Artist 48

Richard Tuttle

Richard Tuttle is an American post-minimalist artist.  Post-minimalism is an artistic field used for work influenced by or attempts to go beyond the aesthetic of minimalism, or the work that is set out to expose the essence or identity of a subject through eliminating all non-essential forms, features or concepts.  Tuttle himself is known for his small, subtle, intimate works. His art makes use of scale and line. His works span a range of media, from sculpture, painting, drawing, printmaking, and artist’s books to installation and furniture.

Tuttle was born in Rahway, New Jersey, in 1941, and lives and works in New Mexico and New York. He received a BA from Trinity College, Hartford. Although most of Tuttle’s prolific artistic output since the beginning of his career in the 1960s has taken the form of three-dimensional objects, he commonly refers to his work as drawing rather than sculpture, emphasizing the diminutive scale and idea-based nature of his practice. He subverts the conventions of Modernist sculptural practice—defined by grand, heroic gestures; monumental scale; and the “macho” materials of steel, marble, and bronze—and instead creates small, eccentrically playful objects in decidedly humble, even “pathetic” materials such as paper, rope, string, cloth, wire, twigs, cardboard, bubble wrap, nails, Styrofoam, and plywood.

Tuttle also manipulates the space in which his objects exist, placing them unnaturally high or oddly low on a wall—forcing viewers to reconsider and renegotiate the white-cube gallery space in relation to their own bodies.  He understands only too well the importance of space in any installation, and uses directed light and shadow to further define his objects and their space. Influences on his work include calligraph, poetry, and language. A lover of books and printed matter, Tuttle has created artist’s books, collaborated on the design of exhibition catalogues, and is also a printmaker. 

Richard Tuttle received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture. He has had one-person exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Kunsthaus Zug, Switzerland; Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela; and Museu Fundação Serralves, Porto. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art organized a 2005 Tuttle retrospective.

http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/richard-tuttle

Artist 47

Jenny Holzer

Jenny Holzer was born in 1950. She is an American conceptual artist who received a BA from Ohio University in Athens (1972); an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence (1977); and honorary doctorates from the University of Ohio (1993), the Rhode Island School of Design (2003), and New School University, New York (2005). Holzer now lives and works in Hoosick Falls, New York. She belongs to the feminist branch of a generation of artists that emerged around 1980, looking for new ways to make narrative or commentary an implicit part of visual objects.

Holzer is mostly known for her large-scale public displays that include billboard advertisements, projections on buildings and other architectural structures, as well as illuminated electronic displays. The main focus of her work is the use of words and ideas in public space. Originally utilizing street posters, LED signs became her most visible medium, though her diverse practice incorporates a wide array of media including bronze plaques, painted signs, stone benches and footstools, stickers, T-shirts, condoms, paintings, photographs, sound, video, light projection, the internet, and even a race car. Whether questioning consumerist impulses, describing torture, or lamenting death and disease, Jenny Holzer’s use of language provokes a response in the viewer. While her subversive work often blends in among advertisements in public space, its arresting content violates expectations.

http://www.jennyholzer.com/list.php
http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/jenny-holzer

Artist 46

Mike Kelley 

Mike Kelley was an American performance and installation artist. He completed a BFA at the University of Michigan School of Art, Ann Arbor, and an MFA at the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, after which he settled in Los Angeles (Go figure, not New York!).

As a student at Cal Arts, Kelley was influenced by the conceptual approach taken by teachers such as Jonathon Borofsky, John Baldessari (woohoo!) and Douglas Huebler. 

His first acclaimed performance work, staged in Los Angeles in collaboration with David Askevold in 1979, was Poltergeist; it included photographs, objects and black-and-white drawings combining image and text in comic-book style.  The counter-cultural, critical energy and concentration on themes of dysfunctionality and repression in his early works became more focused in the mid-1980s, when he began working with found objects, specifically soft toys. 

