Category: Art

Kenneth McGowan: Color Photography, Hollywood Illusion & the Artificial Landscape

Kenneth McGowan photographed places where reality was supposed to look artificial and artificial things were designed to pass for reality. Movie sets, fake trees, masks, studio backlots, amusement attractions, stuffed Pink Panthers, and fragments of Hollywood spectacle became subjects for a photographer fascinated by the visual strangeness of Southern California. Born in Ogden, Utah, in …

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Visionary Perspectives: A Visual Odyssey with Photographer Robert D’Alessandro

Robert D’Alessandro found one of his most enduring subjects almost everywhere he looked: hanging from houses, painted across clothing, attached to cars, displayed outside businesses, carried by individuals, and woven into the visual fabric of American life. The subject was the American flag, a symbol so familiar that it could easily disappear into the background …

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Evald Okas: Painting, Printmaking & Seven Decades of Estonian Art

Evald Okas seemed unwilling to settle into a single way of making art. He painted portraits, nudes, city scenes, industrial landscapes, historical compositions, and monumental murals. He worked in etching, drypoint, lithography, book illustration, and ex libris design. He traveled whenever circumstances allowed, filling his work with impressions of Paris, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, and …

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Dawoud Bey: Portraiture, Harlem & the Photography of Black American Life

Dawoud Bey has spent more than five decades asking deceptively simple questions about photography. Who gets pictured? Who gets to control the way they are seen? What happens when a camera treats an ordinary person with the same seriousness traditionally reserved for celebrities, politicians, and historical figures? And can a photograph make a history visible …

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Eduard Ole: Cubism, Art Deco & the Changing Face of Estonian Modernism

Eduard Ole’s long career moved through nearly every major transformation experienced by Estonian art in the 20th century. In the 1920s, he helped introduce the sharp geometry and experimental spirit of European Cubism to the newly independent country. A few years later, his paintings softened into the elegant figures, subdued colors, and streamlined sophistication associated …

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Miguel Covarrubias: Caricature, Harlem, Bali & a World of Modern Art

Miguel Covarrubias seemed capable of turning almost anything he encountered into a new field of study. In 1920s New York, he became one of the Jazz Age’s most celebrated caricaturists and drew dancers, writers, actors, musicians, politicians, and the nightlife of Harlem. In Bali, he moved beyond travel sketching to study dance, religion, ritual, costume, …

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Esta Nesbitt: Fashion Illustration, Xerox Art & the Machine as Creative Partner

For roughly two decades, Esta Nesbitt worked inside the polished world of American fashion illustration. Her drawings appeared in publications including Harper’s Bazaar, Mademoiselle, and The New York Times Magazine, where elegance, line, clothing, and the idealized human figure were central to the job. Then, during the 1960s, she began moving in an entirely different …

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Walter Peregoy: Color, Modernism & the Bold New Look of Disney Animation

Walter Peregoy did not seem particularly interested in making animation look safe. His backgrounds could be rough, angular, brilliantly colored, and deliberately incomplete. A building did not need every brick carefully rendered. A tree could become a collision of shapes and lines. Colors did not have to remain neatly contained within outlines, and the painted …

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Robbert Flick: Los Angeles, Sequential Views & the Photography of Movement

Robbert Flick does something unusual with landscape photography: he refuses to pretend that we experience a place in a single frozen moment. We walk through it. We turn our heads. We drive past it. Buildings disappear behind other buildings, roads carry us toward something and then away again, and landscapes change according to where we …

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Alan Crane: Lithography, New England & the Quiet Poetry of Everyday Places

Alan Horton Crane could transform an ordinary harbor, snowy road, village street, fishing boat, crowded market, or stand of bamboo into an image filled with atmosphere. His lithographs rarely depend upon dramatic events. Instead, their power comes from looking carefully at places where people live and work and then translating those observations into remarkably controlled …

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