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. 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. 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 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 American lives, 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 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 art wall.
Alma Thomas was an artist and art teacher who lived and worked in Washington, D.C., and is now recognized as a major American painter of the 20th century. She is the first African-American woman to be included in the White House's permanent art collection. In August 1963, Thomas took part in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, inspiration for her large oil painting, Sketch for March on Washington, commemorating the event (itself included on a US Postal service stamp in 2005).
Marsden Hartley was an American painter, poet, and essayist in the Modernist Movement, who learned how to paint by observing cubist painters in Paris and Berlin. He combined an understanding of advanced European practices with a deeply spiritual sense of the American landscape to create a daring and wide-ranging body of work in both abstract and realist styles. While in France in 1926, he painted Purple Mountains, Vence.
James Little is a working artist, a painter and curator, known for a vivid use of color in his works. His paintings are represented in the collections of numerous public and private collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art among many others. Study for the Surrogate was painted in 2002 using watercolor paint and graphite. Little will often cut geometric patterns into his work, which absorb deeper hues.