I just wanted to remind the others, who work with material and not concept, that there are things in life that are exciting and satisfying and for a potter this is one. A loaded kiln waiting for the fire, beckoning for that lick of flame to impose a permanence on this delicate earthen surface. Do not forget that life is not a concept and neither is your work. Make sure that in the end it is still fun...

John Cage

John Cage was an American composer. Cage was a pioneer in the music scene and one of the leading figures in post-war avant-grade. He was one of the leading members in the Fluxus group. He was influenced by both of his teachers Henry Cowell and Arnold Schoenberg, but his primary influence was in the Eastern cultures. He studied Indian philosophy and Zen Buddhism. He worked with chance music, electronic music, and the non-standard use of musical instruments. He was a key person in the development of modern dance. He was best known for his 4'33?, the three movements of which are performed without a single note being played. A performance of 4'33? can be perceived as including the sounds of the environment that the listeners hear while it is performed, rather than merely as four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence.

Fluxus

Fluxus is a network of artists that is made up of composers and designers that are known for blending different artistic media and disciplines in the 1960s. They were seen as an intermediate group through their involvement with Neo-Dada noise music, literature, urban planning, architecture, visual art, and design. The groups’ early work explore the idea of chance in art. The Fluxus boxes that were organized with Geogre Maciunas. He was the one that gathered the printed cards, games, and ideas, then organized them into the small boxes. One of the ideas that was a part of Fluxus was that each person is their own composer, as well as the idea that art was created by the artist creating the work and “doing it” which was the art itself. Fluxus performances were usually brief and simple, which they called event scores. They were to be performances that sought to elevate the banal, to be mindful of the mundane, and to frustrate the high culture of academic and market-driven music and art.

Gutai group

Gutai group was an avant-garde Japanese artistic movement. It was founded by Jiro Yoshihara and Shozo Shimamoto in 1954. The name Gutai means concrete. The group was composed of Japanese artists. Jiro Yoshihara wrote the manifesto for the Gutai group in 1956. In the manifesto, it expresses a fascination with the beauty that arises when things become damaged or decayed. The process of damage or destruction is celebrated as a way of revealing the inner "life" of a given material or object: "Yet what is interesting in this respect is the novel beauty to be found in works of art and architecture of the past which have changed their appearance due to the damage of time or destruction by disasters in the course of the centuries. This is described as the beauty of decay, but is it not perhaps that beauty which material assumes when it is freed from artificial make-up and reveals its original characteristics? The fact that the ruins receive us warmly and kindly after all, and that they attract us with their cracks and flaking surfaces, could this not really be a sign of the material taking revenge, having recaptured its original life?" This group would later influence the Fluxus group.

Allan Kaprow

Allan Kaprow was an American painter and was one of the pioneering artists that established the concept of performing art. He helped create and develop the “environment” which installation art incorporates almost any media to create an experience which is the environment. He helped develop the term “ Happening” which is a performance, event, or situation meant to be considered as art. He created 200 performance pieces. He was influenced by the Fluxus group and installation art. His work started out a scripted pieces that were planned out. His work soon evolved and became looser in the planning of them. He also involved more everyday activities in his work to integrate art and life.

Yves Klein

Yves Klein was a French artist who was an important figure in post-war European art. His parents were both painters and were involved with the abstract movement in Paris. Klein was known for his monochrome paintings. He got his influence of Zen with the idea of a void. The void is a nirvana-like state that is void of worldly influences. His work can also be linked to performance art when he had his audience formally dress up and have models go around making the paintings with their bodies. As he was directing the piece, a monotone symphony played during the event. He was also known for the photograph “Leap Into the Void”, in which the artist is jumping off a wall with his arms stretched out while falling to the payment below the wall. He also did a series of fire painting where he would paint using a torch in his work. He would use this alone or paint before he would use the fire.

