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Article

Abercrombie, Gertrude  

Susan Weininger

Publication History:

Published online:
10 September 2021
Collection:
Grove Art Online

(b Austin, TX, Feb 17, 1909; d Chicago, IL, Jul 3, 1977).

American painter, printmaker, and sculptor. Her work, often described by critics as “magic realist” or “surreal,” includes portraits, still lifes, landscapes, and interior scenes that translate a private vision into the concrete terms of this world. She studied at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, graduating in 1929 with a BA in Romance languages; after returning to Chicago she took courses at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the American Academy of Art. Her work was deeply personal, informed by a lasting connection to the regional mentality of the Chicago art world combined with a distinctive and witty approach.

Her interests were shaped by early experiences. Both of her parents were opera singers and she became a serious jazz aficionado as an adult; she learned German as a child during a stay in Berlin, stimulating a love of languages and wordplay; she had a profound connection to the Midwest and its landscape, particularly to her father’s western Illinois hometown of Aledo, where she spent many happy summers with his extended family, moderating the loneliness of being an only child....

Article

Acconci, Vito  

Publication History:

Published online:
31 October 2011
Collection:
Benezit Dictionary of Artists

American, 20th century, male.

Born 24 January 1940, in New York.

Painter, sculptor, performance artist, video artist. Multimedia.

Body Art, Conceptual Art.

Vito Acconci was born in the Bronx, New York and lives and works in Brooklyn. He studied at Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts and at the University of Iowa. He has taught in various art schools and universities and in particular at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Yale University and the Parsons School of Design in New York....

Article

Adams, Lisa Kay  

Publication History:

Published online:
31 October 2011
Collection:
Benezit Dictionary of Artists

American, 20th – 21st century, female.

Born 3 August 1955, in Bristol (Pennsylvania).

Painter, sculptor, video artist, installation artist.

Lisa Adams studied at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, in 1976; Scripps College, Claremont, California, obtaining a BA in 1977; and Claremont Graduate University, receiving an MFA in ...

Article

African American art  

Regenia Perry, Christina Knight, Ellen Tani, dele Jegede, Kelvin L. Parnell Jr., Bridget R. Cooks, Jessica M. Ditillio, Camara Dia Holloway, Meaghan Walsh, and Jenifer P. Borum

Publication History:

Published online:
2003
Collection:
Grove Art Online

[Afro-American artBlack American art]

Term used to describe art made by Americans of African descent from the 17th century through the present. While the crafts of African Americans before the end of the 19th century continued largely to reflect African artistic traditions (see Africa: Art of the African diaspora), the earliest fine art made by professional African American artists was in an academic Western style (see fig.). Since at least the early 20th century, African American artists have worked in myriad contexts, many of which blur the boundaries between fine and vernacular art.

Regenia Perry, revised by Christina Knight and Ellen Tani

The first African artists in North America arrived in the 16th century as the result of the transatlantic slave trade, through which millions of Africans were forcibly displaced to the Americas under inhuman conditions. Before 1776 the work of enslaved African artists consisted largely of metalwork, ceramics, weaving, and making musical instruments, furniture, and clothing. Enslaved artists and artisans made significant contributions to colonial economies through their craftsmanship. In the Carolinas, they created a type of earthenware called colonoware (1500–1860s), possibly descended from West/Central African pottery. They also made undecorated earthenware pottery produced for domestic use and for trade....

Article

African American Expatriate Artists  

Theresa Leininger-Miller

Publication History:

Published online:
24 February 2010
Collection:
Grove Art Online

[Negro Colony]

Group of African American artists active in France in the 1920s and 1930s. Between the world wars Paris became a Mecca for a “lost generation” of Americans. Hundreds of artists, musicians, and writers from all over the world flocked to the French capital in search of a sense of community and freedom to be creative. For African Americans, the lure of Paris was enhanced by fear of and disgust with widespread racial discrimination experienced in the United States. They sought a more nurturing environment where their work would receive serious attention, as well as the chance to study many of the world’s greatest cultural achievements. France offered this along with an active black diasporal community with a growing sense of Pan-Africanism. Painters, sculptors, and printmakers thrived there, studying at the finest art academies, exhibiting at respected salons, winning awards, seeing choice art collections, mingling with people of diverse ethnic origins, dancing to jazz, and fervently discussing art, race, literature, philosophy, and politics. Although their individual experiences differed widely, they had much in common, including exposure to traditional European art, African art, modern art, and proto-Negritude ideas. As a result of their stay in Paris, all were affected artistically, socially, and politically in positive ways and most went on to have distinguished careers....

Article

Akers, Charles  

Publication History:

Published online:
31 October 2011
Collection:
Benezit Dictionary of Artists

American, 19th century, male.

Born 15 November 1836, near Hollis (Maine); died 16 September 1906, in New York.

Sculptor, draughtsman. Busts.

Charles Akers' brother, Benjamin Akers, was his teacher in Rome from 1857 to 1858. He sculpted a large number of busts and medallions of famous men, including ...

