fellow artists from New York such as Claes Oldenburg, Frank Stella, John Chamberlain and Dan Flavin. During this period he gave up painting in order to devote himself to sculpture, or rather to the object, making painted wooden structures such as Light Cadmium Red Oil on Wood (1963; Ottawa, N.G.) that he exhibited in 1963 at the Green Gallery, New York. In their matter-of-factness and simplicity these abstract works were a logical continuation of the Colour field painting practised by American artists such as Barnett Newman. By placing the objects directly on the ground rather than on a plinth or base, Judd further emphasized their self-sufficiency, as in Untitled (1963; Ottawa, N.G.).
Alex Katz
On July 24, 1927 Alex Katz was born in New York City. From 1946-49 he studied at the Cooper Union School of Art in New York, and then at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine from 1949-50. In 1972 he was awarded the Guggenheim Grant in Painting. He currently lives and works in New York. Alex Katz is one of the most important American artists to have emerged since 1950. Throughout his career, which now spans more than thirty years, Katz has produced a remarkable and impressive body of work that constitutes a unique aspect of modern realism. "Portraits have been the mainstay of Katz's paintings since the late 1950's - especially of his wife, Ada, son, Vincent, and a circle of friends composed of artists, poets, critics and dancers. Katz's portraits form a new and distinctive type of realism in American art which combines aspects of both abstraction and representation. His work is characterized by flatly painted, dramatically cropped, oversize heads that recall movies, advertising and billboards. Katz's concern is not with an emotional narrative, but with the style of portraiture - with giving the traditional genre to posed portraits an expansive, contemporary look."
Ellsworth Kelly
Born May 31, 1923, in Newburgh, New York. He studied at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, from 1941 to 1943. Kelly first came before the public in the early 1960s as a painter and major example of an emerging post-painterly abstraction. Yet at this point, when his painting entered contemporary art history, its essential style and Kelly's characteristic manner of working had been established for well over a decade. Though it became to be associated with New York Abstraction in the 1960s, ironically it's formulation took place in Paris between 1949 and 1954. What Kelly takes from nature remains the primary subject of his art - shape. He has exhibited countless number of times throughout the world and is part of some of the most impressive art collections, including Museums.
Sol LeWitt
In the late 1960s, Sol LeWitt(b.1928) made his mark in the art world with his spare and platonic Module Unit sculptures. Twenty-five years later the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Mass., is celebrating this international artist for other kinds of marks, the ones made on walls. This stately treasure of a museum a half hour north of Boston is generously housing a sprawling retrospective "Sol LeWitt: Twenty-five Years of Wall Drawings, 1968-1993." It is an expansive visual experience curated on a grand scale, the sort of progressive exhibition rarely attempted outside a major art center. The truth is that Mr. LeWitt is neither sculptor nor painter, but a conceptual artist. Two and a half decades ago he helped pioneer a movement that radically changed the face of art. It was the final triumph of the Modernist art revolution that began in the early years of this century, and it challenged and toppled some of the best-established conventions about what art was. The most cherished of these was the notion of the artist as craftsman, and of art as a physical product industriously toiled over by the artist. Conceptual artists, however, shared a more philosophical and less tangible conviction about the creative gift. They asserted that it was an original experience that flowered in the artist's imagination, and that was where art "happened." LeWitt clearly stated in 1967, and the quote is repeated in the catalog essay: "In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair." As the result of this kind of priority and focus, teams of assistants, and not LeWitt, take to ladders and scaffolds with ink-soaked rag or chalk in hand to realize his vision. LeWitt's color notations and dimensions are translated into floor-to-ceiling and wall-to-wall paintings and drawings that transform the space into an experience-in-the-round. While wall painting is the most ancient of practices, from cave paintings and Italian frescoes to Works Progress Administration murals, many people credit LeWitt with revitalizing and reclaiming this territory for his own, forging it into a modern idiom. What is so immediately impressive about this exhibition is the way in which the work exists directly on the large museum walls, devouring the viewer within an odyssey of endless spatial manipulation, formal invention, rich color dialogue, jarring disorientation, and soaring geometry. From skylit gallery to skylit gallery, all the forces of formalist Abstraction are at play, laid out like an amusement park inviting us to just get on and ride. It is that pure and simple. As instrumental as his Modular Unit sculptures were in guaranteeing LeWitt recognition as an artist 25 years ago, it is the wall drawings that command attention today. The sculpture is structural and geometric; framework cubes arranged to form larger shapes, initiating a shockwave of echoing rectilinear patterns. Even though LeWitt has been doing the wall drawings for almost the same length of time, and although they share similar formal concerns, their basic nature makes them less permanently visible. Since these works are painted or drawn directly on the wall, they are "temporary," and act as an installation that will be painted over when the exhibition ends. This impermanence lends bite to the conceptual claims of the work, and some poetry as well, in a gesture of nonmaterialism that suggests an experience of performance and "happening." Oddly enough, any problems we might find with this artist's work are suggested by the exhibition itself. The museum elected to