Carl Jung

Carl Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist, an influential thinker and the founder of analytical psychology. His approach to psychology has been influential in the field. In his work, he understood the psyche through exploration of dreams, art, mythology, world religion and philosophy. The most important ideas that he introduced included the concept of psychological archetypes, the collective unconscious and synchronicity. These archetypes represent innate universal psychic dispositions that form the substrate from which the basic themes of human life emerge. In order to be synchronous, the events should be unlikely to occur together by random chance.

Atsuko Tanaka

Atsuko Tanaka’s work as an artist in several medias includes abstract painting, sculptures, performances and installation art. Her work consisted of everyday objects like textiles, doorbells, light bulbs. She was one of the pioneering avant-grade artists. She was also a part of the Gutai group, an avant-garde artists' movement. The Gutai group was an artistic movement and association of artists founded by Jiro Yoshihara in Japan in 1954. Her best known work was called “The Electric Dress”, which consisted of electric wires that lit-up colored light bulbs which she wore to an opening exhibition. The work symbolized post-war Japan’s rapid transformation and urbanization.

Joseph Beuys

Joseph Beuys was a performing artist who was most famous for his public performances. Along with his performing arts, Beuys also produced sculptures, prints, posters, and thousands of drawings in his lifetime. Beuys was encouraged to become an artist after he returned home from World War II. He gathered about 327 drawings between the 1940’s and 50’s and created a book which was entitled “The Secret Block for a Person in Ireland”. The title draws reference to his inspiration of James Joyce was an Irish expatriate writer, widely considered to be one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. Through his involvement with Fluxus, Bueys pushed the boundaries of art. He took a different focus than the Fluxus group who were interested in the radical Dada. Bueys had a different message “The Silence of Marcel Duchamp is Overrated” with his practical focus of Duchamp and the Readymade. This created the primary aspect of controversy that surrounded Bueys in his work. Beuys was motivated by a utopian belief in the power of universal human creativity and was confident in the potential for art to bring about revolutionary change.

Dorothea Lange

Dorothea Lange was educated as a psychologist and had a minor in photography. She had started her photographing career in San Francisco where she opened up a portrait studio. With the onset of the Great Depression, she focused on the people at that time. With unemployed and homeless people, she captured the attention of other photographers. She turned to the Federal Resettlement Administration, which was later called the Farm Security Administration. She documented the rural poverty and exploitation of the sharecroppers and migrate laborers, bringing them to public attention. Her images became iconic of the era with the distribution of a free newspaper. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, her focus went to the Japanese-Americans and the “relocation camps” in America. She covered the evacuation to temporary centers and then to Manzanar, the first internment camp. Her images were critical of the Army and the containment of people that where detained without charging them with any crime or any appeal.

Alfred Stieglitz

Alfred Stieglitz was one of American early photographers who witness the radical change in the landscape of American society and culture. He saw New York go from a sleeping giant to a vibrant symbol of the modern metropolis. The body of his works were filmed in the first full length film that was entitled “Alfred Stieglitz - The Eloquent Eye“. As a photographer, and through the use of the medium, he was able to open a window onto many crucial developments of the time. He rebelled against the academic assumption that photography, though useful to the artist, was inferior to painting. He strived to have his photos equal to paintings. There were two kinds of pictorials: soft and hard. Alfred was a hard in the way he wanted infused photographic prints to predominate; he allowed his images to evoke the character of painting. He was interested in the condition of life in America and using a black and white format to depict his images of the New York environment.

Ansel Adams

One of America’s famous photographers, Ansel Adams was best know for his black and white photos of the American West and Yosemite National Park. His photography is straight forward of nature in a crisp and realistic way. They portray the beauty and elegance of nature with an underlying motivation of persuading the people of America to value the land and to preserve the American wilderness. His first artistic career was as a pianist, but he than began experimenting in amateur photography. He became serious about photography in the 1920s with the dispute of photograph being more persuasive than a hand-drawn illustration. He had several technical accomplishments, one being the use of his own zone system. The zone system allows photographers to calculate and control the range of gray-scale tones in their negative by using a light meter.

