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

 81-100 of 2,914 Results  for:

  • American Art x
Clear all

Article

Andrews, Benny  

Deborah Cullen

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
24 February 2010

(b Plainview, GA, Nov 13, 1930; d Brooklyn, New York, Nov 10, 2006).

African American painter, collagist, printmaker, and art advocate. Benny Andrews grew up under segregation in the rural South, one of 10 children in a sharecropper’s family. After graduating from high school, he served in the US Air Force. Afterwards, through the GI Bill of Rights, he studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he received his BFA. In 1958, he moved to New York. Andrews received a John Hay Whitney Fellowship (1965–6) as well as a CAPS award from the New York State Council on the Arts (1971). From 1968 to 1997, he taught at Queens College, City University of New York and created a prison arts program that became a national model. In 1969, Andrews co-founded the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC), an organization that protested against the Harlem on my Mind exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Between ...

Article

(6) Anna Claypoole Peale  

Lillian B. Miller and Margaret Barlow

In 

Article

Article

Annapolis  

James D. Kornwolf

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
2003

North American city and capital of the state of Maryland. It is situated on a peninsula in the Severn River and has a population of c. 36,000. It was founded as state capital in 1694. Originally called Providence, it was then named after Princess, later Queen, Anne, although it was also known at that time as Anne Arundeltown. Following the English Glorious Revolution of 1688, which brought William III and Mary II to the English throne, the formerly largely Catholic state of Maryland was divided into Anglican parishes by its new governor, Francis Nicholson. Although land had been set aside before 1694 on Annapolis’s site, little development had occurred. The city plan (1695) is attributable to Nicholson and while several towns in the English colonies, including New Haven (founded 1638) and Philadelphia (founded 1682), had adhered earlier to formal design principles, none was as obviously Baroque as his plan. Although the original was lost, another exists from ...

Article

(2) Anni [Anneliese] Albers [née Fleischmann]  

Nicholas Fox Weber

In 

Article

Article

Anshutz, Thomas  

Sally Mills

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
2003

(Pollock)

(b Newport, KY, Oct 5, 1851; d Fort Washington, PA, June 16, 1912).

American painter and teacher. In 1872 he moved to New York, where he enrolled at the National Academy of Design. By 1875 he had advanced to the life class but found the Academy ‘a rotten old institution’. Moving to Philadelphia, Anshutz entered a life class taught by Thomas Eakins at the Philadelphia Sketch Club and transferred to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts when it opened its new building in 1876. Continuing to study under Eakins and Christian Schussele (1824/6–79), Anshutz soon became Eakins’s assistant demonstrator for anatomy courses taught by the surgeon William Williams Keen.

Anshutz’s style quickly progressed from a tight linearity toward an emphasis on solid form, expressed through simplified modelling and a thorough knowledge of anatomy. For his first mature works he sought subjects in the active lives around him, whether in the lush pastoral setting of The Father and his Son Harvesting...

Article

Ant Farm  

Avigail Moss

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
26 March 2018

American architecture, performance art, and video collective active between 1968 and 1978. Ant Farm was founded in San Francisco by architecture and art students, principally Chip Lord (b 1944) who attended the Tulane School of Architecture, and Doug Michels [Douglas Donald Michels] (1943–2003), who graduated from the Yale School of Architecture. They were later joined by others, including Curtis Schreier (b 1944) and Hudson Marquez (b 1947). The group’s name originated from a friend’s suggestion that their practice functioned more like a rock band or a toy Ant Farm—busily and collectively working underground—than a corporate architecture firm. Their work took an ecological approach to collective living. The group operated between San Francisco and Houston until 1978, when a fire destroyed Ant Farm’s San Francisco studio, at which point Ant Farm disbanded.

Michels and Lord first met when Michels lectured at Tulane, and again when both participated in Anna and Lawrence Halprin’s San Francisco workshop for dancers and architects, ‘Experiments in Environments’, joining other students such as Yvonne Rainer and Meredith Monk. Ant Farm’s early architecture and design work was influenced by the American architect and theorist Buckminster Fuller; by the ‘do-it-yourself’ ethos of Stuart Brand’s ...

Article

Antin [née Fineman], Eleanor  

Margaret Barlow

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
2003

(b New York, Feb 27, 1935).

