Augusta Savage

-African-American sculptor associated with the Harlem Renaissance
-She began making clay figures as a child, mostly small animals, but her father would beat her when he found her sculptures.

Beauford Delaney

-A celebrated artist who was part of the Harlem Renaissance during the 1930's and 40's.
-Moved to Paris in 1953 where he developed a distinct style of abstract impressionism, and became a mentor and friend to expatriate writers James Baldwin and Henry Miller. 
-His artwork became increasingly abstract and non-representational over the years.
-Died tragically in a Paris insane asylum in 1979.
-He bears a striking resemblance to my grandfather.

Self-portrait

Jazz Quartet

Tony Matelli

Tony Matelli

• Tony Matelli’s hyper-real sculptures of meat and vegetable portraits, sprouting weeds, stacked cards, sleepwalking humans and malicious chimpanzees captures your attention with immediacy, a visual poignancy that would make it hard not to react with curiosity and amusement.
• Matelli’s uses his own struggles and pessimisms as a launching pad to his work, a romantic artist with a diaristic approach sharing stories of problems and trying to undo those problems which only risks being less interesting and even inhumane.



Double Meat Head, cast aluminum, cast bronze, urethane, paint, 2009





• Guest at VCU.

Old Enemy, New Victim, silicone, urethane foam, fiberglass, steel, hair, 2007

Paul Signac

A photo that I took at Paul Signac's home at Barfleur in Normandy, France.

• When I was in France I found this home of the painter Paul Signac. I never  knew anything about him until now. 
• French neo-impressionist painter who helped develop pointillism. 
•  He followed a course of training in architecture before deciding at the age of 18 to pursue a career as a painter after attending an exhibit of Monet's work.
• Many of Signac's paintings are of the French coast. He loved to paint the water. There is plenty of water at Barfleur! (I had the best mussels I've ever had in my life, there.)

"Sunday," 1888-1890

Leonid Tishkov

Leonid Tishkov

• Having graduated from medical school as general practitioner, he was a co-editor of a medical encyclopedia and worked as illustrator for a number of newspapers. 
• From 1980s, when he became acquainted with the Moscow conceptualist circles, Tishkov has devoted himself to art.
•  Tishkov’s constantly evolving story is told with the use of objects, drawings, paintings, artist’s books, drama plays, photographs and video works.
• Over the last ten years Tishkov has been working chiefly with installation, photograph and video.

"A Stars Visit"

Marni Kotak

Brooklyn-based performance artist Marni Kotak

• Said giving birth is the "highest form of art" 
• Delivered a baby boy — inside a New York City art gallery
• She has been re-enacting events from her life for more than 10 years, including her own birth, losing her virginity in "a sunny blue Plymouth" and her grandfather's funeral.

Teresita Fernández

Teresita Fernández

•VCU Alumni
•1992 Sculpture + Extended Media MFA
•Selected by President Obama to serve on the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts; a panel which advises the government on national matters of design and aesthetics such as the design and site of national memorials and museums.
•Fernández is best known for her prominent public sculptures and unconventional use of materials, which are characterized by an interest in perception and the psychology of looking.

Fernández is the youngest artist commissioned by the Seattle Art Museum for the recently opened Olympic Sculpture Park where her permanently installed work Seattle Cloud Cover allows visitors to walk under a covered skyway while viewing the city’s skyline through optically shifting multicolored glass.

Peter Doig

Peter Doig

•In 2007, a painting of Doig's, entitled White Canoe, sold at Sotheby's for $11.3 million, then an auction record for a living European artist.

•Many of Doig's works are very abstract Landscapes, harking back to his childhood in Canada.


•Doig is best known for his series of paintings of Le Corbusier’s modernist communal living apartments known as l’Unite d’Habitationlocated at Briety-en-Foret, in France.

"Canoe Lake"

Peter Max

Peter Max

•Invited by President and Mrs. Reagan to paint six Liberty portraits for the White House, Washington, DC

•Official artist for events including the Grammy Awards, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, The Super Bowl, and others.

•German-born Jewish American artist best known for his "Cosmic Brownie" style.

Roberto Matta

Roberto Matta

•One of chile's best known painters.

"A Grave Situation," 1946

•A seminal figure in 20th century abstract expressionist/ surreal art.

"La Source du Calme," 2002-This was Matta's final work.

Bruce Nauman

Bruce Nauman

•Contemporary American Artist


•Works with a broad range of media.


•Confronted with “What to do?” in his studio soon after graduating, Nauman had the simple but profound realization that “If I was an artist and I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing in the studio must be art. At this point art became more of an activity and less of a product.”

"Dream Passage"

"Violins/Violence"

Jennifer and Kevin McCoy

Jennifer and Kevin McCoy

Lecture at VCU on Monday, October 10, 2011.

• Brooklyn, New York-based married couple who make art together.
• They work with interactive media, film, performance and installation to explore personal experience in relation with new technology, the mass media, and global comm
• • They were awarded a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship.
• • Jennifer- Was always interested in what went on behind the scenes- ie the background in order to give respect to the work that went into the things that went on behind the scenes.
    • You want to take things that you've seen and make new things from them.
    
    
    
    

"Horror Chase"

• Evil Dead- inspired sequence

-Didn't like the way the shots ended up in the original film.

