Search Results

Sign in Modify your search

Perform this search in

Narrow Your Choices

Format

Type

Place Type

Life event

Date

Field

Medium

Era

Region/Country

  • Open Section
    • Open Section
    • Open Section
    • Open Section
    • Open Section
  • Open Section
    • Open Section
    • Open Section
    • Open Section
    • Open Section
    • Open Section
  • Open Section
    • Open Section
    • Open Section
    • Open Section
    • Open Section
    • Open Section
    • Open Section
  • Open Section
    • Open Section
    • Open Section
  • Open Section
    • Open Section
    • Open Section
    • Open Section
    • Open Section

Occupation

Availability

 121-140 of 2,914 Results  for:

  • American Art x
Clear all

Article

Artists for Victory, Inc.  

Ellen G. Landau

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
24 February 2010

American non-profit organization formed to put the special training and technical skills of artists at the service of the US government during World War II. Emulating the Central Institute of Art and Design, which aided the British government with war-related projects, the National Art Council for Defense and Artists Societies for Defense were formed in New York in 1941. Complying with a federal request that there be only one such US organization, these merged in January 1942 to form Artists for Victory, Inc., with the intent “to render effective the talents and abilities of artists in the prosecution of World War II and the protection of this country.”

With their headquarters on Park Avenue, New York, by early 1943 Artists for Victory had a national individual membership of over 10,000 painters, sculptors, designers and printmakers. Taking as their symbol the Nike of Samothrace (c. 200 bc; Paris, Louvre) and, as a basis for their philosophy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s State of the Union message of ...

Article

Artists in Residence  

Anne K. Swartz

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
23 February 2011

[A. I. R. Gallery]

Art gallery in New York. Founded in 1972, Artists in Residence, or A. I. R. Gallery, was the first artist-run, not-for-profit gallery dedicated to women artists in the USA. Encouraged by the burgeoning Women’s Movement, a group of women artists wanted to create meaningful opportunities to show their art and have it seen and discussed. There were few options for women creating art to show it since few of the commercial galleries would show work by women. Women artists might occasionally have a single work included in a group show at a commercial gallery, but it was rare, and solo exhibitions of women artists were rarer still. So, women artists had to develop their own occasions to show their art.

A. I. R. Gallery’s mission is “to advance the status of women artists by exhibiting quality work by a diverse group of women artists and to provide leadership and community to women artists.” The gallery was founded by a group of artists—Dotty Attie (...

Article

Artists Space  

Tom Williams

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
24 February 2010

American exhibition space established by Irving Sandler and Trudie Grace in 1972–3 for the exhibition of “unaffiliated artists” in New York. It was founded under the auspices of the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) to provide artists with a non-profit alternative to the commercial gallery system in New York. The stated mission of the space was to provide a venue for artists without gallery representation and to give them greater control over the exhibition of their work. In accordance with this mission, artists have frequently played a key role in administering the space and determining its exhibition schedule. A number of notable figures exhibited at Artists Space early in their careers, including Laurie Anderson, Robert Longo, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, and Laurie Simmons.

In 1972, Sandler was acting as a consultant to NYSCA, and Grace was the director of its Visual Arts Program, and they established the space to provide financial resources and exhibition opportunities for unaffiliated artists living in New York. In accordance with this mission, artists often curated their own exhibitions and those of other artists, and in the 1970s and 1980s, the space became a crucial site of artistic independence and experimentation. During its early years, a pattern was established in which well-known artists would select someone from the younger generation for exhibition, but when Helene Winer followed Grace as director between ...

Article

Artists’ Caucus of Visual AIDS  

Tom Williams

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
26 May 2010

American artists’ convention within the larger AIDS activist organization Visual AIDS. This group is best known for the famous Ribbon Project in 1991 in which artists and activists encouraged people to wear red ribbons to raise consciousness about the AIDS crisis within the broader population. Along with the efforts of such artist–activist groups as Gran Fury and Group Material, Visual AIDS represented an important aspect of the art world’s response to the AIDS crisis during the late 1980s and early 1990s. The Artists’ Caucus comprised a diverse and changing group of artists that included Penny Arcade (b 1950), Allen Frame (b 1951), Michael Goff (b 1957), Nan Goldin (b 1953), Paul H-O, Frank Moore (1953–2002), Joe Rudy and Leslie Sharpe.

