Kara Walker is a contemporary African American artist who received her MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design and currently teaches at Columbia University. Her work deals with issues of race, gender, sexuality, and violence. She is best known for black silhouettes like the one depicted here, but has also worked with sculpture and [...]
Benjamin Williams Leader was born in the West Midlands of England in 1831. As a young man he attended the Royal Grammar School and studied at the Worcester School of Design in the evenings. In his free time, Leader painted en plein air. In 1854, after working several years for his father, Leader decided to [...]
Charles Warren Eaton’s artistic success came as a young man. His entrance into the art world coincided with a profound change in the prevailing artistic style in America. In the late 1870s the highly realistic and detailed Hudson River School manner, which had dominated the American art scene for over forty years, was giving way [...]
The huipil is the most common traditional garment worn by indigenous women from central Mexico to Central America. It is a loose-fitting tunic, generally made from two or three rectangular pieces of fabric which are then joined together with stitching, ribbons or fabric strips, with an opening for the head and, if the sides are [...]
Clare Romano is an American printmaker notable for her fascination with landscape. She was especially moved by her first encounter with the Grand Canyon in 1975. She responded not only to the colours of the landscape and to intensity of the light, but also to the dramatic monolithic formation of the canyons. Her simplification and [...]
Josef Albers was a German-born, American painter known for his complex understanding of color and geometry. Albers was a student, then a professor at the Bauhaus craft and fine arts school. The Bauhaus was founded with the idea of creating a "total" work of art in which all art forms, including architecture, would eventually be [...]
Ernest Trova was a self-trained American surrealist, pop art painter, and sculptor. Trova’s most successful image was his Falling Man series which he created in both two and three dimensional media. Synthesizing post-painterly abstraction with own his own ancient brand of classicism, Trova arrived at a result that attracted immense interest. Images and sculptures of [...]
Chavez, an indigenous Mapuche Chilean, was a goat-herder as a child but later grew to fame for his prints. Chavez worked past his humble beginnings by attending University of Concepción and working nights. Later, he attended Pratt University in New York and the Art Institute of Chicago before settling in Germany. This print, translated as [...]
Much of Pablo Picasso’s work dealt with moving away from standard academic art forms. This textile was designed in 1956 by Pablo Picasso for Fuller Fabrics’ Modern Masters print series. The Modern Masters series included textile designs by Picasso, Míro, Warhol, Léger, Dufy, and Chagall. The textiles were sold both for clothing and for furnishings, [...]
An influential American Expressionist, Robert Motherwell was a printmaker and editor. He attended the California School of Fine Arts, received his BA in Philosophy from Stanford, and his Ph.D. from Harvard. Later, he studied at Columbia University. It was while at Stanford that Motherwell first encountered Modernism through his study of Symbolist literature. His fascination [...]
