Our library walls feature posters and prints of artwork created by historically excluded artists. Our goal is to create a space in which everyone can see themselves in the art on our walls. If you have questions, please feel free to ask a librarian!
Jean-Michel Basquiat was a painter in the Neo-Expressionist movement of the 1980s. Born in New York City, Basquiat first began attracting attention through his work under the name "Samo," while selling merchandise with his paintings on each item until his painting career took off in 1980 at a group art show. His style included many recurring motifs, most notably crowns and skulls. While dealing with racism that coincided with his emerging art career, his work became critically acclaimed, and eventually led to his collaborations with Andy Warhol. Basquiat passed in 1988. Since his untimely death, he has become the highest selling American artist at auction. The featured print on our art wall is his painting Untitled, made in 1981.
Frida Kahlo was considered one of Mexico's greatest artists, and she is both a feminist and LGBTQIA+ icon. She began painting mostly self-portraits after suffering severe injuries at a young age in a bus accident. Kahlo later became politically active and married fellow artist Diego Rivera in 1929. She exhibited her paintings in Paris and Mexico before her death in 1954. Her painting, Self Portrait Along the Border Line Between Mexico and the United States, was painted in 1932. When Frida came to the United States promoting her artwork, she was very much impacted by the culture shock of the two countries. This painting captures her longing for and her embrace of her rich cultural heritage while crossing the border line into the United States.
Salvador Dali was a Spanish artist and leading figure in the surrealist movement in the 1920's. Dali is perhaps best known for his melting clocks, featured in his painting The Persistence of Memory. Dali lived in France throughout the Spanish Civil War before leaving for the United States in 1940, where he achieved commercial success. He returned to Spain in 1948. Dali's artistic repertoire included painting, graphic arts, film, sculpture, design, photography, fiction, poetry, autobiography, and essays and criticism. The painting featured on our art wall is Meditative Rose, painted in 1958 during a period of intense spirituality in Dali's life.
David Hockney is an English painter, draftsman, printmaker, stage designer, and photographer. He's one of the most important figures in contemporary British art due to his work in the Pop Art movement of the 1960s. He's also an LGBTQIA+ icon. He is best known for his portraits, photocollages, Splash series of paintings, and plein air (open air) landscape paintings, such as the featured work on our art wall, Garrowby Hill, painted in 1998. He is still active to this day, working with creating digital landscapes on various devices.
Bisa Butler is a contemporary American artist who has catapulted quilting into the world of fine art. Butler creates vibrant quilted portraits celebrating Black life, depicting both everyday people and notable historical figures. She works mostly with kente cloth and African wax printed fabrics in an effort to adorn her subjects in the cloth of their ancestors while telling stories forgotten over time with her artwork. Southside Sunday Morning, created in 2018, is one of these quilted works, depicting in textiles a scene from a Russell Lee photo taken in Chicago in 1941.
Georgia O'Keeffe was an American modernist painter, and is widely considered to be the mother of American modernism. In New York City in the early 1920s, her art career took off with her focus on abstraction. She is best known for her enlarged paintings of flowers and skulls. O'Keeffe was active in the arts until the 1980s, shortly before her death. Her focus on abstraction made her one of the most important women in the fine arts, and she still holds the record for the highest price paid at auction for a painting by a woman. The painting featured on the Diverse Art Wall is Blue and Green Music, painted in 1921 based on her idea that music and sound could be translated into something for the eye.
Yayoi Kusama is a contemporary Japanese artist working primarily in installation and sculpture. While having trained at the Kyoto City University of Arts, Kusama was inspired by American Abstract Impressionism, and moved to New York City in 1958. She became an important figure in the New York Avant-Garde scene and Pop Art movement. She has been open about her own mental health struggles, and in the seventies she moved back to Japan and checked herself into a hospital for the mentally ill, where she remains by choice. Her studio is a short distance from the hospital, and she continues to work on installations to this day. A photo of her installation The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away, created in 2013, is on display on our diverse art wall.
Jacob Lawrence was an American painter and professor at the University of Washington known for his portrayal of African-American historical subjects and contemporary life in his "dynamic-cubist" paintings. Lawrence believed that all paintings should have three things: universality, clarity and strength. The featured print on our art wall is his painting Fulton and Nostrand, made in 1958.
Gieve Patel is a prominent Indian poet, playwright, painter, as well as a retired physician. He lives in Mumbai and is fully engaged in the arts. Patel is considered to be one of the important painters who portrayed the social reality parallel to the prominent painters of the Baroda School in India. Through his paintings, Patel explores themes of contemporary life, with a focus on its complexity and beauty. The featured print on our art wall is The Early Guest, painted in 1981.
Charles Demuth was an American painter who developed Precisionism as a style of painting, which reduced subjects to their essential geometric shapes, and often used planes of light to create a sense of crisp focus and sleekness. He primarily worked in watercolors and turned to oils later on in his career. As a gay artist, Demuth found acceptance in Parisian society. In founding the precisionist movement, he worked closely with other modernist artists, including Georgia O'Keefe. In his childhood, he had either suffered a leg injury or polio, and used a cane while walking his whole life. As a diabetic, he was one of the first Americans to receive insulin. He died due to diabetic complications in 1935 at the age of 51. The print featured on our art wall is Welcome to our City, painted in 1921.
Dr. Sun-Young Won Lee is a painter and retired art professor from The Ohio State University at Lima. Born in Seoul, South Korea in 1943, she studied art at the Ewha Womans University in South Korea, the Pratt Institute in New York, and received her Doctorate of Philosophy in Art Education from The Ohio State University. Nearly all of her employ color nuances and numerous layers that intertwine the concepts of multiplicity and unity, suggesting a universal inseparability between human existence and nature. The painting featured on our wall in the quiet area is Fragrance of Spring, painted in 1994.