Derrick Adams
Derrick Adams is an American artist whose work focuses on the joyful aspects of community and family life as a Black American.
Milton Avery
Avery was born in 1885, in Altmar, a small town in upstate New York. His father was a tanner, who moved the family to a small town near Hartford, Connecticut when Avery was thirteen. The youngest of four children, Avery help to support the family by doing factory work, starting at age sixteen.
Jennifer Bartlett
Jennifer Losch Bartlett was an American artist. She was known for paintings and prints that combine the system-based aesthetic of conceptual art with the painterly approach of Neo-Expressionism.
Ernie Barnes
Ernest Barnes was born in Durham, North Carolina in 1938. His father was a shipping clerk and his mother a housekeeper for attorney Frank L. Fuller Jr.
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Basquiat attended City-as-School, an alternative high school in Manhattan, for students who don't do well in traditional schools. He finally dropped out of school altogether when he was seventeen, just one year short of graduation. His father gave him some money, threw him out of their home and wished him luck. Basquiat stayed with friends, and became part of the New York graffiti arts scene.
Gifford Beal
Gifford Beal was an American painter, printmaker and muralist, whose early work was associated with the Ashcan School. Early Life and Education Gifford Beal was born in New York in 1879, the youngest of six children. His father, William Reynolds Beal, his oldest brother, Reynolds Beal, and his niece, Marjorie Acker, were all accomplished painters. Beal’s formal [...]
Peter Beard
Peter Hill Beard was an American artist, photographer, diarist, and writer who lived and worked in New York City, Montauk and Kenya. His photographs of Africa, African animals and the journals that often integrated his photographs, have been widely shown and published since the 1960s.
James Carroll Beckwith
James Carroll Beckwith was an American painter whose powerful portraits, murals and paintings of historical monuments are part of permanent museum collections around the world. He signed his work Carroll Beckwith. Early Life and Education James Carroll Beckwith was born in Hannibal, Missouri in 1852, and raised in Chicago, where his father opened a wholesale grocery business. [...]
George Bellows
George Bellows (1882-1925)photograph c.1920 by Nickolas Muray George Bellows turned down an offer to play baseball with the Cincinnati Reds and, instead, became one of the greatest American painters and chroniclers of the twentieth century. Early Life and Career Bellows was born in 1882, in Columbus, Ohio. Bellows mother was 40, and his father 50, [...]
Frank Weston Benson
Frank Weston Benson was one of America's greatest Impressionist painters. He was one of The Ten who exhibited together in order to advance creativity and originality in American art. Benson was extremely masterful with oils and watercolors and the etchings he did, of wildlife, hunting and fishing, were so in demand that the wildlife and sporting print itself [...]
Thomas Hart Benton
Thomas Hart Benton Painting The Rape of Persephone, 1938 Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975) chronicled the beauty, joys and sorrows of everyday life in America, until the day he died. Early Life Benton was born in 1889 in Neosho, Missouri, the oldest of four children. He spent much of his childhood and adolescence in Washington, D.C., [...]
Oscar Bluemner
Oscar Bluemner was called The Vermillionaire by other artists because of his use of brilliant reds and bold colors. Bluemner was a driving force in the creation of American Modernism. Early Life and Education Oscar Bluemner was born in Prenzlau, Germany in 1876, to a family of artists and artisans. In 1885, Bluemner was given a solo exhibition at [...]
Mel Bochner
Mel Bochner is an American conceptual artist. Bochner received his BFA in 1962 and honorary Doctor of Fine Arts in 2005 from the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University. He lives in New York City.
John George Brown
John George Brown was one of the most popular artists in America at the turn of the twentieth century. His empathetic, and highly skilled, portrayal of children on the streets of New York made him a successful artist, whose works have been exhibited and sought out by collectors for more than a century. Early Life and Education [...]
Orville Bulman
Orville Bulman was a mostly self taught, mid-twentieth century American artist, whose work was inspired by his trips to Haiti and the American South. His many solo shows were usually sold out before the doors officially opened. Many collectors, including the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, had several of his paintings.
Charles Burchfield
Charles Burchfield was an American artist, known for his startling, dreamlike watercolor landscapes and lithographs. Early Life and Education Charles Burchfield was born in Ashtabula Harbor in 1893. He was raised in Salem, in Ohio, by his widowed mother. Many of Burchfield’s paintings are of views from the house in Salem, and of the house itself, where [...]
