Sep 17 2026
Born on this day, September 17, 1909, in Portland, Maine, Raymond White Skolfield was an American painter and printmaker whose work preserved scenes of city streets, working people, industry, waterfronts, and the landscapes of his native Maine. Although his name is less familiar today than many artists of the twentieth century, his work survives in …
Sep 12 2026
Robert Irwin spent much of his career asking a deceptively simple question: What if the most important part of an artwork is not the object itself, but the way we experience the space around it? That question eventually led him away from conventional painting and toward light, shadow, translucent fabric, architecture, gardens, windows, fluorescent tubes, …
Sep 10 2026
Israel Abramofsky built an artistic life across borders. Born near Kyiv in 1888, when the city was part of the Russian Empire, he eventually made his way through Europe, studied art in Paris, absorbed the rapidly changing currents of early 20th-century modernism, and settled in Toledo, Ohio. There he became not simply a working painter …
Sep 09 2026
What happens if an artist creates the idea for an artwork but does not personally make the finished object? For Sol LeWitt, that question became the foundation of an extraordinary career. LeWitt helped transform contemporary art during the 1960s by arguing that the idea behind a work could matter more than the artist’s physical touch. …
Sep 05 2026
Born on September 5, 1924, Frank Armitage followed an artistic path that was anything but ordinary. Over the course of his long career, the Australian-born artist moved from studying the monumental murals of Mexico to painting backgrounds for some of Walt Disney’s most famous animated films, creating imagery for the science-fiction classic Fantastic Voyage, designing …
Sep 03 2026
For photographer Karen Halverson, the American landscape is never simply scenery. Roads cut across mountains, power lines interrupt distant horizons, houses cling to hillsides, dams reshape rivers, and cities press against deserts and canyons. Her photographs explore the uneasy but often beautiful meeting place between the natural world and the human desire to alter, occupy, …
Sep 01 2026
Born on September 1, 1913, in Vienna, Ludwig Merwart became one of the distinctive voices of postwar Austrian abstraction. A painter and printmaker fascinated by texture, color, movement, and experimentation, Merwart developed an artistic language that reflected the restless spirit of European art after World War II. He is remembered especially for his remarkable iron …
Aug 30 2026
Born on August 30, 1929, in Cambrai, France, Guy de Lussigny spent much of his artistic life working with an extraordinarily limited vocabulary: squares, straight lines, carefully controlled space, and color. From those simple elements, however, he constructed a remarkably varied body of work. Lussigny belonged to the generation of European artists who came of …
Aug 28 2026
Born on August 28, 1941, in Dublin, Michael Craig-Martin has spent more than half a century asking deceptively simple questions about the objects surrounding us. What exactly are we looking at when we see a chair, a light bulb, a shoe, a glass, or a telephone? How much information does an image need before we …
Aug 27 2026
Born on August 27, 1959, in Santiago de Cali, Colombia, Juan Fernando Cobo Agudelo spent more than four decades moving between painting, drawing, sculpture, printmaking, public art, publishing, and cultural promotion. His career carried him from Colombia to Madrid and New York, while his work moved easily between the recognizable human figure and increasingly abstract …
