Sep 24 2025
Born on September 24, 1962, Ilgvars Zalāns is a Latvian painter and performance artist whose work turns color, movement, travel, and physical gesture into a remarkably energetic form of contemporary expressionism. His paintings can be exuberant, chaotic, playful, unsettling, and intensely physical, filled with sweeping marks, splashes, layered surfaces, distorted figures, landscapes, animals, and flashes …
Aug 06 2025
Born on August 6, 1940, in Oslo, Egil Kapstad became one of the most respected figures in Norwegian jazz, building a career that reached far beyond the traditional boundaries of the genre. He was a pianist, composer, arranger, accompanist, educator, and musical collaborator whose work connected jazz with poetry, theater, contemporary composition, radio, television, and …
Aug 05 2025
Born on August 5, 1890, in Bryansk in the Russian Empire, Naum Gabo became one of the artists who fundamentally changed what sculpture could be. Instead of thinking of sculpture primarily as a solid object carved from stone or modeled in clay, Gabo constructed forms from planes, transparent plastics, wire, metal, nylon filaments, and empty …
Aug 04 2025
Born on August 4, 1922, in Frenchton, West Virginia, Charley Harper developed one of the most recognizable visual languages in 20th-century American illustration. Cardinals became triangles and circles. Ladybugs expanded into enormous arrangements of red, black, and white. Owls stared from carefully organized patterns of feathers and foliage. Forests, shorelines, deserts, mountains, insects, mammals, and …
Aug 02 2025
Born on August 2, 1914, in La Tuque, Quebec, Félix Leclerc became one of the defining voices of French-language music in Canada and one of the artists who transformed the modern tradition of the singer-songwriter. With little more than a guitar, a deep expressive voice, and lyrics shaped by poetry, nature, humor, solitude, love, work, …
Jul 29 2025
Born on July 29, 1927, in Cleveland, Ohio, Alan Fenton developed a deeply personal form of abstraction during the years when New York was becoming the center of the international contemporary-art world. He worked within the broad orbit of the New York School, studied privately with Jack Tworkov and Adolph Gottlieb, became friendly with Mark …
Jul 27 2025
Born on July 27, 1936, in Baltimore, Maryland, Roland L. Freeman spent more than half a century creating an extraordinary photographic record of Black American life. His camera traveled from Baltimore streets and Washington neighborhoods to Mississippi farms, quilting circles, church gatherings, festivals, Civil Rights demonstrations, horse-drawn produce wagons, blues performances, and communities whose traditions …
Jul 23 2025
Born on July 23, 1914, in Krokeai, a village near Sparta in Greece, Nassos Daphnis developed one of the most rigorous approaches to color and geometric abstraction in postwar American art. His paintings can look almost startlingly simple at first: brilliant red, yellow, and blue fields; black and white divisions; circles, rectangles, diamonds, bands, and …
Jul 21 2025
Born on July 21, 1932, in Helsinki, Finland, Eero Aarnio became one of the designers who gave the Space Age its furniture. His Ball Chair looks like a private capsule waiting to be launched from a futuristic living room. The transparent Bubble Chair hangs from the ceiling like an enormous soap bubble. The Pastil can …
Jul 19 2025
Born on July 19, 1911, in Little Rock, Arkansas, Tom A. Robertson followed an artistic path that was anything but predictable. He began adulthood preparing for a career in law, became an accomplished portrait painter, experimented with modernist ideas in New Orleans, and eventually produced a remarkable group of abstract watercolors and screenprints during the …