   So they rebuilt the set.

  -Shot sequences of chases in the set, and entered it into the software.

-the software creates essentially a giant flip book that changes the effects of the video.

The piece stays inside the tight space, but plays more or less endlessly.

-As a viewer you stay inside a fairly claustrophobic environment, but the changes in lenses and acts. So the variations become clearer everytime you watch it.

They wanted the set to be on view with the video.

Yann Tiersen

-Musician from France.
-Received classical training in several music academies.

Comptine d'un Autre Été

-http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2-1u8xvk54

Yann Tiersen's style of music has a very modern feel to it.

James Rosenquist

-His specialty is taking fragmented, oddly disproportionate images and combining, overlapping, and putting them on canvases to create visual stories.
-From 1957-60 he earned his living as a billboard painter.

Tin Roof

Star Ladder (Second State)

Yves Tanguy

-Yves Tanguy was born in 1900 in Brittany, France.
-He began his career in the merchant marines and was drafted into the army during the World War I.
-After the war he settled in Paris, earning his living by different jobs.
-He never got any formal training in painting.
-Decided to become a painter when he saw De Chirico in 1923.
-His friend, the poet Jacques Prévert, introduced him into the circle of the Surrealists.

Mama, Papa is Wounded!
1927, Oil on canvas

"The Sensitive Layer"
1933

Anish Kapoor, Sculptor

-British sculptor of Indian birth
-sculptures are frequently simple, curved forms, usually monochromatic and brightly colored.
-His early works use powder powder to define and permeate the form.
-Kapoor first became known in the 1980s for his geometric or biomorphic sculptures made using simple—often elemental—materials such as granite, limestone, marble, pigment and plaster.

Sky Mirror
It took six years from the initial idea for a major new piece of public art to the unveiling of Sky Mirror on 27 April 2001, and cost £900,000.

Hole, 1988

Arnulf Rainer, Abstract Painter

• Austrian painter and is internationally renowned for his abstract informal art.
• Began to collect paintings by the insane
• Experimented with hallucinative drugs.

Totenmaske (Deathmask)

Waage

Salvador Dali, Surrealist Painter

-known for bizarre images
-highly imaginative
-shot many strange videos

Claude Debussy, French Impressionist Composer

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ir8snfWIU2M


Claude Debussy has a very distinct impressionist style. Even when I'm not sure of the artist when I hear a Debussy composition I can often take a good guess.

Sergei Rachmaninoff, Pianist

Sergei Rachmaninoff is a romantic piano composer known for his, solemn, powerful songs.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtuMVBLEWJU

Prelude in C Sharp Minor- Rachmaninoff earned the nickname "Mr. C Sharp Minor" because of this composition much to his unliking.

David Hammons

-Mostly known for his works in and around New York in the 70's.
-Much of his work, including Spade with Chains (1973), reflects his commitment to the civil rights and Black Power movements.

Sanford Biggers

-interdisciplinary artist who works in film/video, installation, sculpture, music, and performance.
-Biggers's art frequently references African American ethnography
-Biggers is Affiliate Faculty at the VCU Sculpture and Expanded Media program and was a visiting scholar at Harvard's VES Department in 2009.

Cheri Samba, Congolese painter

His paintings almost always include text in French and Lingala, commenting on life in Africa and the modern world. Chéri Samba lives in Kishasha and Paris.

Fight Against Mosquitoes (Mosquitoes refers to Malara in many French-speaking countries of Africa) This painting was also in the Anderson Gallery.

Nnenna Okore

• inspiration stems from childhood at Nsukka, small university town in southeastern Nigeria.

• was fascinated by the social, natural, and man-made conditions in rural dwellings around the campus.

• works celebrate the transformation of discarded objects into cultural objects.

Trash bags, This particular work is was on display at the Anderson Gallery here at VCU.

Bill Woodrow, Sculptor

-Late 70's, Early 80's Major works.

-Transformer, manipulator of garbage items.

-Creates creatures and images from objects, but he shows from where they come.

Crow Eating Something, Umbrella

Tom Friedman

-monumental ideas in objects

-makes objects exclusively by himself.

-went into his studio, emptied it out, painted all the walls white.

-created a void.

-Go into the studio with single objects and meditate with them until he came up with what to do.

-Into self portraits.

Self-Splattered Portrait, Construction Paper

                                                     Spiral in a Bar of Soap, Pubic Hair Inside Spiral

Tara Donovan, Sculptor, VCU Alumni

- Takes very simple, mundane objects and meditates on the single materials until she comes up with a solution- repurposing them.

-Ends up recreating natural occurences, phenomena.

-Her manipulation of materials is very simple. Putting them in a simple context, a new position that transforms them.

-Has a crew that helps her with most work.

-VCU Alumni

A sculpture made of buttons.

William Rush, 18th Century

Bust of Benjamin Franklin, c. 1800

Winter, 1810, Pine

Emily Carr, Canadian, Post Impessionist.

Odds and Ends

Britanny, France

Eugene Delacroix, Romantic French Artist

A Mad Woman, 1822, Oil on Canvas.

Horse Frightened by a Storm, 1824, Watercolor.

Robert Morris, Minimalist Artist