Article

Albenda, Ricci  

Publication History:

Published online:
31 October 2011
Collection:
Benezit Dictionary of Artists

American, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 1966, in New York.

Sculptor, painter, installation artist. Murals.

Ricci Albenda studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, including courses in architecture, receiving a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1988. His interest in architecture (as well as in graphic design and physics) figures prominently in his installation art, in which he creates environments which challenge the viewer's spatial perceptions. He uses such materials as fibreglass, wallboard, aluminium and acrylic paint. In his exhibition ...

Article

Albright, Ivan  

Janet Marstine

Publication History:

Published online:
2003
Collection:
Grove Art Online

(le Lorraine)

(b North Harvey, nr Chicago, Feb 20, 1897; d Woodstock, VT, Nov 18, 1983).

American painter, sculptor, printmaker and film maker. He was brought up in the suburbs of Chicago and was exposed to art at an early age by his father, Adam Emory Albright (1862–1957), a portrait painter. He passed on to his son the interest in careful draughtsmanship that he had developed from tuition with Thomas Eakins. Ivan’s initial field of interest was architecture, which he studied at Northwestern University, Evanston (1915–16), and at the University of Illinois, Urbana (1916–17). During World War I he served with an Army medical unit, making surgical drawings with great precision. He subsequently decided to become a painter and attended the Art Institute of Chicago (1920–23), the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Chicago (1923), and the National Academy of Design, New York (1924). Around this time he began to exhibit regularly.

Albright settled in Chicago in ...

Article

Alexander, Peter  

Publication History:

Published online:
31 October 2011
Collection:
Benezit Dictionary of Artists

American, 20th century, male.

Born 1939, in Los Angeles.

Sculptor, painter, collage artist.

Minimal Art, Finish Fetish, Light and Space.

Peter Alexander studied at the University of Pennsylvania from 1957 to 1962, the Architectural Association of London from 1960 to 1962, and the University of California ...

Article

Allen, James E(dmund)  

Publication History:

Published online:
31 October 2011
Collection:
Benezit Dictionary of Artists

American, 20th century, male.

Born 1894, in Louisiana (Missouri); died 1964.

Painter, engraver, draughtsman, sculptor. Scenes with figures.

James Edmond Allen studied in Chicago and New York, and was taught by Joseph Pennell and William Auerbach-Levy. In 1966 the Musée-galerie de la Seita in Paris showed his works in the exhibition America in the Depression - Politically Committed Artists of the Thirties ( L'Amérique de la Dépression - Artistes engagés des années trentes).

He worked in dry-point before concentrating on etching. During the thirties, with commissioned compositions depicting workers engaged in massive construction works, he worked for the Work Projects Administration (WPA) , a huge undertaking set up by the Roosevelt administration between 1935 and 1939 to help artists hit by the recession by offering them numerous commissions. Under the influence of Hans Hofmann his work became mainly abstract.

L'Amérique de la Dépression. Artistes engagés des années trente, exhibition catalogue, Musée-galerie de la Seita, Paris, 1996....

Article

Allora & Calzadilla  

Sofia Hernández Chong Cuy

Publication History:

Published online:
02 June 2011
Collection:
Grove Art Online

American installation artists, active also in Puerto Rico. Jennifer Allora (b Philadelphia, Mar 20, 1974) graduated with a bachelor’s degree in art from the University of Richmond, Virginia (1996), and Guillermo Calzadilla (b Havana, Cuba, Jan 10, 1971) graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Escuela de Artes Plastica in San Juan, Puerto Rico (1996). Allora and Calzadilla met in Italy in 1995 during a study abroad program in Florence. They then lived together in San Juan for a year before moving to New York City where they started working collaboratively while each participated in different residency and study programs. In 1998–1999, Allora participated in the year-long Whitney Independent Study Program, while Calzadilla participated in the P.S.1 Contemporary Arts Center National Studio Program.

Allora & Calzadilla’s first important international exhibition was the XXIV Bienal de São Paulo in 1998 curated by Paulo Herkenhoff, which investigated the idea of cultural cannibalism known in Brazilian literature as ...

Article

Alston, Charles  

Publication History:

Published online:
31 October 2011
Collection:
Benezit Dictionary of Artists

American, 20th century, male.

Born 28 November 1907, in Charlotte (North Carolina); died 27 April 1977, in New York.

Painter, sculptor, illustrator, lithographer. Murals.

Groups: Spiral, 306.

Charles Alston moved to New York with his mother in 1914, after his father died. Alston received his BA and MA (...

Article

Alston, Charles  

Deborah Cullen

Publication History:

Published online:
26 May 2010
Collection:
Grove Art Online

(Henry) [Spinky]

(b Charlotte, NC, Nov 29, 1907; d April 27, 1977).

