Category: Art

Frank McClure: Scientist, Printmaker & Observer of Everyday America

Frank McClure had one of those careers that resists being reduced to a single title. During the working week, he was a biochemist whose research helped advance the scientific understanding of fluoride and dental health. Away from the laboratory, he was a printmaker and artist who transformed flowers, winter streets, railroad stations, markets, landscapes, animals, …

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Bruno Bobak: War Artist, Modernist & Painter of Canada

Bruno Bobak’s paintings can move from the devastation of a European battlefield to a quiet Canadian river, from crowded human figures to forests, farms, winter streets, and brilliantly colored landscapes. The subjects changed enormously across his long career, but the paintings remained connected by an energetic approach to color, form, and observation. Born in Poland …

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Dorothy Dehner: Abstraction, Sculpture & a Career on Her Own Terms

Dorothy Dehner spent much of her early artistic life working in the shadow of circumstances that made it difficult for her to develop the career she wanted. Yet when she finally gained the freedom to devote herself fully to art, she embarked on an extraordinary second act. Beginning seriously in sculpture when she was already …

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Achille Vianelli: Watercolor, Light & the School of Posillipo

Achille Vianelli captured Italy one luminous corner at a time. Sunlit piazzas, quiet church interiors, steep coastal roads, ancient arches, fishing boats, distant mountains, and narrow streets all became subjects for an artist with an extraordinary ability to translate atmosphere into watercolor. Born in Porto Maurizio in 1803 and active for much of the 19th …

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Irving Petlin: Pastel, Protest & the Art of Bearing Witness

Irving Petlin made pictures that can feel as though they are emerging from memory just before they disappear again. Figures hover inside pale landscapes. Bodies dissolve into dusty fields of color. Buildings, forests, animals, and fragments of architecture appear without fully explaining themselves. Even when his subject was a recognizable historical event, Petlin rarely approached …

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Chihiro Iwasaki: A Tribute to Japan’s Beloved Illustrator

Chihiro Iwasaki: Watercolor, Childhood & a Lifelong Wish for Peace Few artists have captured childhood with the tenderness and immediacy of Chihiro Iwasaki. Her children rarely pose. They splash in baths, stare out windows, clutch flowers, sit alone in thought, or move through pale landscapes that seem to dissolve into watercolor around them. With only …

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Emily Carr: Forests, Modernism & a Singular West Coast Vision

Emily Carr painted forests as though they were alive. Cedars twist upward, branches seem to breathe, clouds roll across the sky in great waves, and deep green landscapes pulse with an energy that feels almost impossible to contain within the edges of a canvas. Her mature paintings of British Columbia are unmistakable, yet the path …

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Roy DeCarava: Harlem, Jazz & the Poetry of Light

Roy DeCarava could find an extraordinary photograph in a hallway, on a subway staircase, inside a dim jazz club, or on an ordinary Harlem street. His pictures rarely shout for attention. Instead, they draw the viewer slowly into deep shadows, subtle expressions, and moments that might have vanished unnoticed if DeCarava had not been there …

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Yreina Cervántez: Murals, Printmaking & Chicana Visual Culture

Yreina Cervántez builds images in layers. Faces appear beside ancient symbols, fragments of text cross bodies and landscapes, contemporary political imagery meets Mesoamerican visual traditions, and women occupy the center of compositions that ask viewers to think about history, identity, memory, migration, and power. Whether working on a sheet of paper or across an enormous …

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Robert Singletary: Chesapeake Bay, Weather & the Poetry of Patient Drawing

Robert Singletary could turn weather into a subject all its own. Snow falls so thickly that the landscape nearly vanishes. Fog dissolves the boundary between water and sky. Rain, clouds, moonlight, and darkness transform familiar stretches of the Chesapeake Bay into places that seem suspended between observation and memory. Born in Bloomington, Illinois, in 1945, …

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