American performance artist, photographer and filmmaker. In the mid-1950s she studied acting at the Tamara Daykarhanova School for Stage, New York, and creative writing at the College of the City of New York. Her performances can be seen as autobiographical, with invented roles based partly on historical characters. Set-pieces recurring in performances from the early 1970s included the King of Solana Beach, inspired by a portrait of Charles I, King of England, by Anthony van Dyck; Eleanor Antinova, giving the recollections of a black dancer in Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes; and the Angel of Mercy, Florence Nightingale in the Crimea. Antin considered her performances as a means of self-definition as an artist and woman in the late 20th century. The presentations incorporated pithy commentaries on contemporary social and political issues. The spontaneous nature of her activity can be linked to the early years of American film-making, when participants devised dramatic scenarios in an ad hoc sequence. By interspersing her personal experience and vision with episodes from the past, Antin attempted to redefine traditional boundaries associated with women, power and art. For ...

Article

Antonakos, Stephen  

Robert Saltonstall Mattison

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
26 May 2010

(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

Antoni, Janine  

Klaus Ottmann

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
10 December 2000

American performance artist and sculptor. Antoni studied sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. Antoni drew attention to herself in 1993 during a performance (Loving Care) at the Anthony d’Offay Gallery in London where, dressed in a black catsuit, she dipped her long hair repeatedly into a bucket filled with hair dye, and using her hair as a paint brush, mopped the gallery floor on her hands and knees. Her performance was reminiscent of Yves Klein’s 1960s ...

Article

Anuszkiewicz, Richard  

Kenneth W. Prescott

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
2003

(b Erie, PA, May 23, 1930).

American painter, printmaker and sculptor. He trained at the Cleveland Institute of Art in Cleveland, OH (1948–53), and under Albers family, §1 at the Yale University School of Art and Architecture in New Haven, CT (1953–5). In his paintings of the late 1940s and early 1950s he depicted everyday city life, as in The Bridge (1950; artist’s priv. col., see Lunde, pl. 66). In 1957 he moved to New York, where from 1957 to 1958 he worked as a conservator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and from 1959 to 1961 as a silver designer for Tiffany and Co. During this period he began to produce abstract paintings, using either organic or geometric repeated forms, as in Winter Recipe (1958; New York, Mr and Mrs David Evins priv. col., see Lunde, pl. 100). These led in the early 1960s to asymmetric and imperfectly geometric works, such as ...

Article

Apartment  

Matthew Gordon Lasner

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
2003

[flat]

Set of rooms, including a kitchen, designed as a complete dwelling for occupation by a single household within a larger structure or complex, typically with other similar homes, that became a common living arrangement in many European and North American cities in the 19th century and which spread globally in the 20th. (For ‘apartment’ as a suite of rooms in a larger building in early modern Europe see Château; Country house; Hôtel particulier; Palace; Palazzo; and Villa.)

The origins of the apartment as a complete dwelling for occupation by a single household within a larger structure or complex, typically with other similar homes, are multiple and varied.

As an architectural type and as a way of living, the idea of the apartment, in one form or another, dates to ancient Rome, where the insulae in Ostia Antica of the 2nd century AD housed businesses on the ground floor and dwellings upstairs (...

Article

Aperture  

Monica McTighe

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
11 February 2013

American photography foundation and publisher. Aperture magazine was founded in San Francisco in 1952 by American photographers Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Barbara Morgan, Minor White, Ernest Louie, Melton Ferris, and Dody Warren, with writer–curators Beaumont Newhall and Nancy Newhall. They intended the organization to serve as a forum for discussing photography, to exhibit photographers’ work, and to raise the profile of art photography in the United States.

The journal Aperture, which began publication in 1952, dedicated itself to the practice of photography as a fine art and thus distinguished itself from popular and commercial photographic periodicals. In this way the journal emulated Alfred Stieglitz’s Camera Work (1903–17). Photographer Minor White was the journal’s first editor and, under his tenure, it became concerned with the capacity of photography to deal with spirituality and profound human experiences. The first issue included the work of Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams, and French photographer Lisette Model. All contributors were urged to write about their own work. In ...

Article

Apfelbaum, Polly  

Saisha Grayson

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
26 March 2018

(b Abington, PA, 1955).

