Women in Visual Arts Archives – Page 2 of 12

Helen Levitt: 1913-2009

August 31, 2016 By Wendy Campbell

Since I’m inarticulate, I express myself with images. —Helen Levitt

Born on August 31, 1913 in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, New York, Helen Levitt was once called (by David Strauss in a 1997 Artforum International article) “the most celebrated and least known photographer of her time.” Perhaps this lack of recognition stems from Levitt’s tendency to be an “intensely private” person who did not seek fame and rarely gave interviews. Perhaps it was because she did not wish to assign “social meaning” to her photographs—a lesson she learned after meeting photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson—that a photograph could “stand up by itself.”

Leaving high school in her senior year, Levitt began working in 1931 for the commercial portrait photographer J. Florian Mitchell, who was known to the family. “I helped in darkroom printing and developing,” she said. “My salary was six bucks a week.” It was during this time that she taught herself photography.

Levitt was influenced by the photographic styles of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans, and Ben Shahn. She met and accompanied Cartier-Bresson on a photographic shoot of the Brooklyn waterfront in 1935 and the following year, bought a second hand Leica, the camera Cartier-Bresson preferred. Between 1938-39, Levitt was mentored by and worked with Walker Evans but she gave more credit to photographer Ben Shahn and his gritty photos of New York of the 1930s.

Levitt found success early on, and in July 1939, her work was published in Fortune magazine. In 1940, her Halloween photograph was included in the inaugural exhibition at Museum of Modern Art as part of its new photography section. In 1943, Levitt had her first solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (Helen Levitt: Photographs of Children March 10-April 18).

In a rare interview in 2001 for NPR, Levitt talked about her street photography: “It was a very good neighbourhood for taking pictures in those days, because that was before television, there was a lot happening. And then the older people would sometimes be sitting out on the stoops because of the heat. They didn’t have air conditioning in those days. It was, don’t forget, in the late ’30s. So those neighbourhoods were very active.” (listen to/read the interview)

Levitt also worked in film and spent most of her time from 1949-59 as a full-time film editor and director. Notably, during this period, she worked on two documentary films, In the Street with friend and painter Janice Loeb and the writer James Agee, and The Quiet One (1948). The Quiet One writers, Sidney Meyers, Loeb, and Levitt, were nominated for the Best Writing, Story and Screenplay Academy Award. The film was also nominated for Best Documentary Feature. The National Board of Review named it the second best film of 1949. Levitt continued working in film making for almost twenty-five years.

When Levitt returned to photography in 1959, she was among the first photographers to work in colour. She received Guggenheim fellowships in 1959 and 1960 for these projects. Sadly, a great deal of Levitt’s early colour work was stolen from her New York apartment in the late 1960s.

Comprehensive surveys of Levitt’s work were held at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York in 1980 and at the Laurence Miller Gallery in 1987. However, it was not until 1991 that she gained significant recognition when the first national retrospective of her work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art was held. The exhibition showed at other major museums including the International Center for Photography, New York (1997), and the Centre National la Photographie, Paris (2001). In 2007, Helen Levitt: Un Art de l’accident poetique, opened at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris. In 2008, Levitt was the recipient of the Spectrum International Photography Prize which included a major retrospective at the Sprengel Museum in Hannover, Germany. Also in the fall of 2008, a major retrospective was held at FOAM Museum in Amsterdam. In that same year, Levitt received the Francis Greenburger award for excellence in the arts.

On March 29, 2009, Helen Levitt died in her sleep at the age of 95.

