March 9, 2013
David Černý [chair-nee] (b. 1967) is a controversial Czech sculptor. He gained notoriety in 1991 by painting a Soviet tank pink, to serve as a war memorial in central Prague.
As the Monument to Soviet tank crews was still a national cultural monument at that time, his act of civil disobedience was considered ‘hooliganism’ and he was briefly arrested. Another of his conspicuous contributions to Prague is ‘Tower Babies,’ a series of cast figures of crawling infants attached to Žižkov Television Tower. For the 2012 Summer Olympics Černý created ‘London Booster’ – a double decker bus with mechanical arms for doing push-ups.
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February 26, 2013
Alex Gross (b. 1968) is a visual artist currently working in Los Angeles; he specializes in oil paintings on canvas whose themes include globalization, commerce, great beauty, dark mayhem, and the remorseless passage of time. Alex graduated in 1990 from Art Center College of Design, in Pasadena, California. Since then, he has become established as an artist in the Pop Surrealism movement (e.g. lowbrow).
In 2000, he received a fellowship from the Japan Foundation; he spent two months traveling throughout Japan, researching and collecting a wide variety of Japanese Fine and Commercial art, as research for his own artwork. Part of his collection was compiled and published by Taschen under the title ‘Japanese Beauties’ in 2004.
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February 26, 2013
Yuko Shimizu is a Japanese illustrator based in New York City. Among comic fans, she is best known for her ongoing monthly covers for ‘The Unwritten’ and her cover art for P. Craig Russell’s comic book adaptations of Neil Gaiman’s ‘The Sandman: The Dream Hunters,’ published by Vertigo (DC Comics). Her self-titled monograph was published by Gestalten in the fall of 2011, and her children’s book, ‘Barbed Wire Baseball,’ written by Marissa Moss, is scheduled to be published by Abrams Books in the spring of 2013. She has been a faculty member at the School of Visual Arts since 2003.
She graduated from Waseda University’s School of Commerce in 1988 as valedictorian and soon began her first job in the corporate PR department of one of Tokyo’s largest sogo shoshas (trading company). Eleven years later, she resigned and moved to New York City to pursue her childhood dream of becoming an artist. She set out to earn a second bachelor’s degree, this time in illustration at the School of Visual Arts. However, after finishing her sophomore year, she was accepted into the MFA Illustration as Visual Essay program. She graduated in May 2003.
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February 7, 2013
Steve Powers (b. 1968) is a New York City artist who at one time wrote graffiti in Philadelphia and New York under the name ESPO (‘Exterior Surface Painting Outreach’). Powers is from Philadelphia’s Overbrook neighborhood; he graduated from Robert E. Lamberton High School in 1987 and took classes at The Art Institute of Philadelphia and the University of the Arts. In 1994, he moved to New York with fellow writer and designer Ari Forman, in order to expand the reach of his magazine, ‘On the Go.’
ESPO’s work often blurred the lines of legality. For example, pieces like ‘Greetings from ESPOLand’ utilized the style of the Asbury Park Billboards and appeared to be a legitimate billboard. In 1997 ESPO began his most ambitious non-commissioned art. He painted on storefront grates in Fort Greene, Bedford-Stuyvesant, TriBeCa, and the South Bronx, covering the entire grate with white or silver paint and then using black to make each grate into a letter in his name.
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February 6, 2013
Marc Quinn (b. 1964) is a British artist and one of a loose group known as the Young British Artists. He is known for ‘Alison Lapper Pregnant’ (a sculpture of Alison Lapper, an English artist who was born without arms) and ‘Self’ (a sculpture of his head made with his own frozen blood). Quinn has used blood, ice, and faeces to make sculptures; his work sometimes refers to scientific developments.
Quinn’s oeuvre displays a preoccupation with the mutability of the body and the dualisms that define human life: spiritual and physical, surface and depth, cerebral and sexual. Quinn’s sculpture, paintings and drawings often deal with the distanced relationship we have with our bodies, highlighting how the conflict between the ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’ has a grip on the contemporary psyche. In 1999, Quinn began a series of marble sculptures of amputees as a way of re-reading the aspirations of Greek and Roman statuary and their depictions of an idealized whole.
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February 6, 2013
Daniel Edwards (born 1965) is a contemporary artist whose pieces address celebrity and popular culture in ways that have often stirred controversy. His work is generally accompanied by press releases. He includes the idea of promotion and associative fame in his own marketing of his art. His work includes a sculpture of the disembodied head of Ted Williams, a life-sized statue of Britney Spears giving birth while nude on her hands and knees on a bearskin rug (Edwards titled the piece ‘Monument to Pro-Life: The Birth of Sean Preston,’ explaining that it symbolized Spears’ decision to put childbirth ahead of her career; Britney Spears actually had a caesarean section), a bust of Senator Hillary Clinton, and a 25-foot (7.6 m) bust of Fidel Castro.
