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Gaye, Aissatou Germaine Anta  

Joanna Grabski

(b St Louis, February 6, 1953).

Senegalese glass painter, potter and teacher. She earned an MA in literature at the Université Cheikh Anta Diop, Dakar (1980), then graduated from the Ecole Normale Supérieure d'Education Artistique (1983). Her early work in both literature and fine arts dealt with the social role of women in colonial Senegal. In the 1980s and 1990s, she worked primarily with glass painting or sous verre, a medium with a long history in Senegal. Her work advances well-known conventional glass paintings that depict colorful quotidian and religious scenes. She works with a palette of intense hues, applying them across the glass support so as to maximize the expressive potential of the medium. Although she created figural works in the 1980s, her work in the 1990s became increasingly abstract. Her glass paintings, such as Nature (1998; priv. col.), are characterized by their luminescence and large scale. In addition to exhibiting her work in Africa and Europe, she has been involved in a number of educational and humanitarian projects. Her achievements have been recognized by two prestigious awards from the government of Senegal, including the Chevalièr de l’Ordre du Mérite (...

Article

Jiménez, Luis  

Margaret Moore Booker

(b El Paso, TX, Jul 30, 1940; d Hondo, NM, Jun 13, 2006).

Hispanic American sculptor and printmaker. He specialized in larger-than-life, vibrantly colored, fiberglass, and epoxy sculptures that celebrate humanity and reflect his Mexican American heritage. He was also an accomplished printmaker (lithographs and etchings) and draftsman (colored-pencil drawings). As the “Godfather” of Chicano art, the artist of working-class people and mentor to numerous Hispanic artists, he played an important role in bringing Chicano sensibilities into mainstream art.

Born the son of an illegal immigrant, Jiménez grew up in El Paso, TX, where he learned to weld, wire, and airbrush in his father’s neon-sign shop. After receiving a BFA in 1964 at the University of Texas at Austin, and a brief stay in Mexico City, he moved to New York City where he worked with Seymour Lipton (1903–1986) and found success parodying 1960s American pop culture in his work.

In the early 1970s he returned to the Southwest (eventually dividing his time between El Paso and Hondo, NM), where he gained success and controversy as a sculptor of outdoor figures. Drawing inspiration from the social realist Mexican and Works Progress Administration (WPA) murals, he combined large scale, color, and pose to create a dramatic and heroic effect in his work. Like the New Mexican ...

Article

Langley, Warren  

Geoffrey R. Edwards

(b Sydney, July 6, 1950).

Australian glass artist. He studied science at the University of Sydney and in 1972 began a series of studies in glass in Australia, the USA and England. While in the USA he attended the Pilchuck School founded by Dale Chihuly and established a close association with the Pilchuck programme. His spectacular deployment of neon tubing as a floating serpentine pattern across panels of glossy, black moulded glass, brought him a number of major architectural commissions including large-scale murals for the Coal Board Building in Singleton, New South Wales, and the ANZ Bank in Melbourne. From the early 1980s Langley developed a series of idiomatic sculptural objects in which heavily textured and sandblasted slabs of fused glass are embedded with symbols and geometric emblems composed of intricate tesserae.

A. McIntyre: ‘Warren Langley Glass Works: Art of Man Gallery, Paddington, December 1978’, Craft Australia, 2 (Winter 1979), pp. 50–51 I. Bell: ‘Warren Langley’, ...

Article

Ndiaye, Serigne  

El Hadji Sy

(b Tivaouane, 1953).

Senegalese painter and teacher. He graduated in 1976 from the Institut National des Arts du Senegal, where he trained as an art educator. After building a collection of glass paintings, he began to explore this medium as a support for his art. He carefully studied the techniques of glass-painting masters, advancing the conventional subjects associated with the medium. Rather than representing traditional narrative and religious scenes, his paintings depict both human figures and organic forms resembling flora. The glass painting Aristot (1992, Dakar, Serigne Babacar Sy priv. col.) suggests his emphasis on the graphic potential of both line and colour. Closer examination reveals his use of tiny dots and thin lines to animate the composition. Ndiaye has exhibited in Senegal, Europe and the USA, and Senegalese television produced a short film about his work in the early 1990s. In addition to working in Switzerland and France, he has taught art in Dakar and St Louis, Senegal....

Article

Prache, Anne  

Charles T. Little

(b Paris, 1931; d May 1, 2009).

French art historian of medieval art. As Professor of the University of Paris IV (Paris-Sorbonne) from 1981 until 1998, she was a leading specialist in French architecture and stained glass. She was president of the French section of Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi from 1980 to 1988. Studying at the Ecole du Louvre, she wrote initially on the sculpture of Reims, followed by a study on Notre-Dame-en-Vaux at Châlons-en-Champagne, Notre-Dame-en-Vaux. Her doctoral dissertation for the Sorbonne, under the direction of Louis Grodecki (1910–82), became an important monograph on St Remi at Reims. This was later followed by several books on Chartres Cathedral that stand out as classic studies. Aside from technical studies of the origin and development of the flying buttress, she was able to determine building sequences for a number of monuments by utilizing dendrochonological analysis of wooden beams. Her interest in Gothic architecture lead to a new series devoted to the Gothic monuments of France by Editions Picard. Her important contribution to Zodiaque publications included books on the ...

Article

Robinson, Ann  

Kyla Mackenzie

(b Auckland, April 4, 1944).