James Agee (1909-1955), a good friend of Levitt, wrote “Helen Levitt’s photographs seem to me as beautiful, perceptive, satisfying, and enduring as any lyrical work that I know. In their general quality and coherence, moreover, the photographs as a whole body, as a book, seem to me to combine into a unified view of the world, an uninsistent but irrefutable manifesto of a way of seeing, and in a gentle and wholly unpretentious way, a major poetic work.“

Sources: New York Times, NPR, Artsy, Lawrence Miller Gallery

5 Random Art Facts: XXIV

August 9, 2016 By Wendy Campbell

1. The De Stijl Art Movement was a Dutch movement founded in 1917 in Amsterdam. Originally a publication, De Stijl (meaning “style” in Dutch), was created by two pioneers of abstract art, Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg. The magazine De Stijl became a vehicle for Mondrian’s ideas on art, and in a series of articles in the first year’s issues he defined his aims and used, perhaps for the first time, the term neo-plasticism. This became the name for the type of abstract art that he and the De Stijl circle practiced. Proponents of De Stijl advocated pure abstraction and universality by a reduction to the essentials of form and colour. They simplified visual compositions to vertical and horizontal, using only black, white and primary colours. The movement had a profound influence on the development both of abstract art and modern architecture and design.

Other members of the group included Bart van der Leck, Vantongerloo and Vordemberge-Gildewart, as well as the architects Gerrit Rietveld and JJP Oud. Mondrian withdrew from De Stijl in 1923 following Van Doesburg’s adoption of diagonal elements in his work. Van Doesburg continued the publication until 1931. (Tate)

2. Wabi-Sabi is a term used to describe a type of Japanese aesthetics and has been associated with Zen Buddhism as it exemplifies many of Zen’s core spiritual and philosophical tenets. The aesthetic is sometimes described as one of beauty that is imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. Emerging in the 15th century in Japan as a reaction to the prevailing aesthetic of lavishness, ornamentation, and rich materials, wabi-sabi is the art of finding beauty in imperfection and profundity in earthiness, of revering authenticity above all. An example of this can be seen in certain styles of Japanese pottery. In the Japanese tea ceremony, the pottery items used are often rustic and simple-looking. Hagi ware pottery for example have shapes that are not quite symmetrical, and colours or textures that appear to emphasize an unrefined or simple style. Other examples of wabi-sabi include Honkyoku (traditional shakuhachi music of wandering Zen monks), Ikebana (the art of flower arrangement), Japanese gardens, Zen and bonsai (tray) gardens and Japanese poetry. (Wikipedia, Utne Reader)

3. Women and the Arts: In 1976, at the peak of her career, Georgia O’Keeffe refused to lend her work to a pivotal exhibition in Los Angeles, Women Artists: 1550 to 1950. It was one of a wave of all-female shows that decade — some 150 — to spotlight artists largely ignored by major museums and galleries. But O’Keeffe, the most famous female artist of her day, saw herself in a different category — “one of the best painters,” period.

The feminist art historian Linda Nochlin borrowed an O’Keeffe painting elsewhere and put her in the show anyway. Yet despite these exhibitions, neither O’Keeffe nor any other woman would break into Janson’s History of Art, the leading textbook, until 1987, and equality remained elusive. (New York Times)

4. The Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh was painted in June 1889, one year before his death. It depicts the view from the east-facing window of his asylum room at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence where he voluntarily admitted himself after the self-mutilation of his ear. The painting is a combination of van Gogh’s direct observations as well as his imagination, memories, and emotions. The steeple of the church, for example, resembles those common in his native Holland, rather than those in France. The whirling forms in the sky, on the other hand, match published astronomical observations of clouds of dust and gas known as nebulae. (Moma, Wikipedia)

5. Fluxus – Founded in 1960 by Lithuanian/American artist George Maciunas, Fluxus was a small international network of artists and composers who challenged accepted ideas about what art is. Rooted in experimental music, it was named after a magazine which featured the work of musicians and artists centred around avant-garde composer John Cage.

Almost every avant-garde artist of the time took part in Fluxus, including Joseph Beuys, Dick Higgins, Alice Hutchins, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Ben Vautier, Robert Watts, Benjamin Patterson and Emmett Williams.