Visual AIDS was established in New York in 1989 by curators Gary Garrels, William Olander and Thomas Sokolowski and by the art critic Robert Atkins in order to mobilize art world institutions in the fight against AIDS and to increase public awareness of the crisis. Among their early interventions, the most important was the first annual “Day Without Art” in which museums and galleries were encouraged to memorialize AIDS deaths on ...

Article

Artists’ Union  

Patricia Hills

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
16 September 2010

Organization created in 1934 to improve the economic conditions for artists during the Great Depression. In September 1933 a group of 25 artists, then working for the government’s Emergency Work Bureau in New York, met to discuss the pending discontinuance of the bureau. One of the artists was Bernarda Bryson, who had helped organize the Unemployed Councils for the Communist Party. Calling themselves the Emergency Work Bureau Artists Group, they changed their name to the Unemployed Artists Group. In December they petitioned the federal relief administrator Harry L. Hopkins to set up a jobs program for all unemployed artists, to include teaching, mural painting, easel painting and commercial and applied art jobs. In response the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) was set up, with Julianna Force, director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, administering the program in New York. Not satisfied with the limited number of artists being placed in PWAP roles, the Unemployed Artists Group protested; the group also renamed itself the Artists’ Union (AU) in ...

Article

Arts and Crafts Movement  

Alan Crawford

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
2003

Informal movement in architecture and the decorative arts that championed the unity of the arts, the experience of the individual craftsman, and the qualities of materials and construction in the work itself.

The Arts and Crafts Movement developed in the second half of the 19th century and lasted well into the 20th, drawing its support from progressive artists, architects and designers, philanthropists, amateurs, and middle-class women seeking work in the home. They set up small workshops apart from the world of industry, revived old techniques, and revered the humble household objects of pre-industrial times. The movement was strongest in the industrializing countries of northern Europe and in the USA, and it can best be understood as an unfocused reaction against industrialization. Although quixotic in its anti-industrialism, it was not unique; indeed it was only one among several late 19th-century reform movements, such as the Garden City movement, vegetarianism, and folksong revivals, that set the Romantic values of nature and folk culture against the artificiality of modern life....

Article

Artschwager, Richard  

Marco Livingstone

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
2003

(b Washington, DC, Dec 26, 1924; d in Albany, NY, Feb 9, 2013).

American sculptor and painter . He studied art in 1949–50 under Amédée Ozenfant in New York. During the 1950s he designed and made furniture in New York, but after a fire that destroyed most of the contents of his shop in 1958 he turned again to art, initially painting abstract pictures derived from memories of the New Mexican landscape.

Artschwager continued to produce furniture and, after a commission to make altars for ships in 1960, had the idea of producing sculptures that mimicked actual objects while simultaneously betraying their identity as artistic illusions. At first these included objets trouvés made of wood, overpainted with acrylic in an exaggerated wood-grain pattern (e.g. Table and Chair, 1962–3; New York, Paula Cooper priv. col., see 1988–9 exh. cat., p. 49), but he soon developed more abstract or geometrical versions of such objects formed from a veneer of formica on wood (e.g. Table and Chair...

Article

Asawa, Ruth  

Midori Yoshimoto

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
24 February 2010

(Aiko)

(b Norwalk, CA, Jan 24, 1926; d San Francisco, CA, Aug 5, 2013).

