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Article

Adams, Kc  

Canadian First Nations (Oji-Cree), 20th century, female.

Born 28 March 1971, in Yorkton (Saskatchewan).

Installation artist, ceramicist, photographer, sculptor, printmaker.

KC Adams studied at Concordia University, in Montreal, Quebec, where she received her BFA in Studio Arts in 1998. Her artistic practice was further developed through artists’ residencies in Canada, at institutions in Banff, Charlottetown and Winnipeg. During her ...

Article

Anderson, Akili Ron  

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

Assu, Sonny  

Canadian First Nations (We Wai Kai/Cape Mudge Band), 21st century, male.

Born 1975, in Richmond (British Columbia).

Painter, sculptor, printmaker, photographer.

The aesthetic of Sonny Assu (Liǥwilda’x̱w/Laich-kwil-tach) is a confluence of Northwest Coast formline motifs and popular Western culture. He is well versed in the traditional Kwakwaka’wakw arts of drum, blanket and basket making and uses these as the starting place of many of his artworks. Drawing on a pop sensibility, mass-media culture is used as a conduit to explore and expose these Kwakwaka’wakw traditions as well as the artist’s own mixed heritage. By bringing these seemingly desperate elements together, Assu’s works challenge popular notions of authenticity regarding Indigenous people and their art. Moreover, while the works may appear whimsical at first glance, they offer a sharp critique of Western society’s culture of consumption as it relates to colonisation, both historical and ongoing, in North America....

Article

Bartlett, Jennifer  

Cecile Johnson

(Losch)

(b Long Beach, CA, March 14, 1941).

American installation artist, painter, printmaker and sculptor. Bartlett studied at Mills College, Oakland, CA (1960–63), and at the Yale School of Art and Architecture, New Haven, CT (1964–5). The progressive approach to modern art taught at Yale and the nearby thriving art scene of New York were instrumental in her early development (1963–early 1970s). Bartlett’s first one-person exhibition was in New York (1970) in the loft of the artist Alan Saret. Nine-point Pieces (1973–4), a later work, was shown at the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York and was experimental both conceptually and materially. Her ambivalent use of systems to establish an order and to oppose it allowed her to explore the material and the conceptual process of making images and objects. Rhapsody (1975–6; priv. col., see exh. cat., p. 21), one of her best-known installations, consists of 988 steel plates covered with screenprint grids and hand-painted Testors enamel and hung on a wall (2.28×47.86 m). Each plate exists individually and in relation to its adjoining plate and may be read vertically or horizontally, creating a mesh of stylistic variability exploring both figurative and non-figurative motifs. Another work of the 1970s is ...

Article

Bartow, Rick  

Native American (Wiyot and Yurok), 20th–21st century, male.

Born 1946, in Newport (Oregon).

Sculptor, painter, ceramicist, mixed-media artist, print-maker.

Rick Bartow of the Wiyot and Yurok Nations of Northern California works in a number of media to create images which often reference indigenous North American transformation myths. His work with the Maori artist John Bevan Ford has also been an influence. In ...

Article

Billops, Camille  

Deborah Cullen

(b Los Angeles, CA, Aug 12, 1933).

African American filmmaker, sculptor, printmaker and archivist of African American culture. Camille Billops received her BA from California State College and her MFA from the City College of New York. A visual artist, filmmaker and archivist, Billops’s darkly humorous prints and sculpture have been exhibited internationally, including at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum of Design, the New Museum and the Bronx Museum, New York; the Library of Congress, Washington, DC; Clark College, Atlanta University; the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA; Museo de Arte Moderno La Tertulia, Cali, Colombia; Gallerie Akhenaton, Cairo, Egypt; the American Center, Karachi, Pakistan; and the American Cultural Center, Taipei, Taiwan. Billops received a Percent for Art commission in New York and was a long-time member of Robert Blackburn’s Printmaking Workshop (PMW), traveling to establish the first summer printmaking workshop in Asilah, Morocco, with the PMW delegation.

As a filmmaker, Billops earned a National Endowment for the Arts award. Her films have been shown on public television and at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. She collaborated with photographer James Van Der Zee (...

Article

Brown, James  

American, 20th – 21st century, male.

Active since 1972 also active in France.

Born 1951, in Los Angeles.

Painter (including gouache/mixed media), watercolourist, sculptor, engraver. Figures, portraits.

James Brown became interested in specifically religious symbols, and their interior force, at a very early age, while he was studying at school and at the Jesuit University. When he went to Paris in ...

Article

Buck, John  

American, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 1946, in Aimes, Iowa.

Sculptor, printmaker.