Fluxus had no single unifying style. Its artists used a range of media and processes adopting a ‘do-it-yourself’ attitude to creative activity, often staging random performances and using whatever materials were at hand to make art. Seeing themselves as an alternative to academic art and music, Fluxus was a democratic form of creativity open to anyone. Collaborations were encouraged between artists and across art forms, and also with the audience or spectator. It valued simplicity and anti-commercialism, with chance and humour playing a big part in the creation of works. The fluxus network still continues today. (Tate)

Beatrix Potter: 1866-1943

July 28, 2016 By Wendy Campbell

Born on July 28, 1866 in South Kensington in London, England, Beatrix Potter is best known for her illustrated children’s books. She was an author, illustrator, mycologist, farmer, and conservationist. Potter came from a wealthy family and although her father was a barrister, he devoted much of his time to his passions of art and photography. He and Beatrix’s mother Helen were socially active associating with many writers, artists, and politicians.

Potter had a lonely childhood and was educated at home by a governess. By the age of eight, she was filling sketchbooks with drawings of animals and plants and her artistic endeavors were encouraged, especially by her father.

In her teens, Potter spent most of her time studying, and painting and sketching. “Although she got her Art Student’s Certificate for drawing, Beatrix reached the age of 21 having had little real education. Like many adult daughters of the rich, she was appointed ‘household supervisor’ – a role that left her with enough time to indulge her interest in the natural sciences.”

In her 20s, Potter developed into a talented naturalist, made studies of plants and animals at the Cromwell Road museums, and learned how to draw with her eye to a microscope. She began to focus more on drawing and painting and began to earn a small income from her illustrations. She had also begun to write illustrated letters to the children of her former governess, Annie Moore. Peter Rabbit was born in a letter she wrote in September 1893 to Annie’s son, Noel.

Six publishers rejected “The Tale of Peter Rabbit” before Potter decided to publish her own edition of the story. Having seen the edition, publisher Frederick Warne decided to publish Peter Rabbit, and within a year had to produce six editions to meet demand. “This success marked the start of a life-long relationship between Beatrix and Warne who proposed marriage in 1905. ” Although she accepted him – defying her parents, who saw that being a ‘trade’, a publisher was an unthinkable match for their daughter – Norman unexpectedly died less than a month later of a blood disorder.”

Potter continued writing and produced one or two new books each year for the next eight years. In 1909, she met and befriended a local solicitor, William Heelis. After a period of having to battle her parents’ objections to her relationship Beatrix married William in 1913.

After her marriage, Potter dedicated herself to the role of lady farmer and became an expert in breeding Herdwick sheep. From 1920, and due to failing eyesight, Potter did less and less creative work and her books had to be pieced together from sketches and drawings done years earlier. Her last major work, “The Tale of Little Pig Robinson”, was published in 1930.

In the final part of her life, Potter concentrated on her other passion – conservation which was inspired by her friendship with Canon Rawnsley, one of the founder members of the National Trust. “Her expanding estate, funded by revenue from book sales, gave her the opportunity to fulfil an ambition to preserve not only part of the Lake District’s unique landscape but the area’s traditional farming methods.”

Beatrix Potter died on December 22, 1943. She left 14 farms and over 4,000 acres to the National Trust, land that it still owns and protects against development today.

She wrote and illustrated a total of 28 books, including the 23 Tales, the ‘little books’ that have been translated into more than 35 languages and have sold over 100 million copies. Her stories have been retold in various formats including a ballet, films, and in animation.

Sources: V&A Museum, BibliOdyssey

Beatrix Potter’s love of animals may have meant that she would have appreciated this little pair of owls.

Lillian Bassman: 1917 – 2012

June 15, 2016 By Wendy Campbell

Born on June 15, 1917 in Brooklyn, New York, Lillian Bassman is considered one of the most important fashion photographers of the 20th century.

Bassman studied at the Textile High School in Manhattan, NY in 1933 and became an assistant painter at the WPA (Works Progress Administration) in 1934. In the 1940s, Bassman was working as a graphic designer when photographer Richard Avedon, a friend of her’s and her husband (Paul Himmel), encouraged her to pursue a career in photography.