hang its American masterpieces in the main upper gallery, at the heart of a confluence of adjoining spaces devoted entirely to LeWitt. Then it crowned the installation-within-an-installation with a LeWitt "drawing" in the vaulted ceiling enclosing the skylight overhead. The result is a highly unusual juxtaposition. It seems unfair that we're invited to look at Sol LeWitt in the light of Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, John Singer Sargent, and Edward Hopper, and vice versa. These painters share a dusty art-historical stage beneath LeWitt's crisp modernist umbrella; they band together to represent a commitment to art, nature, and their craft. What these artists painted was rooted in the very act of seeing, and making a connection with what they saw. Next to these masters LeWitt naturally seems out of reach, more the architect, the inventor of perceptual experience. He does not touch his work, and so his touch is not in it. LeWitt has created an art cut off from the intuitive and emotional possibilities that arise in the making, just as it is uncompromised by associations or references to things outside itself.
Robert Mangold
1937 Born October 12 in North Tonawanda, New York. 1956-60 Attends Cleveland Institute of Art, Ohio. 1959 Receives Yale University Summer Art Fellowship. 1960-62 Attends Yale University School of Art and Architecture, New Haven, Connecticut. 1961 Receives B.F.A. from Yale University. 1963 Receives M.F.A. from Yale University. 1964 First solo exhibition at Thibaut Gallery, New York. 1971 Solo museum exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. 1972 Participates in Documenta 5 in Kassel, West Germany; also Documenta 6 in 1977 and Documenta 7 in 1982. 1979 Participates in 1979 Biennial Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; again in 1983 & 1985. 1982 Retrospective of paintings at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. 1984-86 Retrospective of paintings at the Akron Art Museum, Ohio; travels. 1993 Receives Skowhegan Medal for Painting. 1993-94 Retrospective exhibition at the Hallen für neue Kunst, Schaffhausen; travels.
Brice Marden
Born October 15, 1938, in Bronxville, New York. He attended Florida Southern College, Lakeland, from 1957 to 1958 and the Boston University School of Fine and Applied Arts from 1958 to 1961, when he received his B.F.A. degree. In the summer of 1961, he attended Yale Norfolk Summer School of Music and Art in Norfolk, Connecticut, and went on to enroll at the Yale University School of Art and Architecture, New Haven, receiving an M.F.A. degree in 1963. It was at Yale that Marden developed the formal strategies that characterized his paintings of the following decades: a preoccupation with rectangular formats and the repeated use of a muted, extremely individualized palette. He has described his early works as highly emotional and subjective, despite their apparent lack of referentiality. In the summer of 1963, Marden moved to New York with his wife, Pauline Baez, whom he had married in 1960, and with whom he had a son, Nicholas. They later divorced and he married Helen Harrington in 1969. He worked as a guard in 1963 and 1964 at the Jewish Museum, where he came into contact with the work of Jasper Johns, an artist whom he studied in depth and whose work furthered his interest in gridded compositions. Marden made his first monochromatic single-panel painting in the winter of 1964. It was during this time that his first solo exhibition was presented at the Wilcox Gallery, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. Marden spent the spring and summer of 1964 in Paris, where he was inspired by the work of Alberto Giacometti. His first solo show in New York was held at the Bykert Gallery in 1966, and in the fall of that year, he became the general assistant to Robert Rauschenberg. In 1968, he began constructing his paintings with multiple panels. From 1969 to 1974, he was a painting instructor at the School of Visual Arts in New York. In 1972, his work was showcased at Documenta in Kassel, and he was honored with a retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1975. A show of drawings made between 1964 and 1974 traveled in 1974 to the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; the Fort Worth Art Museum; and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. In 1977, Marden traveled to Rome and Pompeii, where he strengthened an interest in Roman and Greek art and architecture, which would influence his work of the late 1970s and early 1980s. In the mid-1980s, Marden turned away from Minimalism [more] toward gestural abstraction. Around this time, Marden traveled to Thailand, where he became interested in Far Eastern calligraphy and the art of the brush stroke. During the 1990s, Marden has continued to exhibit regularly in New York. He was the subject of two major traveling shows, Brice Marden—Cold Mountain, at the Dia Center for the Arts, New York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Menil Collection, Houston; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; and Kunstmuseum, Bonn, in 1991 and 1992; and Work books 1965–1995, which traveled in 1997–98 to the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich; Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; and the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Robert Motherwell
An American painter and printmaker, Robert Motherwell (1915-1991) was one of the founders and principal exponents of Abstract Expressionism. A precocious youth, Motherwell received a scholarship to study art when he was 11 years old. He would later earn degrees in aesthetics from Harvard and Stanford. Motherwell decided to become a serious artist only in 1941. Although influenced by the Surrealist artists Max Ernst, Andre Masson and Yves Tanguy, and with an academic understanding of art from his training at university, he remained largely self-taught in technique. He was among the first American artists to cultivate accidental elements in his work. Initially, he followed no single style. But his early work already contained motifs from which much of his later art grew. Motherwell received his first one-person show in 1944 at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century Gallery in New York City.