American installation artist. Upon graduating from Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, where she studied printmaking and painting, Apfelbaum moved to New York City in 1978. Apfelbaum consistently found ways to trouble the distinctions between painting, sculpture, craft, and installation-based practices, and between pure abstraction and a range of conceptual and cultural allusions. Such productive tensions abound in the ‘fallen paintings’ for which she is best known, which feature fabrics meticulously shaped and arranged in floor-bound compositions with titles that reference everything from Disney characters to punk bands to Italian cinema. Playfully poking fun at art historical taboos and tastes, her work is often addressed as a feminist, post-modernist response to Minimalism that embraces the emotional, the psychological, the ephemeral, and the sociopolitical potential of abstraction.

Apfelbaum’s first floor installation, Daisy Chain (1989), presented carved wooden shapes appropriated from an Andy Warhol silkscreen, which in turn had appropriated its graphics from a Scandinavian Airlines ticket, a chain of references inferred by the title, which itself invites associations. As in later work, its accumulated elements can simultaneously be appreciated from above as a pictorial composition, walked around like a sculpture, and experienced temporally and spatially as an installation. In ...

Article

Applebroog, Ida  

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
2003

(b New York, Nov 11, 1929).

American painter. She attended the New York State Institute of Applied Arts and Sciences (1947–50) and in 1958 moved to Chicago, where she was a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1966–8). In 1974 she moved to New York. Applebroog’s paintings were best known for their collision of imagery based on specific everyday experiences, news items and endemic social ills. She first became known in the 1970s for small books, such as Galileo Works (1977), in which her own ‘narratives’, consisting of leaps and jumps between ideas and images, represent a disjunction associated with social critique and a questioning of the ideologies implicit in representation. She posted them to friends and people in the art world. They were the precursors to larger sequential works such as Sure I’m Sure (ink and rhoplex on vellum, 2.56×1.72 m, 1980; artist’s col.), comprising six panels, much like sinister comic-strips, combining irony and intense tenderness. She is best known for her multi-partite paintings that, as part of the legacy of feminist practice in the 1970s, deal with the ‘trivial details’ of everyday life as if they had the scale and weight of subject-matter of traditional history painting. By giving prominence to ordinary events or to groups of people whom she saw as victimized or marginalized, she attempted to empower such groups, especially women, by revealing those elements in their experience that she saw as common to all (e.g. ...

Article

Arai, Tomie  

Margo Machida

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
02 June 2011

(b New York, Aug 16, 1949).

American printmaker and installation artist. Born and raised in New York City, Arai, a third-generation Japanese American printmaker, mixed-media artist, public artist and cultural activist, studied art at the Philadelphia College of Art and The Printmaking Workshop in New York. Since the 1970s, her diverse projects have ranged from individual works to large-scale public commissions (see Public art in the 21st century). She has designed permanent public works, including an interior mural commemorating the African burial ground in lower Manhattan and an outdoor mural for Philadelphia’s Chinatown. Other works include Wall of Respect for Women (1974), a mural on New York’s Lower East Side, which was a collaboration between Arai and women from the local community. Her art has been exhibited in such venues as the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, International Center for Photography, P.S.1 Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art, all New York and the Library of Congress, Washington, DC. She is the recipient of awards and fellowships from National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, and Joan Mitchell Foundation....

Article

Arakawa, Shusaku  

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
2003

(b Nagoya, July 6, 1936; d New York, NY, May 18, 2010).

Japanese painter, performance artist, and film maker, active in the USA. He studied medicine and mathematics at Tokyo University (1954–8) and art at the Musashino College of Art in Tokyo, holding his first one-man exhibition at the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo in 1958 and contributing to the Yomiuri Independent exhibitions from 1958 to 1961. In 1960 he took part in the ‘anti-art’ activities of the Neo-Dadaism Organizers in Tokyo and produced his first Happenings and a series of sculptures entitled Boxes, which consisted of amorphous lumps of cotton wads hardened in cement; many of these were put in coffin-like boxes, though one entitled Foetus was laid on a blanket. In pointing to the sickness of contemporary society, these works caused a great scandal in Tokyo.

In 1961 Arakawa settled in New York, where soon afterwards he addressed himself to the idea of a work being ‘untitled’. In taking as his subject this apparent lack of subject, he emphasized the areas of the picture surface where the subject ‘ought to be’ by means of a few well-placed coloured framing marks, as in ...

