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Article

Antonakos, Stephen  

Robert Saltonstall Mattison

(b Saint Nicholas, Nov 1, 1926; d New York, NY, Aug 17, 2013).

American sculptor and installation artist of Greek birth. Known for his neon environments, he has used light over five decades to explore spatial and temporal relationships. Settling with his family in New York in 1930, he graduated from Brooklyn Community College in 1947. Through the 1950s, he experimented with assemblage and was interested in Abstract Expressionism as well as Arte Povera. In 1960, he began to design neon configurations for interior spaces. While the geometry of his forms recalls emerging Minimalism, the richly glowing colors in such works as Red Box over Blue Box (1973; La Jolla, CA, Mus. Contemp. A.) are sensuous and emotionally evocative, thus differentiating Antonakos from his strictly Minimalist contemporaries. He uses incomplete geometric forms, suggesting Gestalt shapes, to invite the viewer to participate imaginatively in their completion. Since 1973, Antonakos has created nearly 50 permanent public works in America, Europe and Japan, such as ...

Article

Biederman, James  

American, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 1947, in New York.

Painter, sculptor.

James Biederman was a sculptor at Yale University in the 1970s. He produced Minimalist paintings in the 1980s and then turned to a form of gritty, smudged abstraction that might be considered Abstract Landscapism. He has said that to reach the essence of sculpture, his body must always be moving and readjusting. Sculpture has its own world (simultaneously hiding and revealing fictitious space) and excludes him from that world. He feels both drawn into its kingdom and repulsed by his protuberances and tentacles....

Article

Dill, Laddie John  

American, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 1943, in Long Beach (California).

Painter, sculptor.

Minimalism.

John Laddie Dill was the brother of the sculptor Guy Dill. He studied at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles from 1964 to 1968. On graduating, he started a framing business with his former classmate Chuck Arnoldi before joining Gemini G.E.I. as an apprentice printer. Here he met Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein and Jasper Johns who were to influence his subsequent work. In ...

Article

Fleischner, Richard  

American, 20th–21st century, male.

Born 1944, in New York.

Sculptor, draughtsman, photographer, painter, installation.

Land Art, Environmental Art.

Richard Fleischner graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design with a BFA in 1966 and an MFA in 1968, both degrees focusing on sculpture. During the 1970s and 1980s, Fleischner became a leading figure in environmental art....

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

Heavyshield, Faye  

Canadian First Nations (Blood/Kainai), 20th–21st century, female.

Born 1953, in Kainai Reserve (Alberta).

Sculptor, installation artist, photographer.

Blackfoot artist Faye HeavyShield received her training at the Alberta College of Art and the University of Calgary (BFA 1986). Her eloquently, sparse aesthetics fall within the tropes of Minimalism, but she favours natural and handmade materials over mass-produced ones. These materials imbue her work with a narrative specificity not usually associated with Minimalism. Drawing on her memories of a traditional upbringing on the Kainai reserve and her education at St Mary’s Catholic School, HeavyShield brings together small repeated, often abstracted, forms to create large sculptures and installations that metaphorically reference the body and landscape. The results are enigmatic works that explore issues of memory, identity and the politics of place. The repetitive dynamic of her work gives it a meditative quality and reminds the viewer that strength is found in ritual and community....

Article

Heizer, Michael  

Deborah A. Middleton

(b Berkeley, CA, Nov 4, 1944).

American sculptor, painter, and printmaker. Heizer’s earthworks erected in the vast desert expanses of the American Midwest marked the beginning of the Heizer, Michael movement of the 1960s and liberated art from the confines of the art gallery. Heizer’s early experience and exposure to desert landscapes and Native American culture was influenced by his father Robert Heizer, an important American archaeologist, and his maternal grandfather Olaf P. Jenkins, who was an important early American geologist. He attended the San Francisco Art Institute (1963–4) to study painting and moved to New York (1966). In 1967 Heizer left New York to return to the American Midwest with colleague Walter De Maria, and began artistic collaborations with James Turrell and Robert Smithson to explore the making of land art.

Heizer’s early paintings explored the interaction of two-dimensional and three-dimensional geometric forms influenced by the Abstract Expressionists of the late 1940s and 1950s. By ...

Article

Holt, Nancy  

American, 20th century, female.

Born 5 April 1938, in Worcester, Massachusetts; died 8 February 2014, in New York.

Sculptor, installation artist, filmmaker, photographer. Land Art, Environmental Art, Public Art, Post-Minimalism.

Nancy Holt received a BA in Biology from Tufts University in 1960 and then briefly travelled through Europe, before moving to New York City. There, she met influential Minimalist and Post-Minimalist artists, many of whom would become collaborators, including: Carl Andre, Dan Graham, Eva Hesse, Joan Jonas, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris, and Richard Serra. Holt’s early artistic output was primarily photography, video, and Concrete poetry, mediums in which she continued to work throughout her career....