John Buck studied at Kansas City Institute and School of Design, where he received his Bachelor of Fine Art degree, and at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, before graduating with a master's degree from the University of California, Davis, in ...

Article

Cole, Willie  

James Smalls

(b Somerville, NJ, 1955).

African American sculptor, printmaker, and conceptual artist. He grew up in New Jersey and attended the Boston University School of Fine Arts, the School of Visual Arts and the Art Students League of New York City. Cole is best known for assembling and transforming ordinary domestic objects, such as irons, ironing boards, high-heeled shoes, lawn jockeys, hair dryers, bicycle parts and other discarded appliances and hardware into imaginative and powerful configurations and installations embedded with references to the African American experience and inspired by West African religion, mythology and culture. Visual puns and verbal play characterized his works, thereby creating layered meanings. The objects he chose were often discarded mass-produced American products that had themselves acquired an alternate history through their previous handling and use.

In 1989, he became attracted to the motif of the steam iron both for its form and for its perceived embodiment of the experience and history of the unknown persons who had previously used it. He referred to the earliest versions of these irons as ‘Household Gods’ and ‘Domestic Demons’. With them, he engaged with ideas utilizing not only the found object but also the repetitive scorch mark of the iron arranged in either purely decorative patterns or in such ways as to suggest a face or African mask (...

Article

Condo, George  

American, 20th – 21st century, male.

Active also active in France.

Born 1957, in Concord (New Hampshire), United States.

Painter, sculptor, collage artist, pastellist, draughtsman, engraver, screen printer, illustrator. Stage sets.

Neo-Expressionism, Citationism.

George Condo is an American artist who lived in Paris before moving to New York in the early 1980s. There, he met Andy Warhol, Julian Schnabel, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Keith Haring, and he worked with Beat Generation authors William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. In 1999 he received an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Condo remains traditional in his choice of mediums, using only oil, charcoal, pastel, and collage, although his manner is extremely spirited. His art is a type of condensation of much contemporary pictorial art and may just as easily be inspired by Japanese landscapes from the late 19th century as by works by Matta or Masson, Velazquez’s Las Meninas – already revisited by Picasso – or the motifs of Matisse. There are also homages to forgotten painters like Basquiat and even comic book heroes and advertisements. The great diversity of his subjects and styles does not detract from the quality of his paintings, which are intended to be as anonymous as the products in a supermarket....

Article

Cutrone, Ronnie  

Sophie Howarth

(b New York, July 10, 1948; d Lake Peekskill, NY, July 21, 2013).

American painter, draughtsman, printmaker and sculptor. From 1966 to 1970 he studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York, where he made large figurative paintings around themes such as rescue and survival. He stopped painting in 1970 but continued to make drawings and sculptures, including a series of large iron cages such as The Getting To Know You Cage (1979; USA, priv. col.), in which the reactions between two people inside a confined space could be observed by spectators. Several of Cutrone’s cages were shown at Mudd Club, a combined music venue and gallery in New York which he ran between 1979 and 1982. From 1972 to 1982 Cutrone worked as a studio assistant to Andy Warhol, also briefly co-editing Warhol’s Interview magazine (1972–3). He resumed painting in the early 1980s and began incorporating Biblical imagery into his work, linking it with favourite American cartoon characters in ways that deliberately courted controversy. He established his reputation around the same time as such graffiti artists as ...

Article

Davidson, Robert  

Martine Reid

(b Masset, Queen Charlotte Islands, BC, Nov 4, 1946).

Native American Haida sculptor, metalworker, printmaker and blanket-maker. He was the grandson of the Haida blanket- and basket-maker Florence Davidson (1895–1993), and great-grandson of the Haida wood-carver Charles Edenshaw. He began carving argillite as a teenager in Masset, and in 1966 he met Bill Reid, who offered him workshop space in Vancouver. There Davidson developed new carving skills and learnt the fundamentals of the two-dimensional (‘formline’) designs used by the Haida and other tribes of the northern Northwest Coast (see Native North American art, §III, 2). In 1969 he returned to Masset to carve a 12.2 m-high totem pole, the first heraldic column to be raised on the Queen Charlotte Islands since the end of the 19th century. In 1987 Davidson and his crew produced a set of three totem poles entitled Three Variations on Killer Whale Myths for the Pepsicola Sculptural Garden in Purchase, NY. In these totem poles Davidson worked within the strict conventions of the Haida style, refining it by introducing subtle variations in design but preserving a degree of conservative austerity in which movement and individual expression are sacrificed to overall unity of form. In his early work in silver Davidson used flat patterns influenced by Edenshaw, and he went on to develop these into an innovative style of his own in screenprints, silver and bronze. Davidson’s younger brother, ...

Article

Feddersen, Joe  

Native American (Okanagan), 20th–21st century, male.