Bassman’s most well-known photos were taken from the late 1940s to the early 1960s and most were published in Harper’s Bazaar. During this time she also worked as an art director for Junior Bazaar and later for Harper’s Bazaar. At Harper’s Bazaar, “Bassman brought a sophisticated, new aesthetic to fashion photography with her elegant, moody, and often abstract images. Her work diverged from classic fashion photography in that she did not rely on beautiful models and clothes as the sole essence of her photographs.”

“Bassman’s experimental and romantic visions revolutionized fashion photography. Vanity Fair magazine singled her out as one of photography’s “grand masters”. Full of mystery, sensuality, and expressionistic glamour, Bassman’s dramatic black and white photographs capture secret moments and dream memories. Her work is elegant, graceful and totally original. Bassman achieved her unique images through darkroom manipulation, specifically by blurring and bleaching areas of the photographs.’”

By the 1970s, Bassman’s interest in “pure form” photography was at odds with the changing fashion industry. She abandoned photography and turned back to painting, closing her studio for the next two decades. She returned to photography in the early 1990s after a friend found a bag of Bassman’s negatives in storage. Bassman, who had always had an interest in the manipulation of photographs, began altering the pictures and bleaching out backgrounds, creating dramatic effects.

At the age of 87, Bassman discovered PhotoShop and began working in her studio “toying and reconfiguring” her photographs. “She claimed a proud proficiency with her computer. It is a skill however that [did] not extend to the use of e-mail or Google.” “I’m not interested,” she said, “in any of that.” (New York Times)

Lillian Bassman died in her home on February 13, 2012. Her work has been published in “Lillian Bassman” (1997), “Lillian Bassman: Women” (2009), and more recently, “Lillian Bassman: Lingerie,” in March 2012.

Sources: Farmani Gallery, New York Times, New York Times (obituary), Facebook

Dorothea Lange: Migrant Mother

May 26, 2016 By Wendy Campbell

Born on May 26, 1895, Dorothea Lange was an influential American documentary photographer best known for her Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration. Lange’s photographs humanized the consequences of the Great Depression and influenced the development of documentary photography.

One of the most iconic photographs of the Depression and in American history is Lange’s Migrant Mother, photographed in 1936 in Nipomo, California at a campsite of out-of-work pea pickers. Lange approached one of the pickers, Florence Owens Thompson (1903 – 1983) and her seven children and asked to take their photo.

“I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was 32. She said that (she and her children) had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food.” –Dorothea Lange

During this period, known as the Dust Bowl, severe dust storms greatly damaged the ecology and agriculture of the US and Canadian prairies. Poverty stricken families like Florence’s, were common. “Their poverty was total; they had nothing. Where is her husband, the children’s father? She is on her own. There is no help, no protection, and nothing over the horizon but work, want and more wandering. Her worried, vacant expression seems to communicate what we, at our end of history, already know: Things were not going to get better for a long, long time.” (PBS)

For over forty years, the identity of the woman in the photo remained unknown. In 1978, Emmett Corrigan, a reporter from the Modesto Bee tracked down Florence in a trailer park outside Modesto, California. She was 75 at the time. “Lange had promised Thompson that her name would never be published — Thompson wanted to spare her children the embarrassment — but once she was discovered, she revealed her name and told her story.” A letter Thompson wrote was published in The Modesto Bee and the Associated Press distributed a story headlined “Woman Fighting Mad Over Famous Depression Photo” Florence was quoted as saying “I wish she (Lange) hadn’t taken my picture. I can’t get a penny out of it. She didn’t ask my name. She said she wouldn’t sell the pictures. She said she’d send me a copy. She never did.“

Migrant Mother catapulted Dorothea Lange’s reputation and helped earn her a Guggenheim fellowship for achievement in photography. She was funded by the federal government when the photograph was taken, so the image was in the public domain. Lange never directly received any royalties. In 1941, Lange gave up her Guggenheim Fellowship to document the forced evacuation of Japanese Americans from the West Coast, on assignment for the War Relocation Authority.

