Magdalena Abakanowicz
Bronze Crowd 2004
Magdalena Abakanowicz (born June 20, 1930, in Falenty, Poland) is a Polish sculptor. She is notable for her use of textiles as a sculptural medium and is regarded as being one of the most important and influential female artists of the 20th century. She has been a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznań, Poland from 1965 to 1990 and a visiting professor at UCLA in 1984. Magdalena Abakanowicz currently lives and works in Warsaw.
Carl Jung
Carl Gustav Jung (German pronunciation: [ˈka:ɐ̯l ˈgʊstaf ˈjʊŋ]; 26 July 1875 – 6 June 1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist, an influential thinker and the founder of analytical psychology (also known as Jungian psychology). Jung’s approach to psychology has been influential in the field of depth psychology and in countercultural movements across the globe. Jung is considered as the first modern psychologist to state that the human psyche is “by nature religious” and to explore it in depth. He emphasized understanding the psyche through exploring the worlds of dreams, art, mythology, religion and philosophy. Although he was a theoretical psychologist and practicing clinician, much of his life’s work was spent exploring other areas, including Eastern and Western philosophy, alchemy, astrology, sociology, as well as literature and the arts. His most notable ideas include the concept of psychological archetypes, the collective unconscious and synchronicity.
Jung emphasized the importance of balance and harmony. He cautioned that modern people rely too heavily on science and logic and would benefit from integrating spirituality and appreciation of unconscious realms. He considered the process of individuation necessary for a person to become whole. This is a psychological process of integrating the conscious with the unconscious while still maintaining conscious autonomy.Individuation was the central concept of analytical psychology.
Francois Foucault
Diego Rivera
El Venedor de Alcatraces 1941
Diego Rivera (December 8, 1886 – November 24, 1957) was born Diego María de la Concepción Juan Nepomuceno Estanislao de la Rivera y Barrientos Acosta y Rodríguez in Guanajuato, Gto. He was a world-famous Mexican painter, an active Communist, and husband of Frida Kahlo, 1929–1939 and 1940–1954 (her death). Rivera’s large wall works in fresco helped establish the Mexican Mural Renaissance. Between 1922 and 1953, Rivera painted murals in Mexico City, Chapingo, Cuernavaca, San Francisco, Detroit, and New York City. In 1931, a retrospective exhibition of his works was displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900) was an Irish playwright, poet and author of numerous short stories and one novel. Known for his biting wit, he became one of the most successful playwrights of the late Victorian era in London, and one of the greatest “celebrities” of his day. Several of his plays continue to be widely performed, especially The Importance of Being Earnest. As the result of a widely covered series of trials, Wilde suffered a dramatic downfall and was imprisoned for two years’ hard labour after being convicted of homosexual relationships, described as “gross indecency” with other men. After Wilde was released from prison he set sail for Dieppe by the night ferry, never to return to Ireland or Britain.
Twyla Tharp
Twyla Tharp (born July 1, 1941) is an American dancer and choreographer. She has won Emmy and Tony awards, and currently works as a choreographer in New York City.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (October 15, 1844 – August 25, 1900) was a 19th- century German philosopher and classical philologist. He wrote critical texts on religion, morality, contemporary culture, philosophy and science, using a distinctive German-language style and displaying a fondness for metaphor, irony and aphorism.
Nietzsche’s influence remains substantial within and beyond philosophy, notably in existentialism and postmodernism. His style and radical questioning of the value and objectivity of truth have resulted in much commentary and interpretation, mostly in the continental tradition, and to a lesser extent in analytic philosophy.
His key ideas include the interpretation of tragedy as an affirmation of life, an eternal recurrence (which numerous commentators have re-interpreted), a rejection of Platonism and a repudiation of both Christianity and egalitarianism (especially in the form of democracy and socialism).
Nietzsche began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy. At the age of 24 he was appointed to the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel (the youngest individual ever to have held this position), but resigned in 1879 because of health problems, which would plague him for most of his life. In 1889 he exhibited symptoms of insanity, living out his remaining years in the care of his mother and sister until his death in 1900.
Paulo Coelho
Paulo Coelho was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He attended a Jesuit school. As a teenager, Coelho wanted to become a writer. Upon telling his mother this, she responded with “My dear, your father is an engineer. He’s a logical, reasonable man with a very clear vision of the world. Do you actually know what it means to be a writer?”After researching, Coelho concluded that a writer “always wears glasses and never combs his hair” and has a “duty and an obligation never to be understood by his own generation,” amongst other things. At 17, Coelho’s introversion and opposition to follow a traditional path led to his parents committing him to a mental institution from which he escaped three times before being released at the age of 20. Coelho later remarked that “It wasn’t that they wanted to hurt me, but they didn’t know what to do… They did not do that to destroy me, they did that to save me.
At his parents’ wishes, Coelho enrolled in law school and left his dream to become a writer. One year later, he dropped out and lived life as a hippie, traveling through South America, North Africa, Mexico, and Europe and becoming immersed in the drug culture of the 1960s. Upon his return to Brazil, Coelho worked as a songwriter, composing lyrics for Elis Regina, Rita Lee, and Brazilian icon Raul Seixas,composing with Raul made Paulo being associated with satanism and occultism, due to the content of some songs.In 1974, Coelho was arrested and tortured for “subversive” activities by the ruling military government, who took power ten years earlier and viewed his lyrics as left-wing and dangerous.
In 1986, Coelho walked the 500-plus mile Road of Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain, a turning point in his life. On the path, Coelho had a spiritual awakening, which he described autobiographically in The Pilgrimage. In an interview, Coelho stated “[In 1986], I was very happy in the things I was doing. I was doing something that gave me food and water — to use the metaphor in The Alchemist, I was working, I had a person who I loved, I had money, but I was not fulfilling my dream. My dream was, and still is, to be a writer.’ Coelho would leave his lucrative career as a songwriter and pursue writing full-time.
Don Miguel Ruiz
Don Miguel Ruiz was born into a family of healers, and raised in rural Mexico by a curandera (healer) mother and a nagual (shaman) grandfather. Although the family anticipated that Ruiz would embrace their centuries-old legacy of healing and teaching, Ruiz chose to attend medical school and become a surgeon. However, a near-death experience in the early 70s changed his life. Stunned by this experience, he began an intensive practice of self-inquiry; devoting himself to the mastery of the ancient ancestral wisdom. Ruiz, a nagual from the Eagle Knight lineage, is dedicated to sharing his knowledge of the teachings of the ancient Toltec. For more than a decade, he has worked to impart this wisdom to his students through book and audio publications, workshops, and journeys to sacred sites around the world.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky (Russian: Фёдор Миха́йлович Достое́вский, Fёdor Mihajlovič ),sometimes transliterated Dostoevsky, Dostoievsky, Dostojevskij, Dostoevski, Dostojevski or Dostoevskii (November 11, [O.S. October 30] 1821 – February 9, [O.S. January 28] 1881) was a Russian writer, essayist and philosopher, known for his novels Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov.
Dostoyevsky’s literary output explores human psychology in the troubled political, social and spiritual context of 19th-century Russian society. Considered by many as a founder or precursor of 20th-century existentialism, his Notes from Underground (1864), written in the embittered voice of the anonymous “underground man”, was called by Walter Kaufmann the “best overture for existentialism ever written.” A prominent figure in world literature, Dostoyevsky is often acknowledged by critics as one of the greatest psychologists in world literature.
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