As Kelley's work morphed from performance into more installation using found objects, his focus tightened as well.   Where at first his works commentated on public or culture, his later works became something more biographical.  Many of his pieces reflected on the way personal tokens and totems of affection can be invested with desire and repression, and can form part of a person’s psychological development. In contrast to earlier work in which his individuality would be complicated and obscured, biography became increasingly important for Kelley in the 1990s, albeit an openly fabricated biography.  In 1995 he produced an architectural model of the institutions in which he had studied, Educational Complex based on incomplete memories. The sections that were missing suggested areas in which trauma events occurred, referred to by Kelley as ‘repressed space’. By basing his work on a regression to troubled periods in childhood and adolescence, he underlines his view of art as a dysfunctional reality which, through a re-enactment of traumatic events, can have therapeutic ends. 

Kelley's journey through creation was a journey of self-discovery.  And I find his later works truly inspiring.  Unfortunately, by the end of his life, it doesn't seem that he found what he was looking for.  Mike Kelley died earlier this year.  He was only  57.  Kelley was found at his home in South Pasadena in what seemed to be a suicide following a serious depression.  It breaks my heart when an artist with so much talent doesn't make it, like Sebastian Horsely or Jackson Pollock.  

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/02/arts/design/mike-kelley-influential-american-artist-dies-at-57.html?_r=1 

artist 45

Bruce Pearson

Bruce Pearson is an abstract painter who attended the San Francisco Art Institute.  His large-scale works, made more monumental by their deep relief quality, look a lot like swirling coral reefs and hallucinatory 3D landscapes, rapturous fields of color and highly textured surfaces of well-calibrated, but ambiguous meaning. Cast from phrases literally or figuratively clipped from, among other sources, fashion magazines, product catalogs and bad television, Pearson's dense, hallucinogenic pictures are carved from modest styrofoam, then painted a welter of clashing or complementary colors.  The text of each piece is hidden in plain sight, carved in the styrofoam and then painted over.  Often, the text is painted into the piece so that if you looked at it a certain way you would be able to read it, but if you looked at it another way, you would see the image but not be able to read the text.

In an interview of the artist, Pearson said this about his textual inspirations:

"Well, it's amazing how much stuff you can simply get from the newspaper. I get quotes from all over, from journals, from books I'm reading. I compile the stuff, put it into notebooks. I work on about eight different series of paintings simultaneously. They are different as paintings and also as ideas. Each series has its own conceptual structure and the series are interrelated. I find text for each series. Then I do a drawing. I lay everything out in the drawing and make sure things are working as I want them to. If the drawing engages me, then I move into the painting."

I always thought that keeping an art journal meant doing sketches all the time, but this artist keeps a detailed journal of words and phrases.  Each person's research must be intrinsically connected to that artist's passions and goals.  For instance, if I was going to keep a detailed art journal, then ideas about teaching kids, how to communicate to them using art or what kind of pictures kids will most connect to, would be the main thing you should find in there.  

Pearson's works are really quite stimulating.  Looking at them small scale on my computer can be a little sickening because of the bright colors and hallucinogenic patterns.  Go ahead and check it out!

http://www.brucepearsonstudio.com/

artist 44

Audrey Flack

Audrey Flack was born in 1931 in New York (of course).  She holds a graduate degree and an honorary doctorate from Cooper Union in New York City, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Yale University. She attended New York University's Institute of Fine Arts where she studied the history of art.  Originally, her work was abstract (probably in an attempt to branch out and become her own person, apart from all the paintings she was studying in art history) 

Gradually, however, Flack's work became more and more realistic, until she crossed that final threshold into photorealism.

She was awarded the St. Gaudens Medal from Cooper Union, and the honorary Albert Dome professorship from Bridgeport University. She is an honorary professor at George Washington University, and is currently a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania. 
 Flack has taught and lectured extensively both nationally, and internationally. 