In 1945, Lange accepted a position as faculty at the first fine art photography department at the California School of Fine Arts. In 1952, she co-founded the photographic magazine Aperture with a consortium of photographers including Ansel Adams. Lange and Pirkle Jones were commissioned in the mid-1950s to shoot a photographic documentary for Life magazine of the death of Monticello, California and of the displacement of its residents by the damming of Putah Creek to form Lake Berryessa. Life did not run the piece, however an entire issue of Aperture was devoted to the work. The photo collection was shown at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1960.

Dorothea Lange died of esophageal cancer on October 11, 1965, in San Francisco, California, at age 70.

Sources: PBS, Wikipedia, C-SPAN

Read Florence Owens Thompson’s story on PBS.
Dorothea Lange: Grab a Hunk of Lightning premiered on PBS’s American Masters in August 2014. The full episode is available here (USA only)

DAF Group Feature: Vol. 152

April 19, 2016 By Wendy Campbell

Your Weekly Mixx – Enjoy! DAF’s Weekly Mixx is a selection of nine contemporary artworks and/or art related videos chosen from artist and gallery submissions and from our own search for new and interesting works. Visit the Submissions page for information on how to have your art featured in the Weekly Mixx.

Elaine Fried de Kooning: 1918-1989

March 12, 2016 By Wendy Campbell

Born on March 12, 1918 (or 1920) in Brooklyn, New York, Elaine Marie Catherine Fried de Kooning was a painter, sculptor, draughtswoman, printmaker, writer, and wife of influential artist Willem de Kooning.

De Kooning studied in New York at the Leonardo da Vinci Art School, the American Art School, the Academy School, and with Willem de Kooning. She was interested in both figurative and abstract art, acknowledging the influence of her husband and of the Abstract Expressionists of the New York School.

Elaine met Willem de Kooning in 1938 and the couple married in 1943. They had a turbulent marriage, separating in 1956 and reconciling in 1975. Though they benefited from one another’s art and teaching, they also suffered from each other’s infidelities and struggles with alcoholism.

During the 1940s, de Kooning painted portraits of her family, her husband, and many of her literary friends and fellow artists, including the poets Frank O’Hara and Allen Ginsberg and the choreographer Merce Cunningham.

De Kooning had her first solo exhibition at the Stable Gallery in New York in 1952 and exhibited almost annually thereafter throughout the United States, including shows at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, and Washington Gallery of Modern Art in 1964.

In 1962, de Kooning was commissioned by the White House to paint the portrait of President John F. Kennedy. The portrait is one of de Kooning’s most well known and celebrated paintings. Following his assassination in 1963, de Kooning stopped painting for a year and took a teaching appointment at the University of California, Davis.

In the 1970s, de Kooning taught at numerous colleges including Yale University, Pratt Institute, University of Pennsylvania, and Rice University, and others.

While de Kooning, like the “action” painters of the time, used gestural brushstrokes, most her work was figurative and representational, and rarely pure abstraction. An avid traveler, “she was exposed to and inspired by a wide variety of art work that helped make her one of the more diverse artists from the Abstract Expressionist movement; she experimented with sculpture, etchings and subject matter inspired by cave drawings, all in addition to her wealth of painting, which included everything from watercolors and still lifes to abstractions and formal portraits.”

De Kooning’s works are in the collections of numerous major American museums, including the Guggenheim, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC, and the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, New York.

Elaine de Kooning died of lung cancer on February 1, 1989. Willem de Kooning, suffering from dementia at the time, was never told of his wife’s death.

Sources: Crown Point Press, The Art Story

Cedar Lake: Imaginative & Inpsired Works by Canadian Artists & Artisans – Shop Canadian & Save!

International Women’s Day 2016 – Women in the Visual Arts

March 8, 2016 By Wendy Campbell

In honour of International Women’s Day this year, we bring you a visual selection of women artists that have appeared on Daily Art Fixx over the last seven years. Enjoy! Click on an image to open the gallery.

