For decades, Doug Hyde has been a recognized leader among Native American artists. From images evoking Indian lore to those reflecting the modern Native American, his work exudes emotion, strength, and beauty and is resonant of his Native American heritage.

Hyde was born in Oregon of Nez Perce and Assiniboine reward background. He studied at the Institute of American Indian Art in Santa Fe and continued his studies at the San Francisco Institute of Art. Hyde then served with the army in Vietnam, and upon his return, moved back to Santa Fe where he continued his work in sculpture and served as a faculty member at IAIA until 1974.

Hyde works with a wide array of materials including marble, alabaster, onyx, limestone and bronze. His work has evolved in even greater diversity through his bronzes, a relatively new medium for Hyde. His dexterity with this variety of materials is remarkable, and still maintains consistency with Hyde’s distinct style.

The individuality and strong character of Leon Gaspard are expressed in his remarkable paintings, which span continents and decades. Born in Vitebsk, Russia, Gaspard accompanied his father on fur trades to Asia. This exposure to colorful and exotic cultures would influence his work throughout his life.

Gaspard’s artistic studies began in Vitebsk and were followed by further study in Odessa and at the Academy of Moscow. He traveled to Paris in 1901 to study with Adolphe Bouguereau and Edouard Toudouze at the Académie Julian. There he met his future wife, Evelyn Adell, an American ballet student.

Their unusual honeymoon, a two-year pack trip through the Siberian wilderness, allowed Gaspard to create hundreds of sketches. These sketches, as well as others made on his later travels throughout Asia, Europe, North Africa and America, became the foundation for his finished paintings.

Gaspard’s highly successful Parisian career was interrupted by World War I, when he flew with the French Air Corps as an aerial observer. His plane was shot down, and Gaspard was badly injured. His wife’s family arranged for him to come to New York to recuperate. In 1919 the Gaspards moved to Taos, seeking a more beneficial climate. The native cultures of the Southwest reminded Gaspard of his beloved homeland. Though they continued to travel, the Gaspards made Taos their permanent home in 1924.

Gaspard’s paintings are anomalous among the work of the Taos painters since they have many cultures from many lands as their theme. His paintings combine the clear, bright colors associated with impressionism and the influences of more modern and interpretive representation. Gaspard’s vibrant paintings, filled with movement and rendered in brilliant colors, form a historic legacy of cultures form around the world.

Wilson Hurley, a resident of New Mexico from 1935 until his passing in 2008, is recognized as one of America’s premier landscape painters. Working in the great American landscape tradition, he has often been compared with Albert Bierstadt, Frederick Church, and Thomas Moran, the great landscapists of the 19th century. Though honored by the comparison, Hurley creates paintings which are truly contemporary in that they combine the realistic beauty of nature with the best of 20th century technological achievement, thought and expression. Hurley is credited with bringing Western realist landscape painting to the forefront of American painting. His influence on current and future generations of artists is incalculable. His work embodies the spirit of Western individualism and presents his experience, enthusiasm and appreciation to all who see his paintings so that they, too, may understand his extraordinary perspective.

Hurley, whose artistic talents were apparent at a very early age, has often been described as a “renaissance man”. While pursuing successful careers in engineering and law, Hurley quietly developed his art. As the age of 40, Hurley turned to painting full time. The accomplishments he has achieved since are both innumerable and impressive. Among the awards presented to Hurley by the National Academy of Western Art are the 1984 Prix de West for his painting Los Alamos Country, and the gold medal for oil painting in 1977, 1978, and 1984. The National Cowboy Hall of Fame presented him with the 1977 Trustees’ Award for his contribution to Western Art. The Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art presented him with the award for Excellence in Western Art in 1991. He has had one-man shows at the Albuquerque Museum of Art and History; the National Cowboy Hall of Fame and Western Heritage Center in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum in Canyon, Texas; the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma; the Whitney Museum in Cody Wyoming; the Rockwell Museum in Corning, New York and the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Most Americans are familiar with the sculptural contribution Glenna Goodacre (1939 – 2020) gave to the nation through her Vietnam Women’s Memorial installed in 1993 on the Mall in Washington, D.C.  Her 1999 design for the Sacagawea dollar contributes greatly to her renown.  Goodacre’s incredible range of work has made her enormously popular and very widely recognized.