Paul Cadmus
Paul Cadmus was an American Modern Realist painter and printmaker. Like the Italian Renaissance painters he admired, Cadmus’ work was meticulous and technically brilliant.
Alexander Calder
Early Life Alexander Calder in Stedelijk Museum A'dam. 2 October, 1969 Collectie / Archief : Fotocollectie Anefo Alexander Calder was born in Lawton, Pennsylvania, in 1898, to a family of talented artists. His grandfather, Alexander Milner Calder was a sculptor, who emigrated from Scotland to Philadelphia in 1868. He is best known for his monumental sculpture [...]
Mary Cassatt
Cassatt seated in a chair with an umbrella, 1913, Public Domain Verso reads "The only photograph for which she ever posed. Durand-Ruel - Collection Images of Artists Collection. At a time when women were groomed to marry, stay at home and have children, Mary Cassatt was determined to make a career of painting. Through talent [...]
Elizabeth Catlett
Elizabeth Catlett was born in Washington, D.C. in 1915, the youngest of three children. Her parents were the children of freed slaves. Her mother worked as a truant officer for the D.C. public school system. Her father, who died before she was born, taught math at Tuskegee University and made wood carvings in his spare time. One of his woodcarvings, of a bird, fascinated Catlett, and she aspired to be an artist as early as age six.
Marc Chagall
Marc Chagall | Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Marc Chagall painted a world filled with color, light and fantasy and brought an inimitable style of his own to twentieth century art. Early Life and Education Marc Chagall was born Moishe Segal in 1887 in the city of Vitebsk, now part of Belarus. He was the [...]
Chuck Close
Chuck Close was born in Monroe, Washington in 1940. His father, Leslie Close, worked at a hardware store and also as a sheet metal worker when Close was born.
Charles Caryl Coleman
Charles Caryl Coleman was an American painter, associated with the Aesthetic Movement, who found his muse on the island of Capri. Early Life Charles Caryl Coleman was born in Buffalo, New York in 1840. Coleman studied with noted painter William Holbrook Beard, who lived in Buffalo for a brief time to help create an art community, which [...]
John Steuart Curry
John Steuart Curry was an American Regionalist painter, illustrator, muralist and printmaker. His paintings of rural America were a comfort to many during the Great Depression. Early Life and Education John Stuart Curry was born in 1897 in Dunavant, Kansas, a town whose population was just 85 people in 1910. His parents, Smith and Margaret Curry, were [...]
Stuart Davis
Stuart Davis was an American painter whose European influences, combined with his American sensibilities, made him one of the most important modern painters of the twentieth century. Early Life and Education Stuart Davis was born in 1892, to a family that encouraged his talents from an early age. His father, Edward Wyatt Davis, was the art editor [...]
Maria Oakey Dewing
Maria Oakey Dewing was an American flower painter, and an important role model for women in the arts at the turn of the twentieth century. Early Life and Education Maria Oakey was born in New York City in 1845. She was the fifth of ten children born to Sally and William Oakey. William Oakey was in the [...]
Richard Diebenkorn
"deYoung Seawall" by RichardDiebenkorn by ed and eddie CC BY-SA 2.0 Richard Diebenkorn was an American abstract expressionist painter, who marched to the beat of his own drummer, ignoring art trends and painting the light and landscapes that he glimpsed from his Ocean Park studio. Early Life and Education Richard Diebenkorn was born in Portland, [...]
Jean Dubuffet
Jean Dubuffet was a French painter and sculptor who brought a wild and savage style of art to post-war France and America. “Man’s need for art is absolutely primordial,” he said, “as strong as, and perhaps stronger than, our need for bread. Without bread, we die of hunger, but without art we die of boredom.” Early Life [...]
Edmund Dulac
Edmund Dulac was a French-born, naturalized British painter, author and illustrator, whose work is as charming and sought after today as it was when he created it, in the first half of the twentieth century. Early Life and Education Edmund Dulac was born in Toulouse, France in 1882. Although he showed a penchant for drawing and painting [...]
Mabel Dwight
Mabel Dwight (1876-1955) was one of America’s leading lithography artists in the first half of the twentieth century. She was a keen and compassionate observer of the human condition. Dwight, an only child, was burnin Cincinnati, raised in New Orleans and traveled extensively throughout her life. She studied painting at the Hopkins School of Art in San [...]