American sculptor, painter and draftsman. Asawa was born the fourth of seven children to Japanese immigrants and her childhood on a thriving truck farm formed her work ethic. During World War II, the Asawas were separated into different internment camps. At the Rohwer Relocation Center in Arkansas, Ruth was able to learn drawing from interned Japanese–American illustrators. In 1943 a scholarship allowed her to leave the camp to study at Milwaukee State Teachers College. However, when she realized that she could never find a teaching position in Wisconsin because of her Japanese ancestry, she headed to Black Mountain College in North Carolina in 1946. The Black Mountain College community, including illustrious teachers such as Albers family, §1 and R(ichard) Buckminster Fuller, nurtured Asawa’s artistic foundation and philosophy. There she started on looped-wire sculpture after discovering the basket crocheting technique in Mexico in 1947. Upon graduation, she married her classmate, the architect Albert Lanier (...

Article

Ash, Gilbert  

Gordon Campbell

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
22 October 2008

(b 1717; d 1785).

American furniture-maker whose New York workshop specialized in chairs in the Chippendale style. His reputation is largely based on attributed pieces, such as the sets of chairs made for Sir William Johnson (now divided, examples in Winterthur, DE, Dupont Winterthur Mus. and New Haven, CT, Yale U. A.G.) and for the Van Rensselaer family (New York, Met.)....

Article

Ashcan school  

M. Sue Kendall

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
2003

Term first used by Holger Cahill and Alfred H(amilton) Barr in Art in America (New York, 1934) and loosely applied to American urban realist painters. In particular it referred to those members of Eight, the who shortly after 1900 began to portray ordinary aspects of city life in their paintings, for example George Luks’s painting Closing the Café (1904; Utica, NY, Munson-Williams-Proctor Inst.). Robert Henri, John Sloan, William J(ames) Glackens, Everett Shinn and Luks were the core of an informal association of painters who, in reaction against the prevailing restrictive academic exhibition procedures, mounted a controversial independent exhibition at the Macbeth Galleries, New York (1908).

Sloan, Glackens, Shinn and Luks had all worked for the Philadelphia Press. It was in Philadelphia, where Henri had trained at the Academy of Fine Arts, that he convinced them to leave their careers as newspaper illustrators to take up painting as a serious profession. In an explicit challenge to the ‘art for art’s sake’ aesthetic of the late 19th century, Henri proposed an ‘art for life’, one that would abandon the polished techniques and polite subject-matter of the academicians; it would celebrate instead the vitality that the painter saw around him in everyday situations....

Article

Ashkin, Michael  

Morgan Falconer

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
31 July 2002

(b Morristown, NJ, Oct 29, 1955).

American sculptor. He studied Oriental and Middle Eastern cultures and languages before later graduating in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (MFA 1993). Ashkin gained international recognition in the mid-1990s for his tabletop dioramas of inhospitable, often deserted, American landscapes. Influenced by Robert Smithson’s interest in the concept of entropy as well as more traditional landscape discourses such as Romanticism and the Sublime, Ashkin’s work has often suggested vast inhuman wastelands, although their real scale might only be a few square feet. His earliest works concentrated on semi-arid deserts, but soon the dominant motif switched to semi-stagnant marshes. No. 33 (1996; see exh. cat.), typical of the numerical nomination of his work, depicts a long, thin freeway in a swampy wilderness; a single truck drives along and telegraph wires line the road, suggesting vast distances. No. 15 (1996; see exh. cat.) is smaller in size, though again the tiny scale of the trucks that pass in convoy over a swampy, pock-marked landscape suggest great expanse. More recently Ashkin has expanded his practice into video and photography exploring the Sublime. ...

Article

Asian American Arts Centre  

Matico Josephson

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
02 June 2011

American multi-ethnic arts organization based in New York’s Chinatown. The Asian American Arts Centre (AAAC) and its predecessors, the Asian American Dance Theatre (1974–93) and the Asian Arts Institute (1981–8), emerged from the milieu of the Basement Workshop, the first working group of the Asian American Movement on the East Coast, whose mouthpiece was the journal Bridge (1970–81). After the closing of the Basement Workshop in 1987, the Dance Theatre and the Asian Arts Institute were consolidated as the AAAC.

