Joan Mitchell (1925-1992) was a "second generation" abstract expressionist painter and printmaker. She was an essential member of the American Abstract expressionist movement, and one of the few female painters to gain critical and public acclaim in the era.
American painter, Robert Ryman (b. 1930) is associated wth the movements of monochrome painting, minimalism and conceptual art. The artist first moved to New York City from Nashville with the intention of becoming a jazz musician. In 1953 he took a temporary job—where he would ultimately work for seven years—as a guard at the Museum of Modern Art. Soon after, he would decide to devote his career towards painting. In his first paintings and collages from the mid-1950s, he experimented with material, color and brushwork, eventually reducing the painting to its barest elements.
Craig Owens (1950-1990) was a critic who wrote and lectured extensively on contemporary art. He showed particular interest in the issues of photography, postmodernism, feminism, and Marxist thought. A former associate editor for October and senior editor for Art in America, as well as professor of art history at Yale University and Barnard College, his writings were collected in Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture (1994). Owens died of an AIDS-related illness in 1990.
West coast artists, Mike Mandel (b.1950) and Larry Sultan (1946-2009) became artistic collaborators in 1972 while both enrolled in the San Francisco Art Institute’s MFA program. This interview captures the duo’s camaraderie (look closely, they are wearing matching shirts!) and youthful optimism as they describe the impetus behind their California billboard installations of the early seventies.
Betty Parsons (1900-1982) was an influential art dealer in mid to late 20th century New York. She used her gallery as an influential advocate for the abstract avant-garde, and was renowned for championing new styles and new artists well before they received wider recognition or commercial success. Notable examples of Parson's circle include abstract expressionist giants Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still.
Chuck Close (b.1940) has been a leading figure in contemporary art since the early 1970s. As a young artist in the mid-’60s, Close turned away from the model of Abstract Expressionism to develop a simple but labor-intensive working method based upon repetition and small color elements. Denying himself expressive gesture, Close builds shapes and tonal variations within a working grid that provides the structure for large-scale, close-up portraits. Close’s formal analysis and methodological reconfiguration of the human face have radically changed the definition of modern portraiture.
Louise Fishman (b.1939) is an abstract painter who uses knives rather than brushes to apply her undiluted colors. Her complex compositions place architectural shapes within other shapes.
“Almost everything is covered in my paintings. I go through numerous changes in them. I used to think that I was losing a lot of images. More recently I discovered that I was travelling through a process where an image would come back not exactly as it had been before. My unconscious memory is alive,” she says in this interview with Kate Horsfield.
California-based painterJoan Brown (1938-1990) attended the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute). Brown has long been recognized as one of the most important artists to emerge from the creative milieu of the San Francisco Bay Area of the late 1950s. She created a body of work distinguished by its breadth and personal vision. Brown’s style incorporated abstract expressionism and figurative painting. One of California's pre-eminent figurative artists, she died in at the age of 52, in India.
Ron Gorchov (b. 1930) is an American artist who has been working with curved surface paintings and shaped canvases since 1967. He paints on convex/concave saddle-shape canvases with recurring pairs of symmetrical, oar-like images.
Painter, Susan Rothenberg (b.1945) is known for her poetic, atmospheric images. From her early horse paintings to her paintings of athletes and dancers, Rothenberg's works have always been subservient to the flatness and objectivity of her gesturally dense surfaces. In her paintings, image and surface combine in a private symbolism and restrained drama that is physically and emotionally intrusive. Rothenberg currently lives and works in New Mexico.
Canadian-born artist Miriam Schapiro (b.1923) was one of the great forces behind the feminist art movement in Los Angeles. Originally painting in an Abstract Expressionist manner, she developed a new, more personal style of assemblage she called “femmage” as she became more politically involved. She was also one of the first scholars to create a curriculum on Feminist Art at CalArts. Through the use of large scale media and symbols emblematic of the female, she has battled to pay homage to women and their undervalued domestic traditions.
Audrey Flack uses an airbrush to produce large photorealistic paintings and works from slides for her precision. She selects subjects with great personal significance that also represent fragments of contemporary American life. The three paintings discussed in detail in this tape are from the Vanitas series.
“Every still-life painter has her bag of tricks. You have your prop closet and just pull them out,” Flack says in this interview with Kate Horsfield. “One of the beauties of being an artist is that no one can tell me what to paint.”
Charles Simonds (b.1945) majored in art at the University of California at Berkeley. There he discovered an area of clay pits that had once provided the raw material for some of Manhattan's older buildings. He literally immersed himself in the subject, burying himself in a pool of wet clay to get a feel for the material. Simonds's sculptures are enchanting architectural minatures. Most are landforms with small chambers and towers; some are abstract organic shapes. Carefully built brick by tiny brick, Simonds's sculptures engage the child in everyone.