Texas-born Goodacre began her artistic endeavors as a painter rather than a sculptor. She graduated from Colorado College and studied at the Art Students League of New York. Eventually she began to work in three dimensions, shaping portrait busts and figures in wax and clay, transforming herself from painter to sculptor. Central to her career, however, has always been an emphasis on the creative challenges of the human figure.

Goodacre has been awarded many important public commissions. In 1998 she created a seven-foot standing portrait of President Ronald Reagan depicted in casual riding attire for the National Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City and Reagan’s presidential library in California. In 1997 Goodacre was selected as the winning sculptor in an international competition to create the Irish Memorial at Penn’s Landing in Philadelphia. This is Goodacre’s most ambitious public sculpture to date; it comprises 35 life-size figures documenting the potato famine in Ireland and the subsequent immigration of survivors to the United States.

Goodacre has been an academician of the National Academy of Design since 1994 and a fellow of the National Sculpture Society since 1981. She has won many awards at these institutions’ New York exhibitions.  Goodacre has received honorary doctorates from her alma mater, Colorado College, and Texas Tech University in her hometown of Lubbock.  In 2002, she won the James Earl Fraser Sculpture Award at the Prix de West Exhibition.  In 2003, she was awarded the Gold Medal for Career Achievement from The Portrait Society of America and the Texas Medal of Arts.  She was inducted into the Cowgirl Hall of Fame in 2003.

Fremont Ellis was the youngest member of Los Cinco Pintores, the 1920s society of Santa Fe artists. He and his colleagues, Jozef Bakos, Walter Mruk, Willard Nash and Will Shuster, created an awareness of contemporary art which was essential to the foundation of the Santa Fe artist colony.  Although each painter maintained an individual style, their friendships and philosophies held the group together.  Ellis, committed to an impressionistic style of painting, had an ongoing love affair with the natural light and beauty of New Mexico as seen in each of his colorful landscapes.

Born in Virginia City, Montana, Ellis never pursued formal education past the first grade.  His father’s traveling life as a dentist and later a showman kept the family on the move.  At age 14, Ellis saw his first impressionist painting in New York.  He became intrigued and enrolled in the Art Students League.  Three months of formal training convinced Ellis that he could work out his own methods of painting.  Attracted by the growing art colony in Santa Fe, Ellis moved here permanently in 1919 to pursue his ideas.

There is an element of sheer pleasure in all of Ellis’ work.  Each painting portrays a moment, capturing the atmosphere and emotions of the time.  Ellis’ commitment to his career and the admiration of his audience are evident in his awards.  These include the Huntington award for best landscape in the Los Angeles Museum in 1924, the Hazel Hyde Morrison Prize and the Bronze Medal at the Oakland Museum, and a gold medal in 1975 from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City.  Nedra Matteucci Galleries held a major retrospective of Ellis’s work in 2001.

Lee was born in Lexington, NC in 1934 and pursued her academic career at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, where she studied with the painters John Opper and George Ivy. She received her MA in 1958 and her PhD in 1965, both from New York University, and continued her post-doctoral work at the prestigious Warburg Institute at the University of London with research fellowships from the American Philosophical Society.

In New York, she forged close relationships with leaders in American modern painting, including Elaine and Willem de Kooning, and exhibited alongside Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell. Lee was represented by Betty Parsons, one of the most important gallerists of the period, and eventually became her close friend and biographer.

Lee’s work was reviewed frequently and favorably in the central periodicals of the day, including ArtNews, Art in America, The New Yorker, Artforum, Arts Magazine and The New York Times by the widely respected critics Clement Greenberg, John Russell and Hilton Kramer, among others.

Lee’s works are held in the permanent collections of several museums, including the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Montclair Art Museum, the Seattle Art Museum, the Newark Museum, the Hudson River Museum, the Weatherspoon Art Museum, the Mint Museum (Charlotte, NC) and the Johnson Collection (Spartanburg, SC) as well as in many corporate collections such as Chase Manhattan Bank, Citibank and Prudential.

