Derrick Adams
Derrick Adams is an American artist whose work focuses on the joyful aspects of community and family life as a Black American.
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Jean-Michel Basquiat was one of America's brightest, most talented and original artists. His works currently command some of the highest prices at auction around the world. Andy WarholJean-Michel Basquiat, 1982 Early Life and Education Jean-Michel Basquiat was born in Brooklyn on December 22, 1960. Basquiat had two younger sisters. His older brother died shortly before Basquiat [...]
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.
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.
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.
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, [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
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.
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 [...]
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.
Ellsworth Kelly
Ellsworth Kelly photographed in 1965 Ellsworth Kelly was an American artist whose work opened the door for post-war artists to explore minimalism, hard-edge, Color Field paintings and Pop Art. Early Life and Education Ellsworth Kelly was born in Newburgh, New York in 1923 and raised in the small town of Oradell, New Jersey. He [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Jacob Lawrence
Jacob Lawrence was an African-American painter known for his portrayal of African-American life.
Richard Lindner
Richard Lindner (1901-1978) was born in Hamburg, Germany and is well known for his quirky POP artworks. His style blends a mechanistic cubism with personal images and haunting symbolism.
Eddie Martinez
Eddie Martinez is a New York-based artist best known for large-scale paintings that feature bold color, urgent line and brushwork, and graphic shapes and forms.
Emily Mason
Emily Mason was an American abstract painter and printmaker. Mason developed her individual approach to the Abstract Expressionist and color field painting traditions with her veils of color and spontaneous gestural mark. Mason was born and raised in New York City, where she lived and worked until her death.
Henri Matisse
French artist, Henri Matisse (1869-1954) was known for his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter. Matisse is commonly regarded, along with Picasso and Marcel Duchamp, as one of the three artists who helped to define the revolutionary developments in the [...]
Joan Miro
"The more ignoble I find life, the more strongly I react by contradiction, in humor and in an outburst of liberty and expansion." — Joan Miro Early Life and Education Joan Miró posing while Joaquim Ros i Sabaté sculpts a statue of him. Spanish painter, printmaker and sculptor, Joan Miro, was born in Barcelona in [...]
Montoya & Ortiz
Luis Montoya and Leslie Ortiz have been working together since 1994. Their works are as unique and their collaboration. We asked them to tell us how their partnership came about, and Leslie was gracious enough to tell us about their backgrounds and how, almost twenty five years ago, they serendipitously became one of the most remarkable artistic [...]
Joyce Pensato
Joyce Pensato was an American artist who created large scale, Pop, abstract and complex paintings of popular cartoon characters. Early Life and Education Joyce Pensato was born in Brooklyn in 1941. Her father emigrated from Sicily when he was thirteen and learned to speak English by watching American movies. He worked as a printmaker, often helping artists [...]
Pablo Picasso
In 1949, Albanian-American photographer Gjon Mili was able to make an appointment with Pablo Picasso at his studio in Vallauris France. Trained as an engineer and self-taught in photography, Gjon Mili was the first to use electronic flash and stroboscopic light to create photographs that had more than scientific interest. "Pablo Picasso dibujando un centauro con [...]
Robert Rauschenberg
Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) was an American artist who came to prominence in the 1950s transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art. Rauschenberg is well-known for his "Combines" of the 1950s, in which non-traditional materials and objects were employed in innovative combinations. Rauschenberg was both a painter and a sculptor and the Combines are a combination of both, [...]
Kent Rockwell
Growing up in a genteel family in New York City, Rockwell Kent (1882-1971) was a member of the rugged realist school of landscape painters as well as a popular illustrator and printmaker. His 1930 illustrations for Moby Dick are among his most lasting achievements. He was the first American artist to have work exhibited in the Soviet [...]
James Rosenquist
James Rosenquist was one of America's most influential Pop artists, known for his enormous compositions relating to consumerism, politics and science. Photo of James Rosenquist in his Aripeka, Florida studio, 1988. Photo by Russ Blaise. Early Life and Education James Rosenquist was born in Grand Forks, North Dakota in 1933 to parents of Scandinavian descent. The [...]
Hunt Slonem
Born in 1951, Hunt Slonem is an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker. He is best known for his Neo-Expressionist paintings of tropical birds, often based on a personal aviary in which he has been keeping from 30 to over 100 live birds of various species. Slonem's works are included in many important museum collections all over the world.
Pat Steir
Pat Steir is an American painter and printmaker, whose fifty year career has led to her being one of the few female artists whose work has sold for seven figures at auction. Early Life and Education Pat Steir Photo: Jeffrey Beall CC BY-SA 2.0 Pat Steir was born Iris Patricia Sukoneck in 1940 in [...]
Donald Sultan
Donald Sultan’s large-scale still life paintings are filled with rich iconography—provocative objects, like bulbous fruits, set against a tar-black background.
Anthony Thieme
Anthony Thieme - Rooftops, Gloucester Photo: by irinaraquel, CC PDM 1.0 Anthony Thieme (1888-1954) was born in Rotterdam, Holland. He studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in The Hague, Holland, under George Hacker; Garlobini, Guardaciona; and Mancini in Italy. He also studied in Germany. In the 1920's he emigrated to the United States, initially [...]
Andy Warhol
Andy WarholPhoto by Stefan Leijon, CC BY-ND 2.0 Andy Warhol (1928-1987) was an American painter, printmaker, and filmmaker who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art. After a successful career as a commercial illustrator, Warhol became famous worldwide for his work as a painter, avant-garde filmmaker, record producer, author, [...]
Tom Wesselmann
Tom Wesselman, Still Life #30 Photo: C.K.H., CC BY-ND 2.0 Tom Wesselmann was one of America’s most innovative Pop artists. A painter, printmaker and sculptor, his work is as American as the country and western music he sang and wrote. Early Years and Education Tom Wesselmann was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio. He attended [...]
John Whalley
John Whalley in his studio John Whalley was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1954, Whalley's mother, herself an artist and graduate of the Pratt Institute, encouraged him to draw and paint from an early age. He completed his first oil painting at eight years of age at his childhood home in upstate New York, [...]
Jonas Wood
Jonas Wood was born in Boston in 1977. His father was an architect, his mother was head of the theater department at the progressive Cambridge School of Weston high school, which Wood attended.
Jamie B. Wyeth
James Browning Wyeth was born, in 1946, into a family of gifted American artists. His father, Andrew Wyeth, grandfather, N.C. Wyeth, and aunt, Carolyn Wyeth all contributed to his art education. Early Life and Education Wyeth was raised in Chadds Ford Township, Pennsylvania, home of the Brandywine School, established by artist Howard Pyle. Pyle was the teacher [...]
Stephen Scott Young
Stephen Scott Young is one of America’s finest contemporary realist painters. Young’s watercolors and etchings have been compared to those of Winslow Homer and John Singer Sargent. Young is just one of the few living artists whose work has been offered for auction at Christie’s. Early Life and Education Young was born in Hawaii in 1957. He [...]