In an Associated Press interview, Edwards asserted that he incorporates celebrity stories because: ‘You’re bombarded with these stories. And there’s a thread that winds back to the art. That’s not a bad thing. People are interested in sex, and it works for art as well.’
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January 8, 2013
Packard Jennings (b. 1970) is an American artist who appropriates pop culture symbols and references to create new meaning using a variety of media including printmaking, sculpture, animation, video, and pamphleteering.
In his early career he modified billboards, a common practice of culture jammers. Jennings’s work often deals with the philosophy of anarchism, how it’s represented in the media, and the representation of a naive utopia primarily through primitivism, not to be confused with anarchism or anarchy.
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December 22, 2012
Ingri (1904 – 1980) and Edgar (1898 – 1986) Parin d’Aulaire [doe-lair] were married writers and illustrators of children’s books in the 20th century.
Using their research and travel experiences as inspiration, the husband and wife team produced 27 picture books for children. They also wrote and illustrated introductory books of Greek and Norse mythology.
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August 24, 2012
Voina (literally ‘War’) is a Russian street-art group known for their provocative and politically charged works of performance art. The group has had more than sixty members, including former and current students of the Rodchenko Moscow School of Photography, Moscow State University, and Tartu University. However, the group does not cooperate with state or private institutions, and is not supported by any Russian curators or gallerists.
The activities of Voina have ranged from street protests, symbolic pranks in public places, and performance-art happenings, to vandalism and destruction of public property. More than a dozen criminal cases have been brought against the group. According to its members, Voina has no formal leadership, and all members are considered equal. Conceptions are worked out by Oleg Vorotnikov (a.k.a. ‘Vor,’ ‘Thief ‘– the chief ideologist), Natalia Sokol (a.k.a. ‘Kozlyonok,’ ‘Goatling’ – the chief coordinator), Leonid Nikolayev (a.k.a. ‘Crazy Lenya’) and Alexei Plutser-Sarno (the chief media artist, the author of the group’s media art and texts).
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July 30, 2012
Victor Moscoso (b. 1936) is an artist best known for producing psychedelic rock posters/advertisements and underground comix in San Francisco during the 1960s and 1970s. Born in Spain, Moscoso was the first of the rock poster artists of the 1960s era with formal academic training and experience. After studying art at Cooper Union in New York City and at Yale University, he moved to San Francisco in 1959. There, he attended the San Francisco Art Institute, where he eventually became an instructor. Moscoso’s use of vibrating colors was influenced by painter Josef Albers, one of his teachers at Yale. He was the first of the rock poster artists to use photographic collage in many of his posters.
Professional lightning struck in the form of the psychedelic rock and roll poster for San Francisco’s dance halls and clubs. Moscoso’s posters for the Family Dog dance-concerts at the Avalon Ballroom and his Neon Rose posters for the Matrix resulted in international attention during the 1967 Summer of Love. Within a year, lightning struck again in the form of the underground comix. As one of the ‘Zap Comix’ artists, Moscoso’s work once again received international attention. Moscoso’s comix and poster work has continued up to the present and includes album covers for musicians such as Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Herbie Hancock, Jed Davis, and David Grisman.
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July 30, 2012
Bruce Conner (1933 – 2008) was an American artist renowned for his work in assemblage (artistic compositions made by putting together found objects) and film, among other disciplines. He attended Wichita University (now Wichita State), and received his B.F.A in Art at Nebraska University in 1956.
He then attended the University of Colorado on scholarship; also there was Jean Sandstedt, whom he had met at Nebraska and who would become his wife. In 1957 the two married and immediately flew to San Francisco. There, Conner quickly assimilated into the city’s famous Beat community and founded the Rat Bastard Protective Association, an underground, arts organization. His first solo shows in San Francisco, in 1958 and 1959, featured paintings, drawings, prints, collages, assemblages, and sculpture.
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July 27, 2012
Wayne White is an American artist, art director, cartoonist, and illustrator. He started his art career working as a cartoonist and illustrator for a number of publications including ‘The East Village Eye,’ ‘Raw,’ ‘The New York Times,’ and ‘The Village Voice.’ In 1986 he worked on ‘Pee Wee’s Playhouse’ where his work for his set and puppet designs won three Emmy awards; he also supplied a number of voices on the show.
Other television credits include production and set design for ‘Shining Time Station,’ ‘Riders in the Sky,’ ‘The Weird Al Show,’ and ‘Beakman’s World.’ He art directed two seminal music videos, Peter Gabriel’s ‘Big Time’ in 1986, and in 1996 he designed all the Georges Méliès inspired sets for the award-winning video for the Smashing Pumpkins, ‘Tonight, Tonight.’
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