African American painter, sculptor, graphic artist, muralist and educator. In 1913, Charles Alston’s family relocated from North Carolina to New York where he attended DeWitt Clinton High School. In 1929, he attended Columbia College and then Teachers College at Columbia University, where he obtained his MFA in 1931. Alston’s art career began while he was a student, creating illustrations for Opportunity magazine and album covers for jazz musician Duke Ellington.

Alston was a groundbreaking educator and mentor. He directed the Harlem Arts Workshop and then initiated the influential space known simply as “306,” which ran from 1934 to 1938. He taught at the Works Progress Administration’s Harlem Community Art Center and was supervisor of the Harlem Hospital Center murals, leading 35 artists as the first African American project supervisor of the Federal Art Project. His two murals reveal the influence of Mexican muralist Diego Rivera (1886–1957). His artwork ranged from the comic to the abstract, while often including references to African art. During World War II, he worked at the Office of War Information and Public Information, creating cartoons and posters to mobilize the black community in the war effort....

Article

Ambellan, Harold  

Publication History:

Published online:
31 October 2011
Collection:
Benezit Dictionary of Artists

American, 20th century, male.

Born 24 May 1912, in Buffalo; died 26 April 2006, in Arles.

Sculptor, painter. Figures.

Paris, 11 Feb 1994: Dance (oil on canvas, 51¼ × 32 ins/130 × 81.5 cm) FRF 40,000; Sentry (bronze, h. 17¼ ins/43.5 cm) FRF 35,000...

Article

Amer, Ghada  

Chika Okeke-Agulu

Publication History:

Published online:
09 July 2012
Collection:
Grove Art Online

(b Cairo, May 22, 1963).

American painter, sculptor, fibre and installation artist of Egyptian birth. Amer, one of the few young artists of African origin to gain prominence in the late 1990s international art scene, studied painting in France at the Villa Arson EPIAR, Nice (MFA, 1989), and the Institut des Hautes Etudes en Art Plastique, Paris (1991). She subsequently moved to New York. She is best known for her canvases in which paint and embroidery are combined to explore themes of love, desire, sexuality, and women’s identity in a patriarchal world. Amer’s use of Embroidery, historically regarded as a genteel female craft, to create images of women fulfilling their sexual desires without inhibition, recalls the provocations and strategies of 1970s Western feminist art. However, her work also reflects her alarm at the incremental curbing of women’s social and political freedoms in her native Egypt following the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, especially after the regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser ended in ...

Article

American Abstract Artists  

Ilene Susan Fort

Publication History:

Published online:
2003
Collection:
Grove Art Online

[A.A.A.]

American group of painters and sculptors formed in 1936 in New York. Their aim was to promote American abstract art. Similar to the Abstraction–Création group in Europe, this association introduced the public to American abstraction through annual exhibitions, publications and lectures. It also acted as a forum for abstract artists to share ideas. The group, whose first exhibition was held in April 1937 at the Squibb Galleries in New York, insisted that art should be divorced from political or social issues. Its aesthetics were usually identified with synthetic Cubism, and the majority of its members worked in a geometric Cubist-derived idiom of hard-edged forms, applying flat, strong colours. While the group officially rejected Expressionism and Surrealism, its members actually painted in a number of abstract styles. Almost half of the founding members had studied with Hans Hoffmann and infused their geometric styles with surreal, biomorphic forms, while others experimented with ...

Article

Ames, Blanche  

Publication History:

Published online:
31 October 2011
Collection:
Benezit Dictionary of Artists

American, 19th – 20th century, female.

Sculptor, painter. Still-lifes.

Blanche Ames lived in Lowell, Massachusetts, between 1903 and 1904.

New York, 24 Oct 1986: Still-life (1923, oil on canvas, 30 × 24½ ins/76.2 × 62.5 cm) USD 1,000

Article

Anderson, Akili Ron  

Publication History:

Published online:
31 October 2011
Collection:
Benezit Dictionary of Artists

American, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 19 February 1946, in Washington DC.

Painter, sculptor, draughtsman, engraver, photographer, video artist, glassmaker, decorative designer. Theatre design.

AfriCobra Group.

Akili Ron Anderson attended the Corcoran School of Art and Howard University in Washington DC where he lives and works. He is a member of AfriCobra (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists) founded in ...

Article

Anderson, John  

Publication History:

Published online:
31 October 2011
Collection:
Benezit Dictionary of Artists

American, 20th century, male.

Born 29 April 1928, in Seattle.

Sculptor, painter.

John Anderson trained at the Art Centre School in Los Angeles in 1953-1954. He started exhibiting his work in 1962.

New York (MoMA)

London, 31 Oct 1986: London, from Hungerford...

Article

Andre, Carl  

Publication History:

Published online:
31 October 2011
Collection:
Benezit Dictionary of Artists

American, 20th century, male.

Born 1935, in Quincy (Massachusetts).

Sculptor, painter.

Minimal Art.

Carl Andre attended the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts from 1951 to 1953, where he met Frank Stella. On a trip to Europe in 1954 he discovered Brancusi’s sculptures and megalithic monuments. He lives in New York....