Rachelle Thiewes

Rachelle Thiewes is a metal-smith which creates wearable pieces of jewelry. She works with the materials of steel, gold, silver, and slate to create her artwork. Rachelle creates her work to be not just wearable but also to be an extension of the human body. Her metal creations come in the form of highly-detailed necklaces, bracelets, and earrings. Rachelle’s work captures the imagination because it challenges the modern perception of what art is and gives the word an entirely new meaning. She is interested in both integration of the piece of jewelry, the movement with the body, and the sound which it creates.

Marilyn da Silva

Marilyn da Silva works as a metal-smith in a narrative way. She has been using birds in her work since 1999 and has been inspired by them. She does not consider herself a bird watcher but thinks that the bird spend more time watching us instead. She is also inspired by small detailed drawings from the 19th century of bird identification. In her recent work, which included six of the panels in this exhibition, she depicts etchings of birds in their natural environments. Each one comes to life as a relief in the form of a brooch and is housed in a shadow box which frames the image. The subtle beauty of female birds is depicted in four smaller panels. Their placement and composition is inspired by the simplicity and elegance of Japanese flower arrangements. These birds are also removable and can be worn as brooches. To her they act as a metaphors for her everyday experiences, from personal to universal, in her sculpture and including her wearable pieces.

Helen Shirk

Helen Shirk is a metal-smith artist and works with the idea of hallow ware. Her inspiration comes from nature and the landscapes she encountered during her travels to Europe and Australia. In each piece she creates the feeling of sensuousness, strangeness, and vitality that is found in the natural word.
Through the challenge of physically manipulating metal Helen constructs the three dimensional object and then manipulates its mood with color to suit her own intention. The color she is able to produce with color pencils on to metal and a patina that is applied on top of the color pencils. The parts she uses in her work are orchestrated to create an intriguing and seductively energetic natural world.

Inni Parnanen

Inni Parnanen is a jewelry artist. Her metal works take on three-dimensional structures with a complex inner space that proceed from simple to geometric shapes that are characteristic of her work. The repeating lines create an elegant form that is both simple and complex. Interested in the interior and exterior aspect in her jewelry,s he will use different material in her work like parchment and cow horn. She takes an account for the use of each material as well. She likes to keep a simple beauty to her work while studying the structure of the form for its strength, durability and cellular forms. She also uses traditional material like sterling silver in her work, because the material is malleable enough to create the form that she wants and creates organic structure. While most of her pieces are one of a kind pieces, she will also work in editions.

Carol Windsor

Carol Windsor is a jewelry maker who currently works with metal and paper to create her pieces. Through her pieces she is able to create the fragility of life and the preciousness of the moment. Before she started working with paper, she would work with metal, enamels, and wood. The pieces then were physically and emotionally heavy. Putting aside the wood and the enamels, her work is drawn from the awareness of the beautiful and fleeting nature of life. Carol will create a structure of each petal using sterling silver. Then she laminates the sterling silver between the two pieces of paper to create her work.

Sharon Church

Sharon Church is a jewelry maker that uses nature to inspire her work. She takes most of her inspiration from her garden and domestic environment. Her brooch “Shimmer” is to be worn pinned above the heart, and she describes this placement on the body as both a lure and an animate curiosity. In the brooch she has accomplished the moist movement of a slug and combined it with the plumpness of her aloe plants. One has the potential to sting and irritate the skin, the other to heal it; both ooze protective moisture when touched or pierced. Church carved “Shimmer” from wood, studding them with old European cut diamonds, and using buttermilk paint to create a reminder of nature at its most vulnerable. In “Alone/Allure” she creates this piece from oxidized sterling silver, carved antler and old European cut diamonds. This piece is about life and longing.

Jayne Redman

With the linear quality that it brings from the stems and the fullness of the flower buds, nature inspires endlessly in reference to Jayne’s work. Redman primarily uses 18k gold and sterling silver. Many of her forms are multiples of the same shape, engineered to fit together with precise economy that results in an abstract interpretation of their botanical source material. She also uses a technique called keum-boo which is 24K gold that is heat-fused to silver. Redman uses different patina in her work as well. She uses handmade dies to cut out the pieces of her work so that she can make multiples quite easily .