A pioneer of Photorealism and a nationally recognized painter and sculptor, Ms. Flack's work is in the collections of major museums around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Whitney Museum of American Art and the National Museum of Art in Canberra, Australia. She was the first photorealist painter to have work purchased by the Museum of Modern Art.

Flack received a lot of negative criticism for her large-scale photorealistic paintings in the seventies.  Critics called them feministic and too personal, since Flack would paint the things that surrounded her as well as the people who were personally important to her.  The bright colors and high gloss medium she was using also sparked a constant flow of negative comments from her art "superiors."  However, she was soon accepted into the realist world.  She has since become one of the most important and influential artists in her field, simply for sticking to her guns and being who she is.  Go Audrey!

http://db-artmag.com/en/54/feature/audrey-flack-breaking-the-rules/

artist 43

Kiki Smith

Kiki Smith was born in 1954 in Nuremberg, Germany. The daughter of American sculptor Tony Smith, Kiki Smith grew up in New Jersey. As a young girl, one of Smith’s first experiences with art was helping her father make cardboard models for his geometric sculptures. This training in formalist systems, combined with her upbringing in the Catholic Church, would later resurface in Smith’s evocative sculptures, drawings, and prints. The recurrent subject matter in Smith’s work has been the body as a receptacle for knowledge, belief, and storytelling. In the 1980s, Smith literally turned the figurative tradition in sculpture inside out, creating objects and drawings based on organs, cellular forms, and the human nervous system. This body of work evolved to incorporate animals, domestic objects, and narrative tropes from classical mythology and folk tales. Life, death, and resurrection are thematic signposts in many of Smith’s installations and sculptures.

Welcome to the twilight zone. Kiki Smith might just be one of the creepiest artists I have ever encountered. From the (really creepily made) video interview (link below) of her life and her work, I have deduced that Kiki Smith is slightly unstable and might have family wounds and past hurts that haven't been dealt with or healed. Her interests are a little strange, which is fine but all of them come through in her art work because she has made art everything in her life. Maybe that is what is so strange about it. She makes sense of the world by putting her own brokenness out into it through art. Her art passes beyond the span of opinion and commentary. It is a way of life, a way of speaking out the inner hurt and deep feelings that she is trying to make sense of.

Maybe not, but that's just me expressing my opinion:)  The video is a little long, but very interesting if you want to check it out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aRhXY0wQiE&feature=player_embedded

artist 42

James Siena

James Siena was born in California in 1957 and received his BFA in 1979 from Cornell University.  He is an American Abstract Expressionist artist based in New York City. Siena's art is typically created through a series of self-imposed constraints also sometimes referred to as visual algorithms —rules Siena decides on before sitting down to work. In most of his work he establishes a basic unit and action and repeats it indefinitely. The patterns remind me of a visual eye trick book we used to have, which used math and colors to hide 3D images in the pictures.  

Siena creates paintings, drawings, and prints in which hand-rendered procedural abstractions, methodically executed, cover a wide range of modalities and produce multiple visual and psychological effects.  Siena's work stimulates both the eye and the brain. As Roberta Smith wrote in an early review of his paintings: "Mr. Siena is unusually adept at translating the mental into the visual. His paintings think as good as they look." The jewel-like surfaces of his paintings become equally compelling when transformed into the medium of intaglio printmaking. Tactile, compressed and intricate, the work is above all emphatically physical, as seen in the raised surface of the etched line, and the attentive use of color. 

I admire Siena's work and attention to detail.  It reminds me of the work of another artist that I am very close to, my little brother Isaac.  Since I am aspiring to become a teacher, he is my best chance at practicing my skills.  However, Isaac thinks very differently than I do.  He works with permanent markers to make elaborate, methodical, extremely detailed pieces, just like Siena's.  However, he is also twelve and thinks he knows everything and therefore has nothing to gain from looking at the work of others or branching out from what he knows.  I hope to teach him about what he can evolve into by showing him James Siena's interesting paintings and prints.  

http://www.harlanandweaver.com/bio.htm#section_12