New Zealand glass artist. She gained a Diploma in Fine Arts from Auckland University in 1980. Robinson pioneered cast-glass art in New Zealand when there was little support or education for glass artists. She belonged to the international development known as studio glass, in which glasswork is made in a small studio rather than a factory environment. In 1981 Robinson joined Sunbeam Glassworks, a glass-blowing studio in Auckland, where she worked alongside fellow glass pioneers Garry Nash and John Croucher until 1989.

The isolation of glass practice as an artistic field generally, particularly in New Zealand, along with lack of funding, meant that Robinson’s earliest work was arrived at through experimentation and often costly failure. In 1989, she established her own studio in Karekare on Auckland’s bush clad west coast. She had, by then, adopted the lost-wax technique for glass casting, a skill she had learnt from bronze-casting.

Vessels and their open-ended metaphors and references to Oceanic, Japanese, and ancient ritual have characterized much of her oeuvre (e.g. ...

Article

Snyder, Joan  

Mary Chou

(b Highland Park, NJ, April 16, 1940).

American painter . In 1962 Snyder earned a BA in sociology from Douglass College in New Brunswick, NJ. From 1964 to 1966 she attended Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, where she graduated with an MFA. Snyder is well known for her highly expressive, tactile paintings filled with narrative, symbolism and politics.

In the early 1970s Snyder gained fame for her stroke paintings, in which bold brushstrokes in vivid colours traverse the width of the canvas, leaving pools and drips of paint in their path. Applied over a grid loosely sketched with pencil on canvas, these gestural marks both enforce and obscure the geometry and orderly containment of the grid (e.g. Lines and Strokes , 1969; artist’s col.). In contrast to Minimalism and colour field paintings, Snyder’s vibrant, energetic and expressive strokes seem to tell a story. Music has always been an integral part of her artistic process, as evidenced in such early works as ...

Article

Torres, Rigoberto  

Deborah Cullen

(Robert)

(b Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, 1960).

Puerto Rican sculptor, active in the USA. Torres created plaster and fiberglass casts from life, depicting people in their communities. These include portrait busts, figurative tableaux, freestanding figures, and major outdoor murals. Torres worked both independently and in collaboration with John Ahearn (b 1951), with whom he regularly partnered from 1980.

When Torres was 4, his family moved to upper Manhattan and then to the Bronx. Torres began his art practice in 1979 at age 18 while working in a family factory casting religious statues. He visited Fashion Moda, an alternative space in the South Bronx. There, he met John Ahearn, who was making plaster body casts of neighborhood people. Torres became one of Ahearn’s subjects, and Torres’s first heads were cast there and exhibited alongside Ahearn’s. Torres convinced Ahearn to move to Walton Avenue in 1980, where they worked closely with the community. That year they participated in the historic Times Square Show. Between ...

Article

Twomey, Clare  

Kimberley Chandler

(b Ipswich, Dec 19, 1968).

English ceramic artist, researcher, and curator. Twomey studied ceramics at Edinburgh College of Art (1991–4) before going on to do an MA in Ceramics and Glass at the Royal College of Art, London (1994–6). In 2011 she became an AHRC Research Fellow at the University of Westminster, London. Twomey is a leading figure in the applied arts; along with ceramists such as Edmund de Waal and Keith Harrison, she is an advocate for craft as commensurable in significance to the wider visual arts. Her practice can be understood as ‘post-studio ceramics’, as her work engages with clay, yet often at a critical distance. Twomey’s work negotiates the realms of performance, serial production, and transience, and often involves site-specific installations. She is especially concerned with the affective relations that bind people and things, and how objects can enable a dialogue with the viewer (‘it is about an articulated use of the constructs that surround clay materials’; see ...

Article

Wright, David  

Geoffrey R. Edwards

(b Melbourne, 1948).

Australian glass artist . He studied architecture at the University of Melbourne and graduated in 1972. Largely self-taught in the production of glass, he was active in the development of various kiln-working techniques applied to architectural glass. Following his first exhibition of autonomous glass panels in 1976, Wright was awarded numerous church and public commissions including a vast wall of glass (1976) for the Reception Centre at the Royal Zoological Gardens in Melbourne; a set of windows (1987) for the new Parliament House in Canberra; and a window cycle (1988) for the St James’s Anglican church in Sydney. Wright’s compositions are notable for their rhythms, juxtaposed fields of loose pattern and simple, organic imagery that often alludes to the processes of germination and growth. Many of the artist’s smaller, autonomous panels are assembled from mechanically fastened sections of glass with contrasting surface treatments and textures. A series of exhibition pieces made reference to medical X-ray images and incorporated fused motifs and figures with cloudy abstract passages of chemically treated glass....

Article

Young, La Monte  

Julia Robinson

(b Bern, ID, Oct 13, 1935).

American composer. Young was an exponent of experimental “drone” music and an originator of Minimalism (whose diverse practitioners include Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass). Educated at the University of California, Los Angeles (1957–8), he completed his graduate studies in composition at the University of California, Berkeley. An avid and talented jazz musician, Young performed with legendary figures Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry. In 1959, he attended Summer Courses at Darmstadt, the center of New Music, taking advanced composition with Karlheinz Stockhausen. There he discovered the work of John Cage and met Cage’s great interpreter David Tudor, who put Young in contact with Cage. Back in California, Young presented Cage’s work, adopting some of his radical strategies in his own music. A landmark Young composition of this period is Poem for Tables, Chairs, Benches, etc. (1960), a piece of indeterminate duration.

In 1960 Young moved to New York and galvanized a receptive circle of Cage-inspired artists and composers. Young’s most significant contribution to this milieu were his ...