Morley Price

Morley Price is a ceramic artist that works primarily in porcelain. Morley uses the coiling technique to make her work by pinching and pulling the clay coils into delicate convoluted shapes. She finishes with the use of a matt glaze that shows the dramatic concept of light and shadow. In the exploration of movement in her work she has used extensions in a repeating pattern to suggest this. Her works are characterized by numerous flanges. These flanges are paper-thin vanes or wings which are built onto hollow vessel or bottle shapes. These run vertically around each piece and convey a sense of movement while others add depth and illusion. She creates these form without the use of any supports during the making process.

Jennifer McCurdy

Jennifer McCurdy works as ceramic artist choosing to work primarily in porcelain. She is inspired by the ordered symmetry and asymmetry of natural forms revealing the growth of life and its movement. She takes the patterns that she sees around her and integrates them in to her forms. Jennifer uses the emanative space in her work to the express the qualities of light and shadows. Showing the dramatic concept of the light and shadow, she puts on a white microcrystalline glaze. Creating movement and balance in her form is important in her current body of work. With the use of curving patterns in her work she is able to create an energy to the work. She fires her work to cone 10, where the porcelain becomes non-porous and translucent, and one of the hardest surfaces known to man.

Lindsay Feuer

Lindsay Feuer uses organic forms in her porcelain work, inspired by nature and the mysteries that it holds. Lindsay creates these hybrid forms which have recognizable organic parts that are pieced together. In doing this she is able to create these ambiguous forms that have movement and fluidity. They have an animated and fantastical view of our biological surroundings. Lindsey works in porcelain for the white luminescence which shows the rich surface and curvilinear components. The porcelain’s strength and the responsiveness of the clay let her create these whimsical and delicate pieces. With detail in the pieces that make us want to look more closely at them to discover something more that lies within the work. Forming these pieces she is able to bring about a sense of them being born rather than a manufactured feel .

Jessica Mohl

Jessica Mohl is a metal-smith. She works organically with silver, copper, lenses, and enameling in her work. Working with the metal, she creates beautiful line and form, with an emphasis on growth. Jessica wants us to find something hidden within the form that seem almost precious… that we are supposed to which we have to pay attention, yet something that we have to find within the form and not out in the open for everyone to see. She creates an intimate and protective feeling with her work through the layering of the metal and with the texture she uses on the piece. This process of etching and hammering to create the texture creates an organic feel to her work.

Bonnie Bishoff

Bonnie Bishoff and J.M. Syron create furniture together. In their objects they strive to reveal the beauty of nature through furniture with patterns that engage the eyes with both form and color that blends the two beautifully. As collaborating artist, they work with the material of wood, polymer clay, and fabric to produce their work. The two artists use vibrant color in the work to catch the viewer’s eye. The patterns keep the viewer interested in the work throughout the whole piece of furniture. The repetition of line and form in their work echoes fractal geometric patterns, like those found in shells and plants.

Janet Kelman

Janet Kelman blows and carves glass to create her work. She is inspired by underwater creatures, sea anemones. The movement that these forms create are interesting to her with their open, flowing and succulent forms and movement. The forms emerge for her as a feminine reflection of these attributes. They’re fragile yet strong, vulnerable yet buoyant, showy yet austere, and delicate yet grand. She keeps asking herself the question of the preciousness of these forms in relation to the female emphasis. Her intent is to convey a complexity of a coral reef with the motion and overlapping that the forms take with the translucence of the glass. These elegant forms are created somewhat by chance with the slumping technique. The form will twist and turn while in the kiln and creates a dynamic and stable piece of work.