Emily Carr

5 Women Artists You Should Know: Vol. 8

February 24, 2016 By Wendy Campbell

1. Mary Beale (1633 – 1699) – Portrait painter Mary Beale is considered to be the first professional female painter in England. Born on March 26, 1633, in Barrow, Suffolk, Beale was the daughter of Puritan rector and amateur painter John Cradock. Her mother, Dorothy, died when she was ten. Mary became acquainted with local artists, including Nathaniel Thach, Matthew Snelling, Robert Walker and Peter Lely through her father who was a member of the Painter-Stainers’ Company. In 1652 she married Charles Beale, a cloth merchant (and amateur painter) from London.

Beale was prolific and reached the height of her success in 1677, completing over 80 commissions that year. She also took in students, many of them women. Beale supported her family through her work as an artist, and her husband Charles acted as her studio assistant, preparing her canvases and paints, purchasing supplies and managing her accounts. He wrote notebooks about his wife’s daily activities. Beale’s clientele included her immediate circle of friends, nobility, landed gentry, and clergymen.

Mary Beale died in 1699 in London, and was buried at St. James’s, Piccadilly. Her husband died in 1705. Mary and Charles had three children – Bartholomew who died young, a second son, also called Bartholomew, painted portraits before taking up medicine. A third son, named Charles was also a painter. (Tate, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Wikipedia)

2. Eva Hesse (1936 – 1970) – Born on January 11, 1936, Eva Hesse was a Jewish German-born American sculptor, known for work in the postminimal art movement of the 1960s. Hesse attended the School of Industrial Art, then Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 1952, and Cooper Union from 1954 to 1957. In 1959, she received her B.F.A. from Yale and returned to New York, where she worked as a textile designer.

Hesse’s practice as an expressionist painter led her to experiment with industrial and every-day materials including rope, string, wire, rubber, and fiberglass. “Hesse explored by way of the simplest materials how to suggest a wide range of organic associations, psychological moods, and what might be called proto-feminist, sexual innuendo.” She started to gain recognition by the late 1960s, with solo shows at the Fischbach Gallery, New York, and inclusion in major group exhibitions. Her large piece Expanded Expansion showed at the Whitney Museum in the 1969 exhibit “Anti-Illusion: Process/Materials”.

From 1968 to 1970, Hesse taught at the School of Visual Arts, New York. In 1969, she was diagnosed with a brain tumor, and after three operations within a year, she died May 29, 1970. Since her death, there have been dozens of major posthumous exhibitions in the United States and Europe, including at The Guggenheim Museum (1972), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2002), The Drawing Center in New York (2006) and the Jewish Museum of New York (2006), and the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona (2010). In May 2015, a documentary on Eva Hesse, directed by Marcie Begleiter premiered at the Whitney Museum of American Art. (Guggenheim, Wikipedia, The Art Story)

3. Marina Abramović (born November 30, 1946) – Marina Abramović is a Serbian performance artist based in New York. Her work explores the relationship between performer and audience, the limits of the body, and the possibilities of the mind. Active for over thirty years, Abramović has been described as the “grandmother of performance art.”

Abramović studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade from 1965 to 1970. She completed her post-graduate studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, SR Croatia in 1972. From 1973 to 1975, she taught at the Academy of Fine Arts at Novi Sad. “The body has always been both her subject and medium. Exploring the physical and mental limits of her being, she has withstood pain, exhaustion, and danger in the quest for emotional and spiritual transformation. Abramovic’s concern is with creating works that ritualize the simple actions of everyday life like lying, sitting, dreaming, and thinking; in effect the manifestation of a unique mental state.”

Abramovic has presented her work with performances, sound, photography, video, sculpture, and ‘transitory objects for human and non human use’ in solo exhibitions at major institutions in the U.S. and Europe. She has taught and lectured extensively in Europe and America and is the recipient of numerous awards including Golden Lion, XLVII Venice Biennale, 1997, Honorary Doctorate of Arts, University of Plymouth UK, 2009, Cultural Leadership Award, American Federation of Arts, 2011, Lifetime Achievement Awards, Podgorica, Montenegro, 2012, among others. (Wikipedia, Marinafilm.com)

4. Sofonisba Anguissola (1532 – 1625) – Born into a minor aristocratic family in Cremona, Italy, Sofonisba Anguissola became one of the most successful female painters in the Renaissance, and was renowned for her portraits. She was the first woman artist to achieve international renown, and was recognized by Vasari, Michelangelo and Van Dyck during a period in history when women did not typically achieve recognition as artists.