Born 1953, in Omak, Washington.

Printmaker, muralist, sculptor, mixed-media artist. Collage, glass.

Born in 1953, Joe Feddersen is an Okanagan member of the Colville Confederated Tribes, and a Native American artist. He earned his BFA at the University of Washington (...

Article

Fischl, Eric  

American, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 1948, in New York.

Painter, engraver, sculptor. Figure compositions.

Bad Painting.

Eric Fischl studied at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, where he met David Salle and Matt Mullican, artists of his generation who are now well known. He lives in New York....

Article

Flack, Audrey  

American, 20th – 21st century, female.

Born 30 May 1931, in New York.

Painter, sculptor, graphic artist, printmaker, lithographer. Still-lifes, figures.

Audrey Flack studied at the Cooper Union, New York (1948-1951); Yale University, New Haven (BFA, 1952) with Jossef Albers; the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University (1953); and the Art Students League, New York, under Robert Beverly Hale. She has taught in New York at the Pratt Institute and New York University (1960-1968); the Riverside Museum Master Institute (1966-1967); the School of Visual Arts (1970-1974); and the National Academy of Design (from 1987). Flack has been Albert Dorne Professor at University of Bridgeport, CT (1975); Mellon Professor at the Cooper Union, New York (1982); C. & R. Smith Distinguished Visiting Professor, George Washington University (1992); and Visiting Professor, University of Pennsylvania Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (1994). She has served on the boards of directors of the College Art Association of America (1989-1994), the Wonder Woman Foundation, and Interns for Peace....

Article

Fonseca, Harry Eugene  

W. Jackson Rushing III

(b Sacramento, CA, Jan 5, 1946; d Santa Fe, NM, Dec 28, 2006).

Native American painter, printmaker and sculptor of Maidu, Hawaiian and Portuguese ancestry. Raised in Northern California, Fonseca studied at Sacramento City College and at California State University at Sacramento with Wintu artist Frank LaPena (b 1937). A leading figure in the national network of contemporary native artists that formed in the early to mid-1970s, Fonseca received the Best of Show Award in the Indian Art Now exhibition at the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, Sante Fe, NM, in 1979. Many honors followed, including the Allan Houser Memorial Award and an Eiteljorg Museum Fellowship for Native American Fine Art, both in 2005. Inspired by mythology, pictography and modernism, he explored oral history, media imagery and popular culture through figuration and abstraction.

Fonseca’s earliest imagery transformed indigenous designs and material culture. His Maidu Creation Story (1977) was the first of several treatments (1991, 2006) of subject matter based on the teachings of his uncle, Henry Azbill. The quiet, folkish elegance and pristine primitivism of his drawings for the anthology ...

Article

Goshorn, Shan  

Native American (Eastern Band of Cherokee), 20th–21st century, female.

Born 1957, in Baltimore.

Multimedia artist, photographer, illustrator, basket-weaver with paper.

Shan Goshorn, given the Cherokee Wolf Clan name of Yellow Moon, began training in silversmithing at the Cleveland Institute of Art and transferred to the Atlanta College of Art for her final year, receiving a BFA degree in painting and photography (double major) in ...

Article

Haozous, Robert (Bob)  

Native American (Warm Springs Chiricahua Apache), 20th–21st century, male.

Born 1 April 1943, in Los Angeles.

Sculptor, painter, printmaker, jewellery maker.

The Chiricahua Apache artist Bob Haozous, son of the well-known Apache sculptor Allan Houser (Haozous is the indigenous name which became Houser when anglicised), is a noted figure in his own right, having the distinction of contributing work to two Venice Biennales (...

Article

Hassinger, Maren  

American, 20th – 21st century, female.

Born 1947.

Sculptor, lithographer, installation artist.

Minimal Art.

Maren Hassinger is an adjunct professor at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. She works with wire which she treats as she would textile. Her pieces, which she has described as 'kinetic', seem subjected to the elements and to behave in the way of plants, even set inside a gallery. This is her way of referring to an era when nature was not threatened by human activity and to the rural past of African Americans. She is the author of numerous open-air installations such as ...

Article

Heap of Birds, Edgar  

Native American (Cheyenne and Arapaho), 20th–21st century, male.

Born 22 November, 1954, in Wichita (Kansas).

Painter, draughtsman, sculptor, printmaker, installation artist, conceptual artist, educator.

Edgar Heap of Birds is one of the most distinguished North American indigenous artists of his generation. His works reveal a distinctly critical and historical awareness of the ways that American Indian peoples, their histories and their viewpoints have been ignored and written over under colonialism. He has received numerous honours, presenting his work in competition for the United States Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale (...