To exist instead of being an existentialist, to make objects instead of being one.

Hannah Wilke

Hannah Wilke (1940-1993), the pioneering feminist conceptual artist, worked in sculpture, drawing, assemblage, photography, performance and installation. Wilke is considered the first feminist artist to use vaginal imagery in her work.

Hannah Wilke was born Arlene Hannah Butter in New York City on March 7, 1940. She attended public schools in Queens and graduated from Great Neck High School in 1957. Wilke majored in art at Stella Elkins Tyler School of Fine Art, Temple University, Philadelphia, and graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a Bachelor of Science in Education in 1962.

From 1962 to 1965, Wilke taught Art at Plymouth-Whitemarsh High School in Plymouth Meeting, PA, and, after returning to New York, at White Plains High School, White Plains, NY, from 1965 to 1970.

In 1974, Wilke joined the faculty of the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, where she taught sculpture and ceramics until 1991. Throughout her career, Wilke gave workshops as a visiting artist, participated in panels and conferences about womens’ art, and lectured extensively.

Wilke exhibited woodcuts in 1961 in the “Annual Graphics Show” at the Philadelphia Print Club, and in 1966 her prints and drawings were included in the “3-D Group Show” at the Castagno Gallery in New York. Her androgynous and vaginal terra cotta sculptures were first shown in 1967 in “Erotic Art” at Nycata, New York.

Wilke’s early ceramic sculptures were exhibited in New York in 1971 at the Richard Feigen Gallery
in two group shows: “Americans” and “10 Painters and 1 Sculptor.” Hannah Wilke was the sculptor.
In 1972, her work was included in “American Women Artists” at the Kunsthaus, Berlin, and in Documenta V, Kassel, W. Germany.

Wilke had her first one-woman gallery exhibitions in 1972 at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, and Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles. In 1973, she received a C.A.P.S. grant for sculpture and her latex wall piece, “In Memory of My Feelings,” was included in the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. One-woman shows of drawings, collage, ceramics, and kneaded eraser and latex sculpture followed at Margo Leavin in 1974, 1975, and 1976 and at Ronald Feldman in 1974 and 1975, when Wilke began to show her photographic work,

In 1975, Wilke exhibited her work in Paris at Galerie Gerald Piltzer in “5 American Women in Paris.”
“Hannah Wilke: Scarification Photographs and Videotapes,” Wilke’s first one-woman exhibition in a public institution, was held in 1976 at the Fine Arts Gallery, University of California, Irvine, and that year she received a grant for sculpture from the National Endowment for the Arts. One-woman exhibitions followed at Marianne Deson Gallery, Chicago, 1977; P.S. 1, New York, 1978; and Washington Project for the Arts, Washington, D.C., 1979.

Throughout the 1970’s, Wilke continued to exhibit her work in group shows such as “Anonymous Was a Woman,” Cal Arts, 1974; “Artists Make Toys,” The Clocktower, New York, 1975; and “Feministische Kunst,” De Appel, Amsterdam, 1978. In 1979, Wilke received matching grants for sculpture from the National Endowment for the Arts and Ohio University, Athens, Ohio, where, as a visiting artist, she created her signature vaginal sculptures in bronze.

During the 1970’s, Wilke began doing performance art, much of which she made into photographic and video work. In 1974, she performed “Gestures” for videotape and “Hannah Wilke Super-t-Art” live in “Soup and Tart” at the Kitchen, New York. In 1975, “Hello Boys” was performed and videotaped in Paris, and she exhibited “Intercourse with…,” a text and audio installation of her answering machine messages which she had been recording for several years. In 1976, Wilke created “My Country-’tis of Thee,” a performance and installation at the Albright Knox Gallery in Buffalo, New York. In 1977,
her live performance, “Intercourse with…,” was videotaped at the London Art Gallery, London, Ontario, and she performed “Hannah Wilke Through the Large Glass” in front of Duchamp’s “Large Glass” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In 1979, she did her first performance of “So Help Me Hannah” and exhibited photographs from that series at P.S. 1 in Queens, New York.

In 1980, Wilke received an NEA grant for performance and matching grants for sculpture from Alaska Council for the Arts and the University of Alaska. That year she exhibited work in “A Decade of Women’s Performance,” an exhibition at the College Art Association, New Orleans, and was included in “American Women Artists,” Museo de Art Contemporani, Sao Paulo, Brazil. In 1982, Wilke received the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in Sculpture.