Lucy Lippard (b. 1937) earned degrees from Smith College and New York University before beginning her career as an art critic in 1962, when she began contributing to publications such as Art International and, later, Artforum. In 1966, she organized an exhibition entitled “Eccentric Abstraction” at the Fischbach Gallery in New York City. “Eccentric Abstraction” set the standard for what would later be regarded as postminimalism, process, or antiform art.
Jim Dine (b. 1935) first emerged as an avant-garde artist creating Happenings and performances with Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, and others in the early 1960s. Ultimately, he rejected the performances that led to his early success in favor of an introspective search for identity. Using banal objects as subjects for his paintings and prints, Dine displayed a growing sense of self-awareness.
Roger Brown's (1941-1997) quirky, stylized paintings were influenced by such disparate sources as comic strips, hypnotic wallpaper patterns, medieval panel paintings, and early works of Magritte. His work is epitomized by a series of claustrophobic urban scenes with their drop-curtain-like gray clouds and cardboard-box apartment buildings, suggesting an amalgamation of boyish enthusiasm for model making and adult despondency. In 1996 he donated his apartment, complete with all of his belongings, artworks, writings, and automobile to the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, where it is on public display.
A. D. Coleman started writing regularly on photography in 1967 for the Village Voice, at a time when very few critics took the medium seriously. His work, according to Joel Eisinger, qualified him as perhaps "the first postmodernist critic" in the field. After his tenure at the Voice, Coleman became the first photography critic at The New York Times, and has since published in numerous publications internationally on mass media, communication technologies, art, and photography.
Yvonne Jacquette (b.1934)is an American painter and printmaker known in particular for her depictions of aerial landscapes, especially her low-altitude and oblique aerial views of cities or towns, often painted using a distinctive, pointillistic technique. In addition to her paintings, Jacquette frequently collaborated with her late husband, the photographer and filmmaker Rudy Burckhardt, who was also known for his depictions of the urban environment.
Miyoko Ito was known as an “abstract surrealist.” Her paintings are landscape-based abstractions of very intense subtleties of structure and color. Ito was born to Japanese parents in Berkeley, CA in 1918. She studied art at the University of California at Berkeley for a short time until she was imprisoned in a Japanese-American camp after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Ito continued her education in prison, after which she attended Smith College. She was then given a scholarship to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. It was in Chicago that Ito's career as an artist flourished, where she explored cubism and latent abstraction in her works. Ito remained in Chicago until her death in 1983.
Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) was both a pioneer architect of the modern era and a global theorist. Fuller developed a system of geometry that he called “Energetic-Synergetic geometry,” the most famous example of which is the geodesic dome. His many designs for automobiles and living spaces were applications of a wider theory.
Chantal Akerman (1950-2015) gained international recognition with her three-and-a-half hour masterpiece, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), which portrays a housewife’s dull existence and eventual violent action. She has continued to be one of Europe’s most innovative filmmakers with more than forty film and television projects to her credit. Akerman’s work is minimalist, structuralist, and feminist. Major themes in her films include women at work and at home; women’s relationships to men, other women, and children; food, love, sex, romance, art, and storytelling. In this interview from 1976 Akerman discusses her early films, and the development of her particular vision.
Nathan Lyons (b.1930) has contributed to the field of photography as a critic, author, curator, educator, and photographer. He has published several books and catalogs, including Photographers on Photography (1966), Photography in the 20th Century (1967), Towards a Social Landscape (1967), Persistence of Vision (1968), and Notations in Passing (1974). His body of work consists primarily of photographs which focus on American culture.
Jennifer Bartlett (b. 1941) is a writer and painter who makes large paintings with enamels on fabricated panels. She uses an overall grid structure on which she repeats images in a variety of styles ranging from lyric abstraction to childlike representation. Near the end of this interview with Kate Horsfield, she reads the chapter “Dreaming” from her book The History of the Universe (1985). “I decided: 1) I didn’t want to stretch a canvas again, 2) I wanted to be able to work on a lot of things at once. I didn’t want to exercise my own taste, which seemed boring and hideous. I wanted something modular, a constant surface."
A historical interview originally recorded in 1976, edited in 2010 with support from the Lyn Blumenthal Memorial Fund.
Robert Heineken (1931-2006) used technically sophisticated photographic methods to mingle erotic images with visuals from TV and advertising. The American artist was known for appropriating and re-processing images from magazines, product packaging or television. In the "Are You Real" series from 1964 to 1968, he created a portfolio of images filled with unexpected and sometimes surreal juxtapositions by placing a single magazine page on a light table, so that the resulting contact print picks up imagery from both sides of the page.
Originally from Canada, Agnes Martin (1912-2004) moved to the U.S. in 1931. Martin lived in Taos, New Mexico from 1954 to 1957, and then moved to New York, where she established her name as an important minimalist painter.