Claes Oldenburg
Born in 1929 at Stockholm. The son of a Swedish Consul General, he came to Chicago in 1936. After finishing his studies at Yale University, New Haven, he started to work as a reporter. In 1952 he attended a course at the Chicago Art Institute, published drawings in several magazines and began to paint pictures influenced by Abstract Expressionism. In 1956 he moved to New York and came into contact with Jim Dine. In 1958 he met Alan Kaprow and took part in his Happenings. In 1958-59 he arranged his first sculptural, Neo-Dadaist assemblages of plaster and garbage soaked in striking colors. These led to his environments (The Street, The Store etc.). He also started at this time to make replicas of foods like hamburgers, ice-cream and cakes, which prepared the ground for his soft sculptures. In 1964 and 1968 he was represented at the Venice Biennale, and in 1968 and 1972 at the documenta "4" and documenta "5", Kassel. In 1972 he arranged his Mouse Museum. A comprehensive retrospective of his projects, documents and sketches was shown at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1969. He was given a retrospective in 1970 by the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. From 1976 he collaborated on large-scale projects with Coosje van Bruggen, whom he married in 1977. He was represented at the documenta "6", 1977, and documenta "7", 1982, at Kassel. He was given a retrospective of his drawings in 1977 by the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, and the Kunsthalle Tübingen. His environment Mouse Museum/Ray Gun Wing was arranged in 1979 at the Museum Ludwig, Cologne. In 1983 he made his large sculpture of a toothbrush for the Museum Haus Esters, Krefeld. In 1984 he made his proposals for the large project The Course of the Knife for Venice, which was then shown in collaboration with the architect Frank O'Gehry at the Campo dell'Arsenale, accompanied by performances which he took part in himself. He then went on to collaborate with Gehry on other projects related to architecture, e.g. in Boston and Los Angeles. In 1989 the Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg, organized the exhibition Claes Oldenburg - Coosje van Bruggen, A Bottle of Notes and Some Voyages.
Ed Ruscha
Born 1937, in Omaha Nebraska and raised in Oklahoma City, Ed Ruscha began his art career as a boy, taking painting lessons from a portraitist and drawing comics of everyday life. In 1957, he left Oklahoma to attend Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles. He made his first paintings using words after leaving school and working for an advertising agency in 1960. Beginning in 1961, he turned to photography as an additional medium, using his images of buildings on Sunset Strip, and apartment buildings and gas stations in Los Angeles, to create some of the most influential artists books of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Considered both a pop and conceptual artist, over the years Ruscha has investigated the spaces between highways and maps, images and words, abstraction and representation, public imagery and landscape painting. both his paintings and photographs ask the viewer to consider the vernacular-built environment as an index of contemporary society. Ruscha‚s work has appeared in major shows around the world, including Paris, Rotterdam, Barcelona, and Japan. He is also represented in the permanent collections of most major museums, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Hirshhorn in Washington D.C. Ruscha also completed a 23-foot tall mural for the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, entitled „Picture Without Words.