John Joseph Enneking
John Joseph Enneking (1841-1916) was one of America’s first great impressionist painters. After the loss of his parents when he was young, and being wounded and taken prisoner by the Confederates while serving as a Union soldier during the Civil War, Enneking went to Boston to begin his career as an artist. He studied in Paris and [...]
Richard Estes
Richard Estes was born in 1932 in Kewanee, Illinois, but moved to Chicago at an early age. He remained there to study at the Art Institute of Chicago in the 1950s, where his training centered on figure drawing and traditional academic painting, the style that interested him most. Estes is one of the foremost proponents of the Photo-Realist movement, [...]
Walton Ford
Walton Ford in his studio, 2017 Walton Ford is an American artist, whose works combine history, science and mythology to explore the effects that humans and the environment have on birds and mammals. Early Life and Education Walton Ford was born in Larchmont, New York in 1960, one of four children. Walton's father, Enfield Berry [...]
Frederick Frieseke
Frederick Frieseke (1874-1939) was born in Michigan. He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League in New York, and left for France in 1898, when he was twenty four. He remained in France for the rest of his life, and was the most popular living American artist at the height of his [...]
William Glackens
William Glackens was an American painter whose work and life had a profound influence on twentieth century American art.
Abbott Fuller Graves
Abbott Fuller Graves (1859-1936) was an American artist, illustrator and educator who studied in Paris with Georges Jeannin, one of the most famous flower painters in Europe. Graves taught at the Cowles Art School in Boston and, in 1891, opened his own art school in Kenebunkport, Maine. Graves kept his connection with Jeannin, make occasional tips to [...]
Mark Grotjahn
Mark Grotjahn is an American painter and sculptor whose works have been exhibited extensively around the world and are included in the permanent collections of major museums and galleries.
Emile Gruppe
Born in Rochester, New York, Emile Gruppe (1896-1978) became a renowned New England landscape and marine painter. Although he is best known for his variety of Impressionistic landscapes, he also painted figures and portraits. His modern style was largely inherited from French Impressionist Claude Monet. "Lily Pads," date and location unknown, one of Gruppes landscapes, attests to [...]
Robert Gwathmey
Born in Richmond, Virginia, Robert Gwathmey (1903-1988) became an artist known for his Social Realist depictions of life in the rural South. He was one of the first white artists to create dignified images of African-American people and did so in a style that was modernist with many geometric forms and bold colororation. He spent most of [...]
Keith Haring
Keith Haring at work in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, March 14, 1986 Keith Haring was an American street artist and activist, whose easily recognizable work has been inspirational to his admirers around the world. Early Life and Education Keith Haring was born in Reading, Pennsylvania in 1958 and raised in Kutztown, Pennsylvania. He was [...]
Childe Hassam
Through his work and deeds, Childe Hassam helped to bring Impressionism to mainstream America. Early Years Frederick Childe Hassam was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts. His father’s cutlery business was destroyed in the Great Boston Fire of 1872. Although an uncle offered to send him to Harvard, Hassam chose, instead, to take a job to help support his [...]
Robert Henri
Born Robert Henry Cozad in Cincinnati, Ohio, he became one of the leading personalities in American art, known for his teaching skills, ethnic portraits, especially spirited children, and insistence that artists should adhere to social realism and give rein to their own artistic instincts. During his growing up years, he lived between Cincinnati and Cozad, Nebraska, founded [...]
David Hockney
Self-Portrait with Cigarette, 1983, exp. Hockney, Centre Georges-Pompidou, ParisPhoto: Renaud Camus, Taken on September 4, 2017 (CC BY 2.0) Early Years and Education David Hockney was born in the city of Bradford, in Yorkshire, England in 1937. Hockney was the fourth of five children. He received his formal art education at the Bradford School of [...]
Reggie Burrows Hodges
Reggie Burrows Hodges was born in Compton, California in 1965. His childhood in Compton has been the inspiration for many of his paintings. He attended the University of Kansas, where he studied theater and film. Hodges worked at various jobs in television and film production. He spent time in Brooklyn, where he became co-owner of Bass Mind Recording Studio and also co-founded the reggae dub band Trumystic. Hodges played the bass and wrote songs for the band.