Directed by Eleanor S. Yung, the Dance Theatre was at the core of the organization’s activities from the 1970s through the early 1990s, performing traditional dances from several Asian cultures alongside modern and postmodern forms. In the early 1980s, the Asian Arts Institute began to hold exhibitions and collect slides of artists’ work and documentation of their activities, working primarily with artists involved in the downtown art scene. Early programs included open studio events for artists working in Chinatown and exhibitions of the work of Arlan Huang (...

Article

Association of American Painters and Sculptors  

David M. Sokol

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
2003

Group of artists founded in New York in 1911 with the aim of finding suitable exhibition space for young American artists. After preliminary meetings between the painters Jerome Myers (1867–1940), Elmer MacRae (1875–1955), Walt Kuhn (1877–1949) and others, a meeting was held at the Madison Gallery on 16 December 1911 for the purpose of founding a new artists’ organization. At a subsequent meeting on 2 January 1912 they elected officers and began to discuss exhibition plans. The president, Julian Alden Weir, who had been elected in absentia, resigned, however, and the leadership passed to Arthur B. Davies.

Davies, Walt Kuhn and Walter Pach soon took the lead and developed the plan for a major international exhibition, much to the disapproval of the American Realists associated with Robert Henri; the latter group was interested in gaining broader exposure to a public that knew only of the major figures associated with the National Academy of Design and saw no reason to include foreign modernists. Davies and his allies, contemptuous of their provincialism, ignored their wishes. The result of the Association of American Painters and Sculptors’ plans was the International Exhibition of Modern Art, known as the ...

Article

Atıl, Esin  

Sheila S. Blair and Jonathan M. Bloom

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
02 July 2009

(b. Istanbul, June 11, 1938).

American historian of Islamic art. Atıl earned her PhD at the University of Michigan, with a dissertation on an illustrated Ottoman Book of Festivals. In 1970 she was appointed Curator of Islamic Art at the Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, a post that she held for 15 years. An extraordinarily energetic and prolific curator, she organized many notable exhibitions based on the Freer collection as well as traveling exhibitions of Mamluk art, the age of Süleyman the Magnificent, and of the Kuwait collection of Islamic art. Between 1985 and 1987, Dr. Atıl was Guest Curator at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. With the opening of the Sackler Gallery at the Smithsonian Institute in 1987, she was appointed Historian of Islamic Art at the Freer and Sackler Galleries, a position she held until her retirement in 1993.

E. Atıl: 2500 Years of Persian Art (Washington, DC, 1971)E. Atıl...

Article

Atlanta  

Robert M. Craig

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
2003

North American city and capital of the state of Georgia. Situated in the foothills of the Appalachians, Atlanta was established in 1837 and has been the state capital since 1868; the urban area remains today the most populous metropolitan region of the south-eastern United States. The city has historically always been linked to transportation and has served as the hub in the south-east of, successively, the regional railroad system, the interstate highway system, and (with one of the busiest international airports in the world) the global air transportation system.

In 1836 few whites had yet settled in the land of the Creek and Cherokee Indians when the Georgia General Assembly voted to build a state railroad linking the Midwest to the Georgia coast (and through the port of Savannah to the Atlantic). The proposed Western and Atlantic Railroad ran from the Tennessee state line to the bank of the Chattahoochee River, and from there connected to branch rail lines. A small community, initially named Terminus, and in ...

Article

Atnafu, Elisabeth Tariqua  

Carol Magee

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
21 February 2000

(b Dec 8, 1956).

Ethiopian painter, installation artist, graphic designer, and writer, active in the USA. She grew up in Addis Ababa in a family of painters before moving to the USA. She graduated from Howard University, Washington, DC, with a BFA in painting (1975) and returned in 1994 for an MFA. Her early works, based on dreams or visions, have richly textured surfaces. In the 1980s she abandoned her early palette of reds, ochres, and greens for one of purples and blues. Later paintings depict an urban environment and frequently evoke the feeling of dislocation and nostalgia that comes from living in a country that is not one’s own. Her use of themes and motifs from myriad cultures (including those of Ethiopia and Latin America) comes out of her experiences as a diasporic subject as well as the lives of the women around her. Her pieces often tell their stories, as in the Dream Dancers series (...

