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 15 2026
Every September 15 offers an opportunity to celebrate Yuri Norstein, the Soviet and Russian animator whose relatively small body of films has had an influence far beyond its size. Born on September 15, 1941, Norstein became one of the great artists of world animation through films that seem almost impossible to separate from dreams, memory, …
Sep 13 2026
Few singers have ever sounded quite like Yma Sumac. At one moment, her voice could descend into a dark, resonant register that seemed almost impossibly low. Seconds later, she could leap upward into brilliant coloratura, trills, birdlike calls, and piercing high notes that appeared to come from an entirely different singer. Even among the flamboyant …
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 11 2026
Bola de Nieve did not have the kind of voice the recording industry usually tries to manufacture into perfection. It could be rough, intimate, conversational, playful, weary, tender, and suddenly enormous with feeling. He did not smooth away those qualities. He built an entire art around them. Sitting at the piano in immaculate evening clothes, …
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 08 2026
Born on September 8, 1932, in Winchester, Virginia, Patsy Cline possessed one of the most recognizable voices of the mid-20th century. In a recording career that lasted less than a decade, she helped change the possibilities for women in country music while carrying the genre far beyond its traditional audience. Songs such as “Walkin’ After …
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, …