Kathleen Elliot

Kathleen Elliot creates her glass work based on her concept of the American culture. These concepts include taking the American Dream, trying to get ahead, the achievement of money, beauty and perfect children, mass production products, machine produced things, Hollywood in facets of every day life with its surgically altered fantasy of the movie stars and their dreams of perfection. Her inspiration comes from flower petals, the veins in the leaves, the changing colors of autumn leaves, and seed pods. She wants her art to inspire and to awe us with the simple things that can occur in life. Kathleen wants to remind us of these things, and to appreciate and be grateful for them. Her piece entitled “We’re All On The Same Tree” reminds us from whence we came, that in life we may take different form from another person but in the end we all start from the same place and we all end in the same place.

Renee Robbins

As a painter Renee displays a vivid use of color in her work. With the use of rhythmic lines and meticulous textures, Renee creates a landscape of mind, referencing the molecular, biological, architectural and cultural views in her work. This is used as the metaphor for how our exterior and interior selves come together. Renee creates these hybrid forms through the use of layers the paint with thin washes and glazes. She also applies modeling and gel medium to create a complex build up for a layered effect. Creating this atmosphere within her work, she is able to show the complexity within the detailed painting of the piece. This layering effect gives suggestion to the layers and complexity of the human mind. Renee will add to the complexity with the use of mixed media, adding string, paper, sand, fabric and lace to her work.

David Hering

David Hering is a glass work artist who recalls the processes that he has used in his work as a painter within his glass work. Creating these paintings in glass is what this artist is trying to achieve in his work. It is not an easy task to convert one field into another. With this new found tools and logic, David’s work shows his respect for the new technique. This created his current body of work, where the surfaces are meant to be inviting. The silver foil over the black background color and powders create the bases of his glass vessels. He than sandblasts these vessels to create a surface texture. The graphic view of the silver and the colored ground of the vessel’s exterior is important to his individual expression in his work.

Tom Hadley

Tom is a ceramic artist that reflects on several areas of interest and is able to combine them all into one form. One example of this is the function of the vessel as a abstract sculpture form and its many associations, both of which are literal and metaphoric. Pattern and color is another idea that he wants to get in his pieces as well. Tom does this to create various feeling or impressions. The third interest is integration of surface pattern, which he does with the thickness of the wall so they can be viewed from the outside and the inside of his vessels. He use a degree of illusion in the pieces through color and pattern with the combination of both the flat modulating surface of the pot and the real depth that is present in the interior space. He also concerns himself with not only how his pieces look in three dimensions but in two dimensions as well.

Mark Levin

Mark works with wood and tries to infuse it with a “Beethoven dynamic” which is pulling the melodic filigree out of wood along with the power and passion of the work. Mark starts his pieces by designing them in a flat black design rather than working with the wood and the design together. This allows him to create a much more powerful piece once the piece is then made from wood. His organic shelves and table that he creates has a visual fellow to them. The table tops or the shelves have a nature leafy feeling to them. The ripple has been carved so elegantly that they look like they have been made out of some material other than wood. The forms are than complemented by the natural texture of the wood which is prominent in his work.

Sarah Obreccht

The objects that Sarah makes out of metal and mix media are to be viewed as botanical specimens in a collection. She focuses in on the detail of her organic forms. Putting detail in her leaves, berries and pods in the way she clusters her tactile creates a line quality in her work allowing the viewer to move throughout the piece with ease. Sarah chooses to place the elements together in layers, clustering them together for a repeating pattern in her work. Through the exploration of the shape of her forms, the patina, and the material that she uses, she is able to have a controlling element in her work with the branches and the stem. The objects’ scale invites the viewer for closer observation of the work. By combining references of controlled forms she is able to catalog her personal nature through her pieces.

Kyung-Ok Choi

Kyung-Ok Choi is a glass artist that creates delicate forms in her work. She is interested in portraying the human experience with the use of organic forms. She focuses on communicating the graceful flow of our emotional tendencies in her sculptural forms. She creates these narratives of human success and failure in the pursuit of personal ambition and experience as the subject in her work. She depicts this by the use of ladder in her work and by the use of clear glass. The glass, I believe, gives us the feeling that things are not ways clear in life, that we have to keep trying even though the path to our dream will not appear in front of us, and that we have to climb to work for it. Choi blends her Korean heritage into her work. She works in her personal philosophy and experience. She uses clear flame work glass to portray this image. While working her sculptures she utilizes form and its surrounding atmosphere.

Eva Hild

Eva Hild works in clay in a large sculptural scale. Eva’s influence in her work is influence. Her current hand built clay forms show the pressure and strain. These delicate and continuously flowing forms are made with thinly built white clay. The size of the sculptures relate to the size of the body. The thin walls are pulled and bent in different directions to reflect varying degrees of external and internal pressures, and how, as a consequence, perception of inner and outer space is changed or challenged. Her inspiration comes from life itself. She tries to relate her work to her life. With the different pressures, strains, flows and ramifications that may influence how one feels at any given point in time throughout life. With the ins and outs of life’s path so too does the path that Eva sculptures take. You want to be able to look around the next corner in her sculpture and see what lies ahead but not know until you get there, always finding something different around each corner.

Cheryl Thomas

Cheryl Thomas is a ceramist who makes hand-coiled porcelain vessels. At first glance these forms look like they are made out of a fiber material. Cheryl works in a simplified palette of black and white. Her vessels seem to take on a life of there own when she forms them. They resemble collapsed baskets, and they are made out of porcelain. The artist assembles these vessels with care, coiling each tiny rope of porcelain into thin walls. With the containers first being balanced, she fires them in the kiln where they collapse into unpredictable forms. Cheryl then takes these collapsed forms and matches them up and puts them in for re-firing. Cheryl creates these sculptures for the chance of the out come… “ My sculptures are created by marriage of design and accident.” Cheryl creates a ancient but modern look to these vessels.

Crutis Arima

Crutis Arima is a metalsmith and ceramic artist. In his more sculptural work he uses the language of gardening as a metaphor for self and society. Crutis uses a 3D surface treatment, acrylic wash on metal, which brings heightened surrealism to his work. The “Transformed Adornment” series tries to find beauty in the overlooked and underappreciated through representation in metal, while being a reminder of the chaos that can occur when one does not temper ideologies. The objects' adornments grow out of the pieces linking them back to their decorative equalities. He wants the viewer or wearer of his pieces to see the little bit of beauty that can exist in everything. His pieces usually have a patina on them, while some pieces have a gold or silver tone to them to giving them a preciousness quality.

Lindsey Gates

Lindsey Gates is a fiber artist that uses everyday objects in a unique way. She gets her inspiration from the different parts of clothing from necklines to ruffles to fasteners from all around the world. She draws from her own vocabulary to create interesting patterns and textures from different materials used in repetition. Lindsey was taught that everything that was around her was useful in one way or another, and she uses this idea in her work from using pistachio shells, paperclips, clothing tags, cut nails and steel washers in her work. She uses silver and copper along with a metal mesh as the foundation of materials in her work. She works with a couple different techniques in her work including knotless knitting with wire and other sewing techniques. She also has different patinas that she uses on her work to create a variety of color .

Dale Chihuly

Dale Chihuly is a glass artist that works with a vibrant color palate. His vessel forms come about by accident, this happening in the majority of his work. He has always been interested in glass, ever since he was a child. He consider himself both an artist and a crafter. Chihuly creates organic forms and works, and he is concerned not with questions of imitation but for autonomous worlds of organic forms and colors. He is drawn to the media for its ability to transmits light, color and forms as beautifully. Precisely arranged lighting brings out the coldness of the glass and, at the same time, an overall atmosphere of warmth. Chihuly's spectacular glass art is displayed in museums worldwide and in massive installations. He brings together countless individual pieces to create a beautiful instillation that resembles an underwater garden.

James Tisdale is a Ceramic Artist who uses his work to speak the words he cannot.  Tisdale grew up in the conservative south and was confronted everyday buy the injustices and  idyocracies of southern culture.  He uses common imagery, such as black face minstrels, Klu Klux Klan members side by side with black men.  Tisdale is the son of a blue collar family  that worked long hours and with that they needed a nanny. So the Tisdale kids were raised by an black woman as were many kids of the south.  He thinks the hypocrisy of the racist culture leaving there most precious of family in the hands of the “enemy” molded his views of the the world which he depicts in his art.

Jack Earl is a ceramic artist that has strong visual ties to Robert Arneson.  Earl’s depiction of iconic and sarcastic images through the use of the traditional sculptural bust is a layered idea.  The bust has long been a symbol of importance and respect, yet the subject matter used by Earl is often a bit tongue in cheek.  For instance why is the dog wearing a suit and why is Madonna of the Woods actually the Madonna and the wodds. He creates questions in the viewers minds, such as “is this serious or a joke” or “is there a meaning that lost to us”.  This mixture of subtle tradition and iconic imagery is a interesting way of addressing some of the questions of art and clay.

    

 Donald Rietz is a ceramic artist who has evolved through the influences of artist that are major contributors to the minds of ceramic art today.  Reitz, just by looking at his work, has been influenced by Peter Voulkos, Toshiko Takaezu, Paul Soldner to name a few.  His work has always combined the vessel, often in an abstract form, with the sculptural ideas of the minimalist and abstract.  One of those macho 50’s men scale was always involved not for aesthetic reasons but egotistic.  Reitz in not given the recognition he deserves for keeping the clay movement going when many others have said it is dead. 

 

Barbara Kruger is a conceptual based artist from Newark NJ.  Her work uses everyday imagery, often iconic subjects, to speak to the objectification of women in media and the miscommunication between men and women.  I also believe that she speaks to the consumer culture in which the media controls the remote.  Printed images in magazines and advertisements on tv can effectively control an entire culture and help them to believe just about anything, from the cleaning habits of women to the evil ideas of democrats.  Kruger leaves a lot to interpretation, so much so that just about any silly advertisement  idea can be inserted. 

 

Edward Hicks, having grown up in Bucks County PA, was as a Quaker and artist of the Mid 1800’s. His work was mostly production works, meaning he made multiples.  His imagery was Quaker based.  He often depicted William Penn signing the treaty with the Indians of PA in the back-round while the for-ground was Mary and baby Jesus sitting with all manner of Gods animals in a peaceful arrangement.  The subject matter of the work spoke to the Quaker congregations of America from the 1800’s to today.  He has been collected by the major museums and plain folk alike.  I grew up with on over the dinner table and looked at it everyday and it helped me to be the kind of man I am today.

 

 Banksy is a Graffiti artist from England.  For years he has been painting rogue art on walls of public and private buildings.   Much of his work comments on the silliness of current culture or the down right racist, classist, and elitist ways of culture round the world.  As many graffiti artists the artist is unknown in the sense that he has not been photographed or documented beyond his “tag” or signature.  This idea of anonymity is a very ancient idea, to speak the voice of the people not the self.  Banksy’s work can be seen from London to LA and most likely many little spots inbetween.  We, as artists and humans, should not fear society, we should change it.

 Buckminster Fuller was a very insightful and interesting man.  He was coined a Futurist or Utopian by others but really he was a humanist. He spent much of his life finding sustainable ways for humans to continue living on earth.  One of his great achievements was the design and construction of the geodesic dome, which is arranges like a carbon molecule or bucky ball ( a term he labeled ).  Fuller was a man with endless imagination at a time when the world could sustain a great mind. Unfortunately Like many great minds his only limits were trust and money, two things Americans give up rarely.  Late in his life, after working on his concepts for several decades, Fuller achieved considerable public visibility. He travelled the world giving lectures, and received numerous honorary doctorates. Most of his inventions, however, never made it into production. Often dismissed as a hopeless utopian he was strongly criticized in most fields he tried to influence, including architecture. His proponents, on the other hand, continue to assert that his work has not yet received the attention that it deserves 

Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche was a German philosopher of the late 19th century who challenged the foundations of Christianity and traditional morality. He believed in life, creativity, health, and the realities of the world we live in, rather than those situated in a world beyond. Central to his philosophy is the idea of “life-affirmation,” which involves an honest questioning of all doctrines that drain life's energies, however socially prevalent those views might be. Often referred to as one of the first existentialist philosophers, Nietzsche's revitalizing philosophy has inspired leading figures in all walks of cultural life, including dancers, poets, novelists, painters, psychologists, philosophers, sociologists and social revolutionaries.