Article

Kelliher-Combs, Sonya  

Native American (Inupiaq/Athabascan), 21st century, female.

Born 1969, in Bethal (Alaska).

Painter, sculptor, draughtsman, installation artist.

Inupiaq/Athabascan artist Sonya Kelliher-Combs holds a BFA from the University of Alaska–Fairbanks (1998) and an MFA from Arizona State University (1992). In 2007 she was awarded an Eiteljorg Fellowship for Native American Fine Art. Her work is included in the collections of the Anchorage Museum, Alaska State Museum, University of Alaska Museum of the North and Eiteljorg Museum....

Article

Lee, Catherine  

Morgan Falconer

(b Texas, 1950).

American sculptor. Lee came to prominence as a Minimalist in the 1970s. An interest in modernism and the monochrome, as well as a hostility to narrative, made the grid her starting point; following which she began to paint predominantly in black. In the mid-1980s she began to divide up her surfaces with dynamic diagonals and introduced more colour. Nututun (1989; see 1992–3 exh. cat., p. 11) is typical of this stage, when her work developed into wall reliefs: an irregular polygon in shape, it is divided into two fragments of amber-coloured, patinated bronze that partially enclose two smaller fragments of green-coloured bronze. By the end of the decade she was making wall reliefs composed of a number of small, shaped and differently coloured panels constructed from various metals, often arranged in large grid compositions. 40 Faults (1989; see 1992–3 exh. cat., pp. 42–3) consists of 40 large green–black patinated metal reliefs, similar to apostrophes in shape. In the late 1990s she began to produce free-standing sculpture, though the forms of the pieces were still predominantly flat and frontal. ...

Article

Miss, Mary  

American, 20th–21st century, female.

Born 27 May 1944, in New York City.

Installation artist, sculptor, designer. Land Art, environmental art, site-specific art.

Mary Miss studied at the University of California at Santa Barbara, graduating with a BA in 1966. She received her MFA from the Rhinehart School of Sculpture at the Maryland Art Institute in ...

Article

Shapiro, Joel  

Doug Singsen

(b New York, New York, 1941).

American sculptor. Shapiro received a BA in 1964 and an MA in 1969, both from New York University. From 1965 to 1967, Shapiro worked with the Peace Corps in India. While there, he saw many examples of Indian sculpture, which helped spur his decision to become an artist. In 1967, Shapiro married Amy Snider, an art educator, with whom he had a daughter, Ivy, in 1969; the couple separated in 1972. In the early 1970s, Shapiro befriended artists Elizabeth Murray and Jennifer Bartlett and gallery owner Paula Cooper, who gave Shapiro his first solo exhibition in 1970.

Shapiro’s work between 1968 and 1972 was strongly influenced by Process art, and Eva Hesse in particular, as seen in Shapiro’s Two Hands Forming (1971; artist’s col.), a circle of clay balls placed on the floor, which closely resembles Hesse’s Sequel (1967–8; Chicago, IL, A. Inst.). Other works made by Shapiro during this time included smeared and dripped paintings, nylon string sculptures and a number of metal sculptures influenced by Richard Serra....

Article

Trakas, George  

Canadian, 20th–21st century, male.

Born 11 May 1944, in Quebec, Canada.

Sculptor, draughtsman, installation artist.

Land Art, Environmental Art, Installation Art.

George Trakas attended Sir George Williams University in Montreal in 1962–1963, relocating to New York City in 1963. He earned a BS degree from New York University in ...

Article

Truitt [née Dean], Anne  

Doug Singsen

(b Baltimore, MD, March 16, 1921; d Washington, DC, Dec 23, 2004).

American sculptor. Truitt was raised in the town of Easton on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. She received a BA in psychology from Bryn Mawr College, where she graduated cum laude in 1943. In 1947, she married James McConnell Truitt, a journalist, whose career caused the couple to relocate frequently in subsequent years.

Truitt’s artistic training began in 1945 with night classes in sculpture in Boston. She continued her studies at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Washington, DC, in 1949–50, where she studied with Alexander Giampietro (1912–2010) and befriended fellow student Kenneth Noland . In the early 1950s she also studied with Octavio Medellin (1907–99) at the Museum School in Dallas, with Peter Lipman-Wulf (1905–93) in New York City, and with Noland and Peter Blanc in Washington, DC. Throughout the 1950s, Truitt experimented with a wide variety of materials and styles in sculpture and drawing.

After living in San Francisco from ...

Article

Zammitt, Norman  

Canadian First Nations, 20th–21st century, male.

Active in California.

Born 1931, in Toronto, to parents of Native American Mohawk and Sicilian origin. Died 2007.

Sculptor, painter, lithographer.

Minimalism, Light and Space.

Norman Zammitt grew up on the Caugnawaga Reservation near Montreal. He moved with his family to Buffalo, New York, before settling in California in ...