Robert Ryman
1930 Born May 30 in Nashville, Tennessee. 1948-49 Attends Tennessee Polytechnic Institute, Cookville, Tennessee. 1949-50 Attends George Peabody College for Teachers, Nashville, Tennessee. 1950-52 Serves in the United States Army. 1952-53 Moves to New York. Studies jazz music, begins painting. 1967 First solo exhibition at Paul Bianchini Gallery, New York. 1973 Receives John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. 1974 Retrospective organized by the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. 1980-82 Retrospective at InK, Halle für Internationale Neue Kunst, Zürich; travels. 1982 Becomes member of the Art Commission, City of New York. 1985 Receives Skowhegan Medal for Painting. 1993-94 Retrospective exhibition organized by the Tate Gallery, London and The Museum of Modern Art, New York; travels. 1994 Elected member of The American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, New York.
Sean Scully
Born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1945, Scully received his art education in London and moved to New York in the mid-1970s. He divides his time between New York, London and Barcelona. Drawn toward pure, repeated shapes, he is known for his idealized use of stripes and grids. Well represented in major museums throughout the U.S., Germany, England, France and Italy, selected public collectors include the Art Institute of Chicago; the Arts Council of Great Britain; the Contemporary Arts Society, London; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Dallas Museum of Art; the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; the Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Germany; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Saint Louis Art Museum; the Tate Gallery, London; the Tokyo International Forum, Tokyo, Japan; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.
Richard Serra
Born 1935 in San Francisco. Serra has explored and expanded the possibilities of printmaking since 1972. World famous as a sculptor, it is clear through the visual power, variety and large number of prints he has produced over the years that the medium of printmaking is not merely of marginal interest to him. Working primarily with metal plates, Serra utilizes the "directness" of lithography, drawing on aluminum and copper as on a sheet of paper. His printmaking informs, and is informed by, his work in other mediums. The series of drawings entitled "Rounds" for example, in which he applied paintstick to paper through a wire mesh (thus mechanizing the process of drawing) was inspired by his previous experiments with the silkscreen process. Elements were further expanded upon in the richly textured, labor intensive set of etchings "Rounds & Ellipses" from 1999. Collected across the globe, Serra's work engages the viewer, exploring the perception of volume and weight, figure-ground relationships, movement and grace. "I think you can't look at these works without being curious about how these things physically came into being," said Serra from a recent interview in 'Art on Paper.' "You become the audience in reconstructing the process of their making."
Andy Warhol
b. 1928, Pittsburgh; d. 1987, New York City Andy Warhol was born Andrew Warhola on August 6, 1928, in Pittsburgh. He received his B.F.A. from the Carnegie Institute of Technology, Pittsburgh, in 1949. That same year, he moved to New York, where he soon became successful as a commercial artist and illustrator. During the 1950s, Warhol’s drawings were published in Glamour and other magazines and displayed in department stores. He became known for his illustrations of I. Miller shoes. In 1952, the Hugo Gallery in New York presented a show of Warhol’s illustrations for Truman Capote’s writings. He traveled in Europe and Asia in 1956. By the early 1960s, Warhol began to paint comic-strip characters and images derived from advertisements; this work was characterized by repetition of banal subjects such as Coca-Cola bottles and soup cans. He also painted celebrities at this time. Warhol’s new painting was exhibited for the first time in 1962, initially at the Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles, then in a solo exhibition at the Stable Gallery, New York. By 1963, he had substituted a silkscreen process for hand painting. Working with assistants, he produced series of disasters, flowers, cows, and portraits, as well as three-dimensional facsimile Brillo boxes and cartons of other well-known household products. Starting in the mid-1960s, at The Factory, his New York studio, Warhol concentrated on making films that were marked by repetition and an emphasis on boredom. In the early 1970s, he began to paint again, returning to gestural brushwork, and produced monumental portraits of Mao Tse-tung, commissioned portraits, and the Hammer and Sickle series. He also became interested in writing: his autobiography, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again), was published in 1975, and The Factory published Interview magazine. A major retrospective of Warhol’s work organized by the Pasadena Art Museum in 1970 traveled in the United States and abroad. Warhol died February 22, 1987, in New York.
Terry Winters
Born June 1, 1949 in Brooklyn, NY. Works and lives in New York and Geneva, Switzerland. Over the past two decades, Terry Winters has proven himself to be one of America's leading minimalist artists. From the time of his student days at the Pratt Institute forward, he has consistently returned to the reduction of forms and colors to their essential. While his work is based on the observed world, the joy of his paintings and prints come from their playful use of opposites and counterpoint. Prints have been a major focus of his work since his first releases with ULAE in 1982. Winters's works are in major collections worldwide, notably The Tate Gallery, Walker Art Center, and the Museum of Modern Art.