During the 1980’s, Wilke exhibited her work in two solo shows at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, notably, in 1984, “Support, Foundation, Comfort,” an exhibition in memory of her mother, Selma Butter. That year, she had a solo exhibition at Joseph Gross Gallery, University of Arizona, Tuscon. Wilke was also included in group exhibitions such as “Androgyny and Art,” Emily Lowe Gallery, Hofstra University, 1982; and “Art & Ideology,” The New Museum, New York, and “American Women Artists,” Sidney Janis Gallery, New York, both in 1984. In 1988, her work was included in “Modes of Address: Language in Art Since 1960” at the Whitney Museum, New York, and in “Marcel Duchamp and the Avant-Garde” at Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany. In 1989, her work was exhibitied in “Women Making their Mark” at the Cincinnatti Art Museum.

Hannah Wilke was diagnosed with lymphoma in 1987 and underwent extensive treatment including a bone marrow transplant. Her first major retrospective exhibition, “Hannah Wilke: A Retrospective” was held at Gallery 210, University of Missouri, St. Louis, in 1989. Another solo exhibition was held at Genovese Gallery, Boston, in 1990. She received Pollock-Krasner Grants for Art in 1987 and 1992, and, during the last years of her life, continued to make art: “B.C.,” a series of watercolor self-portraits; “Brushstrokes,” drawings made from her own hair as it fell out during chemotherapy; and “IntraVenus” hand and face drawings, photographs and videotapes. She died on January, 28, 1993.

“IntraVenus,” the group of monumental photographs documenting her final illness and treatment was exhibited posthumously at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts in 1994 and traveled to Yerba Buena Arts Center, San Francisco; Santa Monica Museum; Weatherspoon Art Gallery, Greensboro, NC; Woodruff Gallery, Atlanta, GA; Nikolai Contemporary Art Center, Copenhagen; and the Tokyo Museum of Photography. “Intra Venus” received First Place Award in 1994 and 1996 for best show in an art gallery from the International Association of Art Critics (U.S.Section).

Since her death, work from Hannah Wilke’s estate was exhibited nationally and internationally. Group exhibitions include “Abject Art,” the Whitney Museum, 1993; “Outside the Frame,” Cleveland Center for the Arts, and “Power, Pleasure, Pain,” Fogg Art Museum, Boston, 1994; “Masculin/feminin,” Centre Pompidou, Paris, and “Action/Performance and the Photograph,” Allen Art Museum, Oberlin, Ohio, 1995; and, in 1996, “Too Jewish?” the Jewish Museum, New York, “More than Minimal,” Rose Art Museum, Boston, and “Sexual Politics,” Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. In 1998, Wilke’s work was included in “Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

“Hannah Wilke: Works from 1965-92,” a posthumous one-woman exhibition was held at Gallery 400, University of Illinois, Chicago, in 1996. “Hannah Wilke,” a posthumous retrospective of Wilke’s work was shown at the Nikolai Art Center, Copenhagen, in 1998, and traveled to Bildmuseum, Umea, Sweden and Helsinki City Art Museum. “Interrupted Career,” a one-woman survey, was held at Neue Gesellschaft fur Bildende Kunst, Berlin, in 2000.

The Hannah Wilke Collection & Archive, Los Angeles, was created in 1999 following the distribution of Wilke’s estate to her family. Since then, two solo exhibitions, “Hannah Wilke: Selected Work:1960-92,” in 2004, and “Advertisements for Living,” in 2006, were held at SolwayJones Gallery, Los Angeles.

In 2005, “The Rhetoric of the Pose,” a survey of Wilke work in the Hannah Wilke Collection & Archive, was mounted at the Mary Porter Sesnon Gallery at UC Santa Cruz in conjuction with a conference sponsored by the Center for Advanced Feminist Studies. Work in the collection is being shown in national and international group exhibitions, and, in 2007, was included in WACK!, a survey of feminist art that originated at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

http://www.hannahwilke.com/id10.html

When the subject is strong, simplicity is the only way to treat it.

Happy Birthday Jacob Lawrence

A celebrated painter, storyteller, and interpreter of the African-American experience, Jacob Lawrence was born in Atlantic City in 1917 to a couple who had moved from the rural South to find a better life in the North. After their parents separated, Lawrence and his two younger siblings lived in settlement houses and foster homes in Philadelphia until their mother could support them in New York. He came to New York in 1930, at the age of thirteen, and quickly discovered art as a means of expression. Lawrence’s education in art was both informal—observing the activity and rhythms of the streets of Harlem—and formal, in after-school community workshops at Utopia House and later at the Harlem Art Workshop. At both centers he was able to study with the prominent artist, Charles Alston, and in the course of his work, he became immersed in the cultural activity and fervor of the artists and writers who led the Harlem Renaissance, Alston among them. Lawrence received a scholarship to the American Artists School, and he began to gain some notice for his dramatic and lively portrayals of both contemporary scenes of African-American urban life as well as historical events, all of which he depicted in crisp shapes, bright, clear colors, dynamic patterns, and through revealing posture and gestures. Lawrence’s mother had hoped he would choose a career in civil service, but members of the creative community, including poet Claude McKay and sculptor Augusta Savage, encouraged him to become an artist. He was painting, he said, “a portrait of myself,” in his portraits of the Harlem community. In 1938, Lawrence had his first solo exhibition at the Harlem YMCA and started working in the easel painting division of the WPA Federal Art Project. In 1940, he received a grant from the Rosenwald Foundation to create a series of images on the migration of African-Americans from the South. The painter Gwendolyn Knight assisted him on the captions for the images and initial coating of the panels. They married in 1941. The same year The Migration of the Negro series had its debut at the Downtown Gallery. Lawrence was the first artist of color to be represented by a major New York gallery, and the success of this exhibition gave him national prominence.

Lawrence was active as both a painter and art educator. He taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina in 1946, and later at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine and the New School for Social Research in New York. In 1971, Lawrence became a professor of painting at the University of Washington in Seattle. In his later career he was also known for his serigraphs (silkscreens), many of them versions of series of paintings completed in earlier years, as well as for his book illustrations. Lawrence was still drawing and painting in preparation for still another series of works when he died in Seattle in 2000.

http://www.phillipscollection.org/american_art/bios/lawrence-bio.htm

Art is a guarantee of sanity. That is the most important thing I have said.

Louise Bourgeois

Louise Bourgeois was born on December 25, 1911, in Paris. As a teenager, Bourgeois assisted her parents in their tapestry-restoration business, making drawings that indicated to the weavers the repairs to be made. In 1932, she entered the Sorbonne to study mathematics, but abandoned that discipline for art. In the mid- to late 1930s, she studied at the École des Beaux-Arts, Académie de la Grande-Chaumière, École du Louvre, Atelier Fernand Léger, and other Parisian schools. In 1938, Bourgeois married an American, the art historian Robert Goldwater, and moved to New York. There, she studied for two years at the Art Students League and was soon participating in print exhibitions.

After moving to a new apartment in 1941, Bourgeois began to make large wood sculptures on the roof of her building. In 1945, her first solo show, comprised of twelve paintings, was held at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery in New York and her work was first included in the Whitney Annual (later the Whitney Biennial). In the mid- to late 1940s, she worked at Stanley William Hayter’s printshop, Atelier 17, where she met Le Corbusier, Joan Miró, and other Europeans exiled by World War II. In 1949, she exhibited works from her Personage series in the first show of her sculpture, at Peridot Gallery in New York.

In 1951, Bourgeois became an American citizen. Continuing her mode of abstracted figuration instilled with psychological and symbolic content, she remained stylistically distinct from New York School developments. She did, however, join American Abstract Artists in 1954. In the 1960s, she taught in public schools and at Brooklyn College and Pratt Institute in New York. She would continue to teach at colleges and universities during the following decade. In the late 1960s, Bourgeois’s imagery became more explicitly sexual as she explored the relationship between men and women and the emotional impact of her troubled childhood (her father had had a ten-year affair with her governess). From 1967 until 1972, she made trips to Pietrasanta, Italy, to work in marble.

With the rise of feminism and the art world’s new pluralism, her work found a wider audience. In the 1970s, she began to do Performance [more] pieces—among them A Banquet/A Fashion Show of Body Parts (1978), in which she wrapped art historians and students in white drapery with sewn-in anatomical forms—and expanded the scale of her three-dimensional work to large environments.

The first retrospective of Bourgeois’s work was organized by the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1982–83), and her first European retrospective was assembled by the Frankfurter Kunstverein (1989). Bourgeois was selected to be the American representative to the 1993 Venice Biennale. Her collected writings were published in 1998. In 2000, three thirty-foot-high towers by Bourgeois, commissioned by the Tate Modern in London—I Do, I Undo, and I Redo—were featured in that museum’s inaugural exhibition. Many of her large-scale works have been exhibited as public art, including three spider sculptures installed at Rockefeller Center in New York in 2001 under the aegis of the Public Art Fund.

Bourgeois’s achievements have been recognized with, among other honors, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (1973), membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1981), a grand prize in sculpture from the French Ministry of Culture (1991), and the National Medal of Arts (1997). Bourgeois lives and works in Manhattan.

http://www.guggenheimcollection.org/site/artist_bio_21.html

Art is not a pastime but a priesthood.

Jean Cocteau

The French poet, writer, artist, and film maker Jean Maurice Eugene Clement Cocteau was born to a wealthy family on July 5, 1889 in a small town near Paris, France. Cocteau’s father committed suicide when he was about 10 years old.

In 1900, he entered a private school and was expelled in 1904. After his expulsion from school, Cocteau ran away to Marseilles where he lived in the “red light district” under a false name. Police discovered him in Marseilles and returned him to his uncle’s care.

At the age of 17 or 18, Cocteau fell in love with an actress named Madeleine Carlier. She was 30 years old at the time. She later ended the relationship.

In 1908, Cocteau associated himself with Edouard de Max. De Max was a reigning tragedian of Paris stage at this time. De Max encouraged Cocteau to write and on April 4 of that year rented the Theatre Femina for the premiere of the young writer’s poetry.

In 1909, Cocteau met the Russian impresario Sergey Daighilev who ran the Ballets Russes. Daighilev encouraged Cocteau to venture into the genre of ballet. The Russian challenged Cocteau to “Ettonne-moi” (Surprise me). The remark pushed Cocteau to write the libretto for an exotic ballet called Le Dieu Bleu. During this time, Cocteau also met composer Igor Stravinsky who was working on his composition The Rite of Spring. In the spring of 1914, Cocteau visited Stravinsky in Switzerland. It was during this visit that Cocteau finished his first book, Le Potomak.

The First World War broke out in the summer of 1914 and though Cocteau never served in the military, he did help run an ambulance service. He acquainted himself with a group of marines. Cocteau was arrested and returned to civilian life in 1915.

In 1917, he met Pablo Picasso. Cocteau and Picasso went to Rome where they met up with Diaghilev. At this point, Cocteau helped prepare the ballet Parade. Picasso designed the sets, Erik Satie wrote the music, and the ballet was choreographed by Leonide Massine. The Paris opening in May of that year was a disaster. A few years later the ballet was successful.

After the war Cocteau continued his association with several well known artists. He founded a publishing house called Editions de la Sirene. The company published Cocteau’s writings and many musical scores of Stravinsky, Satie and a group of composers known as Les Six.

In 1918, Cocteau formed an intimate friendship with a 15 year old novelist, Raymond Radiguet. Radiguet strongly influenced Cocteau’s art and life. The young writer would die from typhoid fever in 1923. His death was a severe blow to Cocteau and drove him to use opium. During Cocteau’s recovery from his opium addiction, the artist created some of his most important works including the stage play Orphee, the novel, Les Enfants terribles, and many long poems.

In 1930 Cocteau’s first film, Blood of a Poet was released. The film was a commentary on his own private mythology. Cocteau designed the work concerning the adventures of a young poet condemned to walk the halls of the Hotel of Dramatic Follies for his crime of having brought a statue to life. In the early 1930’s, Cocteau wrote what some believe is his greatest play, La Machine Infernal. The play was a treatment of the Oedipus theme. Cocteau also wrote La voix humaine(1930, The Human Voice), Les chevaliers de la table rounde (1937, The Knights of the Round Table), Les parents terribles (1938, Intimate Relations), and La machine a ecrire (1941, The Typewriter).

During the next 15 years the artist’s work lapsed. One reason for this is his recurring addiction to opium. His return to work in the early 1940’s was primarily due to the influence of his close friend, actor Jean Marais.

In 1945, Cocteau directed his adaptation of La Belle et la Bete (Beauty and the Beast). The film marked a triumphant return of Cocteau to the screen. Marais starred in the film as the Beast, Beauty’s suitor, and the Prince.

In the late 1940’s, Cocteau adapted two of his plays to film; The Eagle with Two Heads and The Storm Within.

In 1950, Cocteau directed the film Orpheus which again starred Marais. This time the theme revolves around a poet beset by artistic and romantic rivals. When his wife dies, Orpheus descends to Hell to rescue her. In Hell, Orpheus’ fate is determined before a tribunal. Also in 1950, Cocteau used his artists’ eye to decorate the Villa Santo Sospir in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat and begin a series of graphic works.

In 1954, on the death of his friend Collette, the novelist, Cocteau took her place in the Belgian Academy. In 1955, he was elected to the French Academy.

In 1959, Cocteau made his last film as a director, The Testament of Orpheus. The elaborate home movie stars Cocteau and also features cameos from many celebrities including Pablo Picasso, Yul Brynner and Jean-Pierre Leaud.

The artist died of a heart attack at age 74 at his chateau in Milly-la-Foret, France on October 11, 1963 after hearing the news of the death of another friend, the singer Edith Piaf.

http://www.netcomuk.co.uk/~lenin/jean_cocteau_biogra.html

Life is what we make it, always has been, always will be.

Grandma Moses

Anna Mary Robertson (Grandma Moses) was born on September 7, 1860 in Greenwich New York. She spent most of her life as a farmer’s wife and raising her five children. She didn’t become serious about painting until she was in her mid seventies.

Up until that time, she enjoyed embroidery work with colorful scenes on canvas but when her hands became stiff with arthritis, she switched to painting. Her first picture was painted on a piece of canvas with house paint.

In 1938 when she was almost eighty, Louis J. Caldor, an art collector noticed her work in a drugstore window and bought her first paintings. In 1939, Otto Kallir, art dealer first exhibited her scenes of rural life at his Gallerie Saint-Etienne in New York City. Her one-woman show brought national recognition.

Gimbel’s Department Store invited Grandma to New York to see a display of her painting at a Thanksgiving festival. Here she met many people who were fascinated by her paintings and by 1941 she received New York state prize for one of her paintings, “The Old Oaken Bucket.” In 1949, President Harry S. Truman presented her with the Women’s National Press Club Award for outstanding accomplishment in art.

In 1955, the news reporter Edward R. Murrow invited her on his TV show, See It Now. People watched the TV screen as Grandma painted a picture from her house. She sat at an old table and painted on masonite, a thin hard board. “I like to paint old-timey things,” she said.

Her work is called primitive art, a simple and clear style and her theme was American rural life. Many primitive artists have not had formal training yet seem to paint in a natural way. Grandma drew from her memory and captured activities such as capturing the Thanksgiving turkey, Halloween night on the farm and having a family reunion picnic.

At age 100, she illustrated an edition of The Night Before Christmas by Clement Moore and the book was published after her death. Grandma Moses died on December 13, 1961. She lived to be 101 and in the last year of her life painted twenty-five pictures.

http://www.essortment.com/all/informationong_ooc.htm

Although idea and form are ultimately paramount in my work, so too are chance, accident, and rawness.

 Martin Puryear

Martin Puryear was born in Washington, D.C., in 1941. In his youth, he studied crafts and learned how to build guitars, furniture, and canoes through practical training and instruction. After earning his BA from Catholic University in Washington D.C., Puryear joined the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone, and later attended the Swedish Royal Academy of Art. He received an MFA in sculpture from Yale University in 1971. Puryear’s objects and public installations—in wood, stone, tar, wire, and various metals—are a marriage of Minimalist logic with traditional ways of making. Puryear’s evocative, dreamlike explorations in abstract forms retain vestigial elements of utility from everyday objects found in the world. In “Ladder for Booker T. Washington,” Puryear built a spindly, meandering ladder out of jointed ash wood. More than thirty-five feet tall, the ladder narrows toward the top, creating a distorted sense of perspective that evokes an unattainable or illusionary goal. In the massive stone piece, “Untitled,” Puryear enlisted a local stonemason to help him construct a building-like structure on a ranch in Northern California. On one side of the work is an eighteen-foot-high wall—on the other side, an inexplicable stone bulge. A favorite form that occurs in Puryear’s work, the thick-looking stone bulge is surprisingly hollow, coloring the otherwise sturdy shape with qualities of uncertainty, emptiness, and loss. Martin Puryear represented the United States at the São Paolo Bienal in 1989, where his exhibition won the Grand Prize. Puryear is the recipient of numerous awards, including a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Award, a Louis Comfort Tiffany Grant, and the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture. Puryear was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1992 and received an honorary doctorate from Yale University in 1994. Martin Puryear lives and works in the Hudson Valley region of New York.

http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/puryear/index.html

The artist has to be exactly the opposite [of people singing the song, I’ve gotta be Me,] and transcend himself as he makes judgements.

Happy Birthday Romare Bearden

Romare Howard Bearden was born on September 2, 1911, to (Richard) Howard and Bessye Bearden in Charlotte, North Carolina, and died in New York City on March 12, 1988, at the age of 76. His life and art are marked by exceptional talent, encompassing a broad range of intellectual and scholarly interests, including music, performing arts, history, literature and world art. Bearden was also a celebrated humanist, as demonstrated by his lifelong support of young, emerging artists.

Romare Bearden began college at Lincoln University, transferred to Boston University and completed his studies at New York University (NYU), graduating with a degree in education. While at NYU, Bearden took extensive courses in art and was a lead cartoonist and then art editor for the monthly journal The Medley. He had also been art director of Beanpot, the student humor magazine of Boston University. Bearden published many journal covers during his university years and the first of numerous texts he would write on social and artistic issues. He also attended the Art Students League in New York and later, the Sorbonne in Paris. In 1935, Bearden became a weekly editorial cartoonist for the Baltimore Afro-American, which he continued doing until 1937.

After joining the Harlem Artists Guild, Bearden embarked on his lifelong study of art, gathering inspiration from Western masters ranging from Duccio, Giotto and de Hooch to Cezanne, Picasso and Matisse, as well as from African art (particularly sculpture, masks and textiles), Byzantine mosaics, Japanese prints and Chinese landscape paintings.

From the mid-1930s through 1960s, Bearden was a social worker with the New York City Department of Social Services, working on his art at night and on weekends. His success as an artist was recognized with his first solo exhibition in Harlem in 1940 and his first solo show in Washington, DC, in 1944. Bearden was a prolific artist whose works were exhibited during his lifetime throughout the United States and Europe. His collages, watercolors, oils, photomontages and prints are imbued with visual metaphors from his past in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, Pittsburgh and Harlem and from a variety of historical, literary and musical sources.

In 1954, Bearden married Nanette Rohan, with whom he spent the rest of his life. In the early 1970s, he and Nanette established a second residence on the Caribbean island of St. Martin, his wife’s ancestral home, and some of his later work reflected the island’s lush landscapes. Among his many friends, Bearden had close associations with such distinguished artists, intellectuals and musicians as James Baldwin, Stuart Davis, Duke Ellington, Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, Joan Miró, George Grosz, Alvin Ailey and Jacob Lawrence.

Bearden was also a respected writer and an eloquent spokesman on artistic and social issues of the day. Active in many arts organizations, in 1964 Bearden was appointed the first art director of the newly established Harlem Cultural Council, a prominent African-American advocacy group. He was involved in founding several important art venues, such as The Studio Museum in Harlem and the Cinque Gallery. Initially funded by the Ford Foundation, Bearden and the artists Norman Lewis and Ernest Crichlow established Cinque to support younger minority artists. Bearden was also one of the founding members of the Black Academy of Arts and Letters in 1970 and was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1972.

Recognized as one of the most creative and original visual artists of the twentieth century, Romare Bearden had a prolific and distinguished career. He experimented with many different mediums and artistic styles, but is best known for his richly textured collages, two of which appeared on the covers of Fortune and Time magazines, in 1968. An innovative artist with diverse interests, Bearden also designed costumes and sets for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, and programs, sets and designs for Nanette Bearden’s Contemporary Dance Theatre.

Among Bearden’s numerous publications are: A History of African American Artists: From 1792 to the Present, which was coauthored with Harry Henderson and published posthumously in 1993; The Caribbean Poetry of Derek Walcott and the Art of Romare Bearden (1983); Six Black Masters of American Art, coauthored with Harry Henderson (1972); The Painter’s Mind: A Study of the Relations of Structure and Space in Painting, coauthored with Carl Holty (1969); and Li’l Dan, the Drummer Boy: A Civil War Story, a children’s book published posthumously in September 2003.

Bearden’s work is included in many important public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and The Studio Museum in Harlem, among others. He has had retrospectives at the Mint Museum of Art (1980), the Detroit Institute of the Arts (1986), as well as numerous posthumous retrospectives, including The Studio Museum in Harlem (1991) and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (2003).

Bearden was the recipient of many awards and honors throughout his lifetime. Honorary doctorates were given by Pratt Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Davidson College and Atlanta University, to name but a few. He received the Mayor’s Award of Honor for Art and Culture in New York City in 1984.

http://www.beardenfoundation.org/artlife/biography/biography.shtml

A mind always employed is always happy.

Happy Labor Day ~ Thomas Jefferson

This powerful advocate of liberty was born in 1743 in Albemarle County, Virginia, inheriting from his father, a planter and surveyor, some 5,000 acres of land, and from his mother, a Randolph, high social standing. He studied at the College of William and Mary, then read law. In 1772 he married Martha Wayles Skelton, a widow, and took her to live in his partly constructed mountaintop home, Monticello.

Freckled and sandy-haired, rather tall and awkward, Jefferson was eloquent as a correspondent, but he was no public speaker. In the Virginia House of Burgesses and the Continental Congress, he contributed his pen rather than his voice to the patriot cause. As the “silent member” of the Congress, Jefferson, at 33, drafted the Declaration of Independence. In years following he labored to make its words a reality in Virginia. Most notably, he wrote a bill establishing religious freedom, enacted in 1786.

Jefferson succeeded Benjamin Franklin as minister to France in 1785. His sympathy for the French Revolution led him into conflict with Alexander Hamilton when Jefferson was Secretary of State in President Washington’s Cabinet. He resigned in 1793.

Sharp political conflict developed, and two separate parties, the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans, began to form. Jefferson gradually assumed leadership of the Republicans, who sympathized with the revolutionary cause in France. Attacking Federalist policies, he opposed a strong centralized Government and championed the rights of states.

As a reluctant candidate for President in 1796, Jefferson came within three votes of election. Through a flaw in the Constitution, he became Vice President, although an opponent of President Adams. In 1800 the defect caused a more serious problem. Republican electors, attempting to name both a President and a Vice President from their own party, cast a tie vote between Jefferson and Aaron Burr. The House of Representatives settled the tie. Hamilton, disliking both Jefferson and Burr, nevertheless urged Jefferson’s election.

When Jefferson assumed the Presidency, the crisis in France had passed. He slashed Army and Navy expenditures, cut the budget, eliminated the tax on whiskey so unpopular in the West, yet reduced the national debt by a third. He also sent a naval squadron to fight the Barbary pirates, who were harassing American commerce in the Mediterranean. Further, although the Constitution made no provision for the acquisition of new land, Jefferson suppressed his qualms over constitutionality when he had the opportunity to acquire the Louisiana Territory from Napoleon in 1803.

During Jefferson’s second term, he was increasingly preoccupied with keeping the Nation from involvement in the Napoleonic wars, though both England and France interfered with the neutral rights of American merchantmen. Jefferson’s attempted solution, an embargo upon American shipping, worked badly and was unpopular.

Jefferson retired to Monticello to ponder such projects as his grand designs for the University of Virginia. A French nobleman observed that he had placed his house and his mind “on an elevated situation, from which he might contemplate the universe.”

He died on July 4, 1826.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/history/presidents/tj3.html

You can never learn less, you can only learn more.

Richard Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller

Fuller was born on July 12, 1895, in Milton, Massachusetts, the son of Richard Buckminster Fuller and Caroline Wolcott Andrews, and also the grandnephew of the American Transcendentalist Margaret Fuller. He attended Froebelian Kindergarten. Spending his youth on Bear Island, in Penobscot Bay off the coast of Maine, he was a boy with a natural propensity for design and construction. He often made things from materials he brought home from the woods, and sometimes made his own tools. He experimented with designing a new apparatus for human propulsion of small boats. Years later, he decided that this sort of experience had provided him with not only an interest in design, but a habit of being fully familiar and knowledgeable about the materials that his later projects would require. Fuller earned a machinist’s certification, and knew how to use the press brake, stretch press, and other tools and equipment used in the sheet metal trade.

Fuller was sent to Milton Academy, in Massachusetts, and then began studying at Harvard, but was expelled from the university twice: first for entertaining an entire dance troupe, and then, after having been readmitted, for his “irresponsibility and lack of interest”. By his own appraisal, he was a non-conforming misfit in the fraternity environment.Many years later, however, he would receive a Sc.D. from Bates College in Lewiston, Maine.

Between his sessions at Harvard, Fuller worked in Canada as a mechanic in a textile mill, and later as a labourer in the meat-packing industry. He also served in the U.S. Navy in World War I, as a shipboard radio operator, as an editor of a publication, and as a crash-boat commander. After discharge, he returned to the meat packing industry, where he acquired management experience. In 1917, he married Anne Hewlett. In the early 1920s, he and his father-in-law developed the Stockade Building System for producing light-weight, weatherproof, and fireproof housing – although the company would ultimately fail. In 1927, at the age of 32, bankrupt and jobless, living in inferior housing in Chicago, Illinois, Fuller lost his young daughter Alexandra to complications from polio and spinal meningitis. He felt responsible, and this drove him to drink and to the verge of suicide. At the last moment, he decided instead to embark on “an experiment, to find what a single individual [could] contribute to changing the world and benefiting all humanity”.

By 1928, Fuller was living in Greenwich Village and spending a lot of time at Romany Marie’s, where he had spent a fascinating evening in conversation with Marie and Eugene O’Neill several years earlier. Fuller took on the interior decoration of the café in exchange for meals, giving informal lectures several times a week, and models of the Dymaxion house were exhibited at the café. Isamu Noguchi appeared on the scene in 1929 –Constantin Brâncuşi, an old friend of Marie’s, had directed him there – and Noguchi and Fuller were soon collaborating on several projects, including the modelling of the Dymaxion car. It was the beginning of their lifelong friendship.

Fuller taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina during the summers of 1948 and 1949, serving as its Summer Institute director in 1949. There, with the support of a group of professors and students, he began work on the project that would make him famous and revolutionize the field of engineering: the geodesic dome. One of the early models was first constructed in 1945 at Bennington College in Vermont, where he frequently lectured. In 1949, he erected the world’s first geodesic dome building that could sustain its own weight with no practical limits. It was 4.3 meters (14 ft) in diameter and constructed of aluminium aircraft tubing and a vinyl-plastic skin, in the form of a tetrahedron. To prove his design, and to awe non-believers, Fuller hung from the structure’s framework with several students who had helped him build it. The U.S. government recognized the importance of the discovery, and employed him to make small domes for the army. Within a few years there were thousands of these domes around the world.