Article

Atterbury Glass Company  

Gordon Campbell

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
22 October 2008

American glass manufactory. In 1860 James and Thomas Atterbury (the grandsons of Sarah Bakewell, whose brother founded the glass company Bakewell & Co.) joined their brother-in-law James Hale to form the Pittsburgh glass company of Hale, Atterbury and Company. In 1862 Hale was replaced by James Reddick as the company’s glassblower, and the firm became known as Atterbury, Reddick and Company. On Reddick’s departure in ...

Article

Atterbury, Grosvenor  

Leland M. Roth

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
2003

(b Detroit, MI, July 7, 1869; d Southampton, NY, Oct 18, 1956).

American architect, urban planner and writer. Atterbury studied at Yale University, New Haven, CT, and travelled in Europe. He studied architecture at Columbia University, New York and worked in the office of McKim, Mead & White before completing his architecture studies at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Atterbury’s early work consisted of suburban and weekend houses for wealthy industrialists, such as the Henry W. de Forest House (1898) in Cold Springs Harbor on Long Island, NY. De Forest was a leader in the philanthropic movement to improve workers’ housing, an interest that Atterbury shared; through him Atterbury was given the commission for the model housing community of Forest Hills Gardens, NY, begun in 1909 under the sponsorship of the Russell Sage Foundation; the co-planners and landscape designers were the brothers John Charles Olmsted (1852–1920) and Frederick Law Olmsted Jr (1870–1957), the sons of Frederick Law Olmsted. Atterbury developed a system of precast concrete panels to build a varied group of multiple units and town houses suggesting an English country hamlet. He continued his research into prefabrication largely at his own expense throughout his life....

Article

Atwood, Charles B(owler)  

David van Zanten

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
2003

(b Charlestown, MA, May 18, 1849; d Chicago, IL, Dec 19, 1895).

American architect. He received his architectural training in the offices of Eldridge Boyden (1819–96) in Worcester, MA, and Ware & Van Brunt in Boston, with a year’s study (1869–70) in the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. In 1872 he set up on his own, designing the State Mutual Assurance Building (1872) in Worcester, MA, and the Holyoke City Hall (1874–5), MA. In 1875 he settled in New York, working for Christian Herter’s firm of decorators, Herter Brothers, and perhaps also for McKim, Mead & White. Between 1879 and 1881 he assembled a small team of draughtsmen to execute the design of the William Henry Vanderbilt house on Fifth Avenue (destr.), in collaboration with Herter Brothers and the architect John Butler Snook. After the death of John Wellborn Root in January 1891, Root’s partner Daniel H. Burnham engaged Atwood as chief architect of the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, which opened on ...

Article

Audsley, George Ashdown  

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
2003

(b Elgin, 1838; d New York, 1925).

Scottish architect, designer and writer. Trained as an architect, he moved to Liverpool, Lancs, in 1856 and set up an architectural practice with his brother William James Audsley (b 1833) in 1863. With him he wrote Handbook of Christian Symbolism (1865), and together they designed a number of buildings in and around Liverpool, among them the Welsh Presbyterian Church, Prince’s Road, Toxteth (1865–7), Christ Church, Kensington (1870), and the church of St Margaret, Belmont Road, Anfield (1873). For the merchant William Preston they designed the church of St Mary (1873) in the grounds of his house, Ellel Grange, Lancs. Other commissions were for a synagogue and a tennis club. He was among the earliest publishers to exploit the graphic potential of chromolithography, and, contrary to other major books on ornament, he made a case for classifying designs by their basic motif rather than by nationality. He was an expert on Japanese art, lecturing on the subject and between ...