Giorgio de Chirico

The art of De Chirico centers upon the antithesis between classical culture and modern mechanistic civilization. These two elements are locked in struggle, and the tragic quality of this situation exudes an aura of melancholy of which De Chirico is a prime exponent. The iconographic elements of his early art, modern railways and clock towers combined with ancient architecture, are to be sought in the artist's childhood memories of Greece. For the strange visual images in which De Chirico cast his mature works, he used an airless dreamlike space in his townscapes with an exaggerated perspective artificially illuminated, with long sinister shadows, and strewn about with antique statues. There is an elegiac loneliness too (the Delights of the Poet, 1913) and the disturbing juxtaposition of such banal everyday objects as biscuits and rubber gloves with those of mythical significance.

Works of De Chirico

A favorite amusement of ancient Greece was the composition of enigmas. In De Chirico's art they symbolize an endangered transitional period of European culture. From the enigma to the riddle presented by one's dream life is but a short step.

Pablo Neruda

Pablo Neruda was born Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalto in Parral, Chile on July 12, 1904. His family’s disapproval drove the young Basoalto to write under the pseudonym of Pablo Neruda, which he officially adopted in 1946. Although his published poetry was widely respected by the time he reached age twenty, Neruda found it necessary to follow his budding political career to Asia in order to make a living. In Europe in the 1930’s he became involved in Communism , which would influence his later political actions as well as much of his poetry. In 1946 he successfully campaigned in Chile for the regime of Gabriel Gonzalez Videla, but he soon publicly expressed displeasure with Videla’s presidency and was forced to flee his homeland for several years. Neruda was able to return to Chile in 1952, finally both wealthy and widely respected. In 1971 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature . He died of cancer at age 69 on September 23, 1973. By that time he was recognized as a national hero and the greatest Latin American poet of the twentieth century.

Samuel Beckett

Waiting for Godot, 1961 Odeon Theatre, Paris. Directed by Roger Blin and set by Alberto Giacometti.

Irish playwright, poet, writer, and critic, April 13, 1906 – December 22, 1989.
Widely considered one of the most influential Irish intellectuals of the 20th century, Samuel Beckett is a cornerstone of Modernity. Of his prolific body of work including poetry, critical essays, and prose, Beckett’s plays are the highlight. Waiting for Godot is Beckett’s most popular two act play that is famously about nothing but deeply considers the existential plight of humans. This play influenced many in contemporary culture, including Larry David and Seinfeld. During the 1961 Paris revival of Waiting for Godot, Beckett asked Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti to design the set, a scant tree by a country roadside. Of Beckett’s prodigious oeuvre, his lesser know short plays, radio plays, and experimental dance pieces are considered to be groundbreaking in Modern theatre and drama.

Kiki Smith

Kiki Smith:  A Gathering 1980--2005, installation view Walker Center for the Arts.

Born in 1954 in Nuremberg, Germany, lives and works in New York.
Born to opera singer and actress Jane Smith and architect and abstract sculptor Tony Smith, Kiki grew up in New Jersey surrounded by creative people and was exposed to many art practices. Her earliest works use the human body and its functions as a point of departure, using diverse materials—handmade paper, papier-mache, glass, plaster, wax, and bronze, to articulate unique visions of the body, from clinical to primal. During the 1990s Smith began to engage with themes from literature and history, reimagining biblical and mythological characters in corporeality. Smith’s focus on anonymous feminine forms rather than particular personalities led her to examine female archetypes in religion, mythology, and folklore. In some cases she sought unexpected variations on familiar themes. Virgin Mary (1992), for instance, renders the Madonna flayed skinless like an anatomical model, with muscles exposed.