For the next half-century, Fuller contributed a wide range of ideas, designs and inventions to the world, particularly in the areas of practical, inexpensive shelter and transportation. He documented his life, philosophy and ideas scrupulously in a daily diary (later called the Dymaxion Chronofile), and in twenty-eight publications. Fuller financed some of his experiments with inherited funds, sometimes augmented by funds invested by his collaborators, one example being the Dymaxion Car project.

The Montreal Biosphère by Buckminster Fuller, 1967 International recognition came with the success of his huge geodesic domes in the 1950s. Fuller taught at Washington University in St. Louis in 1955, where he met James Fitzgibbon, who would become a close friend and colleague. From 1959 to 1970, Fuller taught at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Beginning as an assistant professor, he gained full professorship in 1968, in the School of Art and Design. Working as a designer, scientist, developer, and writer, he lectured for many years around the world. He collaborated at SIU with the designer John McHale. In 1965 Fuller inaugurated the World Design Science Decade (1965 to 1975) at the meeting of the International Union of Architects in Paris, which was, in his own words, devoted to “applying the principles of science to solving the problems of humanity”.

Fuller believed human societies would soon rely mainly on renewable sources of energy, such as solar- and wind-derived electricity. He hoped for an age of “omni-successful education and sustenance of all humanity”.

Fuller was awarded 28 US patents and many honorary doctorates. On January 16, 1970, he received the Gold Medal award from the American Institute of Architects, and also received numerous other awards.

Richard Buckminster Fuller died on July 1, 1983, at the age of 87, a guru of the design, architecture, and ‘alternative’ communities, such as Drop City, the community of experimental artists to whom he awarded the 1966 “Dymaxion Award” for “poetically economic” domed living structures. In the period leading up to his death, his wife had been lying comatose in a Los Angeles hospital, dying of cancer. It was while visiting her there that he exclaimed, at a certain point: “She is squeezing my hand!” He then stood up, suffered a heart attack and died an hour later. His wife died 36 hours after he did. He is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckminster_Fuller

To give a body and a perfect form to one’s thought, this – and only this – is to be an artist.

Happy Birthday Jacques Louis David

Jacques Louis David was born in Paris and first studied with Francois Boucher,
whose influence may be seen in his works until 1770. In 1768, however, David had begun his studies with the Neoclassicist Joseph Marie Vien. A two-time winner of the Prix de Rome, David did not go to Italy until 1775. He remained for five years, studying the works of Caravaggio and other seventeenth-century Italian Baroque artists. David attracted much attention in Rome for the realistic vigor of his series of strong portraits. He became more and more deeply involved, while in Rome, in the Neoclassical aesthetics of Vien, Anton Raphael Mengs, Johann Winckelmann, and Benjamin West. David studied antique sculpture and ancient history and began to choose his subjects from the latter. The work that became the manifesto of Neoclassicism, the “Oath of the Horatii”, was painted in 1784-85, on a second visit to Rome. In this and in his next great work, “The Death of Socrates”, painted in Paris with figures inspired by classical statues and compositions taken from Roman bas-reliefs, David added two Caravaggiesque touches: sharp lighting that casts clear shadows, and realistic detail. David’s art, embodying the ancient civic virtues, became the symbol of the Revolution and its aesthetic doctrines.

David was also active in the political side of the French Revolution where, from about 1787, he was the arbiter of taste and design in
furniture, clothing, and the stage, as actors began to pose in groups similar to those in his paintings. He brought about the downfall of the French Royal Academy, thus freeing artists from its narrow tradition. He taught more than sixty pupils and was imitated by scores of artists. In 1793 David painted the realistic “Death of Marat”, a powerful painting closer to the sensibilities of a Caravaggio than to those of antique sculpture. In 1794, while briefly imprisoned, he did a naturalistic landscape view of the Luxembourg Gardens. An enthusiastic Bonapartist, David became the first painter to the Emperor, an officer in the Legion of Honor, and a member of the Institute. With the restoration of the Bourbons, however, he was banished to Belgium for having voted for the death of Louis XVI and it was there that he died. David’s strong sculptural painting had replaced the delicate and artificial style of the eighteenth century. Although his strict classicism held back the rise of the Romantic School, he stimulated such artists as Gros and Géricault in their free choice of subjects and in their passionate seriousness. He was thus an important force in the evolution of modern painting.

http://www.vangoghgallery.com/artistbios/Jacques-Louis_David.html