Anguissola studied with Bernardino Campi, a respected portrait and religious painter of the Lombard school. Anguissola then continued her studies with painter Bernardino Gatti (known as Il Sojaro). Anguissola’s apprenticeship with local painters set a precedent for women to be accepted as students of art. As a woman at the time, Anguissola was not permitted to study anatomy or drawing from life from nude models and therefore focused her attention on portraiture.

In 1560, she was appointed painter to the Queen of Spain, Isabel de Valois, Philip II’s third wife. Over her long residence, she taught the young queen drawing and made numerous portraits of the royal family and members of the court. In 1571, Anguissola entered an arranged marriage to Sicilian nobleman, Fabrizio Moncada Pignatelli, chosen for her by the Spanish court. She lived with him in Palermo until his death in 1579 and received a royal pension that enabled her to continue working and tutoring would-be painters. Her private fortune also supported her family and brother. In 1580, she married merchant captain Orazio Lomellini and lived in Genoa until 1620. In her later years, Anguissola became a wealthy patron of the arts. She died in 1625 at age 93 in Palermo.

Anguissola is significant to feminist art historians. Her great success opened the way for larger numbers of women to pursue serious careers as artists. Some of her more well-known successors include Lavinia Fontana, Barbara Longhi, Fede Galizia and Artemisia Gentileschi. (ArtUK.org, Isabella Stewart Gardiner Museum, Wikipedia)

5. Diane Arbus (1923 – 1971) – Born on March 14, 1923, in New York City, Diane Arbus (nee Nemerov) was an American photographer noted for her images of marginalised people—dwarfs, giants, transgender, circus performers and others who might be perceived as ugly or surreal. Arbus was artistic in her youth, creating paintings and drawings. In 1941, she married actor and photographer Allan Arbus who encouraged her artistic pursuits and taught her photography. The couple worked together successfully in advertising and fashion with photographs appearing in Vogue Magazine. In 1956, Arbus began to focus on her own photography and studied with photographer Lisette Model.

By the mid-1960s, Arbus had become a well-established photographer, participating in shows at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, among others. Her raw, unusual images of the people she saw while wandering the streets of New York City were featured in publications such as Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar and The Sunday Times Magazine.

Though she thrived professionally, Diane Arbus had personal challenges. Her marriage to Allan Arbus ended in 1969, and she later struggled with depression. She committed suicide in her New York City apartment on July 26, 1971. Her photographs remain the subject of great interest, and her life was the basis of the 2006 film Fur, starring Nicole Kidman. (Wikipedia, Biography.com)

Megan Kimber: Painting

March 9, 2013 By Wendy Campbell

Born and raised in Poughkeepsie, New York, Megan Kimber graduated from Rhode Island School of Design in 1997 with a BFA in Illustration. After living and creating in Orlando, Florida and New York, she then moved to Savannah, Georgia, where she received her MFA in Illustration from The Savannah College of Art and Design. She now resides in Birmingham, Alabama.

Inspired by the color palette of the light at dusk, Kimber depicts psychological portrait studies within environments reminiscent of the Brother’s Grimm Fairy tales. When it comes to her characters, she finds beauty in flaws. Ultimately, her biggest inspiration is nature – animal movements, fossils, colors found in light and shadow, objects worn and atrophied by forces of nature. Costumes, rituals, and anything else symbolic of a specified sacred celebration is what provides her man-made inspiration.

Kimber’s paintings have been exhibited in Birmingham, Philadelphia, Atlanta, San Francisco, Savannah, NY, Orlando, and Providence.

Her illustration work has been published with Lipstick magazine, Yellow Brand Skateboards, an upcoming CD project from Kebbi Williams, and Ancestry Magazine. (bio from Matt Jones Gallery)

To see more of Megan Kimber’s work, visit MeganKimber.com.