Article

Arbus [née Nemerov], Diane  

Gerry Badger

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
2003

(b New York, March 14, 1923; d New York, July 26, 1971).

American photographer. Arbus was educated at the Ethical Culture School and Fieldston School until 1940. In 1940 she married Allan Arbus with whom she formed a successful partnership in fashion photography. She studied photography with Alexey Brodovitch c. 1954 and with Lisette Model c. 1955–7. Model encouraged Arbus as an artist and particularly as a maker of powerfully individualistic portraits. In 1963 Arbus visited a nudist camp for the first time. Retired Man and his Wife at Home in a Nudist Camp One Morning, NJ (1963; see Arbus and Israel, 1972, p. 27) juxtaposes the domestic, furnished environment with a middle-aged couple whose only clothing is their footwear, enhancing the overall air of incongruity.

In 1963 and 1966 Arbus received Guggenheim fellowships for a project entitled ‘American Rites, Manners, and Customs’. A group of images from this work was featured in the exhibition of 1967 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, entitled ...

Article

Arcangel, Cory  

Christiane Paul

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
16 October 2013

(b Buffalo, NY, May 25, 1978).

American computer artist, performance artist, video artist, installation artist, composer, sculptor, and printmaker. He graduated in 2000 from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, where he originally studied classical guitar but later switched to the technology of music. At Oberlin he also met Paul B. Davis with whom he formed the Beige Programming Ensemble in 2000, and released a record of 8-bit music entitled The 8-Bit Construction Set. In 2010 he co-founded, with Howie Chen and Alan Licht, the band Title TK.

Arcangel’s body of work has consistently addressed a series of themes, such as the manner in which we express ourselves through technological tools and platforms (from Photoshop to YouTube) in funny, original, creative, and awkward ways. His projects often explore our fascination with technology by playfully undermining our expectations of it and limiting viewers’ control. Another theme that frequently surfaces is the speed of technological obsolescence and the absurdity of a given technology’s lifecycle, which often moves from the cutting-edge of design to an insult of good taste (see Siegel, pp. 81–2). Arcangel connects these themes to the history of art, drawing parallels between pop-cultural vernacular and approaches in the fine art world and combining high tech and do-it-yourself (DIY) approaches. Among his best-known works are his hacks and modifications of Nintendo game cartridges and obsolete computer systems from the 1970s and 1980s (...

Article

Arcega, Michael  

Miwako Tezuka

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
02 June 2011

(b Manila, Aug 19, 1973).

American installation artist of Filipino birth. Arcega was born in Manila and immigrated to the USA when he was ten years old. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from San Francisco Art Institute and, in 2009, earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from Stanford University, California. While Arcega has worked with a variety of media, including sculpture and installation, he mainly focuses on language and creates visual and linguistic puns and satires that expose various social and political conflicts and problems resulting from globalization.

A tongue-in-cheek approach as an effective conceptual strategy has been used by a number of artists since Marcel Duchamp. In Arcega’s case, however, it relates more closely to the “format of jokes” that plays on unintended cultural misunderstandings between native English speakers and those for whom English is a second language. Ultimately, Arcega’s humor exposes the dark side of reality with frequent references to political and social issues. His installation ...

Article

Archibald, John S(mith)  

Irene Puchalski

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
2003

(b Inverness, Dec 14, 1872; d Montreal, March 2, 1934).

Canadian architect of Scottish birth. From 1887 to 1893 he was an apprentice in the architectural office of William MacIntosh in Inverness. He settled in Canada in 1893, joining the office of Edward Maxwell in Montreal, where he was employed as draughtsman and assistant.

From 1897 to 1915 he formed a partnership with Charles Jewett Saxe (1870–1943), in which Archibald’s role was predominantly administrative. The partnership’s work included schools, large residences, residential blocks and office buildings. Early commissions in Montreal included the F. H. Anson Residence (1904), 466 Côte St Antoine, Westmount; Montreal Technical School (1909); and several additions to the Queen’s Hotel (1909–13; destr. 1988), 700 Peel Street. After 1915, in his own independent practice, Archibald built the Baron Byng High School (1921); the Masonic Memorial Temple (1928); and St Mary’s Memorial Hospital (1932), all in Montreal. In the 1920s ...