Winslow Homer
Photograph of Winslow Homer taken in N. Y., 1880Albumen print by Napoleon Sarony, American, 1821-1896.Gift of the Homer Family, Bowdoin College Museum of Art. Quiet, thoughtful and seclusive, Winslow Homer became one of America’s most beloved artists. Homer was able to capture the raw beauty of people, the land and, especially, the sea. Early Life [...]
Shara Hughes
Shara Hughes is a contemporary American painter known for her colorful invented landscapes. Employing varied marks, the artist loosely depicts floating moons, gnarled trees, and blazing sunlight. As in the paintings of David Hockney and Charles Burchfield, Hughes’s works defy conventional depictions of space and light while still adhering to a pictorial logic. “Texture, pattern, and perspective is something I like to use to describe a space in ways that maybe don't always make sense,” she has explained.
Robert Indiana
Robert Indiana was one of America’s most renown contemporary artists. His iconic works are recognized throughout the world. "LOVE by Robert Indiana, 1995" Photo by Dick Thomas Johnson CC BY 2.0 Early Life and Education Robert Indiana was born in New Castle, Indiana in 1928. He was adopted by Earl and Carmen Clark, who moved [...]
Kenneth Noland
Kenneth Noland was an American painter. He was one of the best-known American Color Field painters, although in the 1950s he was thought of as an abstract expressionist and in the early 1960s he was thought of as a minimalist painter. Noland helped establish the Washington Color School movement.
Hughie Lee-Smith
Hughie Lee-Smith an African-American artist, born in Eustis, Florida in 1915. In 1938, he graduated with honors from the Cleveland School of Art and worked for the Federal Arts Project of the Works Progress Administration, creating paintings that focused on social justice and racial equality.
Sam Francis
Samuel Lewis Francis was born in San Mateo, California in 1923. His father was a mathematics professor, his mother was a pianist. Francis attended San Mateo High School.
Alfred Jensen
Alfred Jensen was a well-traveled Guatemalan-American artist, whose eclectic works reflect his interest in such diverse topics as physics, color theory, astronomy and Chinese history.
Jasper Johns
Jasper Johns is a master American painter and printmaker, whose work and ideas bridged the gap between the Dada and Post-impressionist movements.
Francis Coates Jones
Genre-figure painter Francis Coates Jones (1857-1932), was born in Baltimore, Maryland. Jones first expressed an interest in art in 1876 when visiting Edwin Abbey. Jones and his brother, H. Bolton Jones, a painter of landscapes, then worked at Pont-Aven, Brittany, in an artists' colony attended by Robert Wylie and Thomas Hovenden. Pont-Aven would soon become famous for [...]
Alex Katz
Alex Katz was born in Brooklyn in 1927, raised in Queens, and has lived in his SoHo loft since 1968. His parents, who emigrated from Russia, encouraged Katz’s interest in the arts. He attended Woodrow Wilson High School, whose curriculum allowed him to study academic subjects in the morning and arts in the afternoon.
Scott Kelley
Scott Kelley is an artist and naturalist living on Peaks Island, Maine Scott Kelley is an American artist, whose focus is on the birds and landscapes surrounding his home in Maine. Early Life and Education Scott Kelley was born in Binghamton, New York in 1963. “Having grown up as an only child,” he says, “I [...]
Louis Aston Knight
Louis Aston Knight (1873-1948) was the son of the American expatriate painter, Daniel Ridgway Knight. Louis Aston Knight was born in America and began studying art at the Pennsylvania Academy of Art. In 1872, he traveled to Paris and continued to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Thereafter, he remained in Europe, and studied in the academic [...]
Jeff Koons
Jeff Koons is one of America’s most successful and controversial artists. Early Life and Education Jeff Koons at the Vanity Fair kickoff part for the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival.Author: David Shankbone Jeff Koons was born in York, Pennsylvania in 1955. His father was an interior designer, his mother a seamstress. Koons showed an interest in [...]
Julio Larraz
Julio Larraz was born in Havana, Cuba, on March 12, 1944. The son of a newspaper publisher, he began to draw at a very early age. In 1961 his parents moved to Miami, Florida, taking the whole family with them. In 1962 they moved to Washington, D.C., and in 1964 to New York City, where Larraz lived [...]