She was the recipient of many awards, including an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from the University of North Carolina, the Childe Hassam Purchase Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Athena Medal from the Rhode Island School of Design. In 2016 she was awarded an Alumna of Distinction Award by the College of Visual and Performing Arts at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Alongside her lifelong devotion to making art, Lee also pursued a career in academia beginning in 1958. She taught at the University of New York, Potsdam and then Winthrop College in Rock Hill, SC. She spent almost a decade at Drew University where she left as full professor and Chair of the Art Department. She then served as the Dean of Visual Arts at the State University of New York at Purchase where, in 1975, she left to begin her tenure as President of the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design. There, she served for eight years before becoming the Director of Arts and Communication and Senior Vice President at the Academy for Educational Development in New York City.

Notwithstanding her many accomplishments as an academic, historian, university leader and teacher, throughout all of her life Lee was first and foremost a painter. She drew great inspiration from her engagements with the landscapes and history of Greece, Rome and her love of the New England countryside. She continuously experimented in drawing, collage, oil and acrylics. Her interests were expansive, deep and informed by her pragmatism, empathy and seductive sense of humor.

Her growth as an intellectual and artist was persistent and enduring. As she wrote once, “A painter should live a long time. It takes decades of work, of arduous search and fretting, to know that labels don’t matter, and to find what will suffice.”

Ed Ruscha (born 1937) is an artist who is best known for his combinations of typography, landscapes, and clean color palette. This was a clear departure from the art era that preceded him, the more gesture-based Abstract Expressionism movement. Ruscha’s work often incorporates a subtle, deadpan humor through his juxtaposition of opposites. In his use of text layered upon his images, he draws attention to dichotomies of high versus low culture and urban versus rural lifestyle. He resists being pigeon-holed into any particular art movement, however his work incorporates elements of Pop Art and Conceptualism. The appropriation of mass-produced imagery, especially surrounding the car culture of Los Angeles is one reason he is particularly associated with Pop Art.  He also published a series of conceptual photographic artist’s books including Thirty Four Parking Lots in Los Angeles and Every Building on the Sunset Strip. 

Julian Opie (born 1958) is a British artist who is most well-known for his reductive and graphic silhouettes, seemingly absorbed in an all-too-familiar depiction of contemporary human life. Through the process of digital manipulation, Opie distills photographs of his subjects down to the most basic and essential of forms. Blurring the lines between illustration, environmental design, and fine art, Opie has managed to bring the graphic clarity and bold impact of 1960s Pop Art into the 21st century.

Erik Parker combines surrealism, comic book art, pop, hip hop, heavy and psychedelia, with a touch of Matisse and Rauschenberg, to create innovative work that is in demand in the U.S, Europe and Asia.

 

Parker moved to New York in 1996 and had his work exhibited at a few group shows. He was invited to paint a mural at Gavin Brown’s gallery, which was fronted by the Passerby Bar, the center of the underground art world in the late ’90s. In exchange for the painting, Parker received a free lifetime tab  at the Passerby. His work at the Passerby caught the attention of Laura Hoptman, who was a curator at the Museum of Modern Art at that time. She included Parker’s work in the first Greater New York show at P.S. 1 in 2001, which led to his first solo show at the Leo Koenig Gallery.

Parker’s career quickly took off after the Greater New York show. He began to exhibit in Europe and Japan and produced enough work to have three or four shows a year. In 2001, Parker married screenwriter Brook Dunn. The couple has two daughters. Parker lives and works in Brooklyn. His work is in the permanent collection of MoMA and other fine museums and galleries around the world.

Ted Diamond was an artist who spent much of his life, obsessed with suicide, eventually taking his own life at forty-seven years of age. 

Although Diamond briefly studied at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, he did not enjoy a conventional education nor a career as a trained artist. Most of the work was created while he was living in a public psychiatric hospital in the Boston area; even under these harsh conditions he found precious moments to paint.

A group of his intimate paintings in gouache mounted on black paper and housed in several notebooks were found in his room after his death by a supporter and friend who kept them safe for nearly 30 years.  The energy of these tempera paintings and their deft handling results in a powerful scale beyond their humble size. They function to present emotional, neurotic content, elevated to fine art by coloristic and painterly mastery. These are either self-portraits or renderings of other patients encountered on the psych ward in his hospital stays. These remarkable works, an “Outsider’s’” vision in the deepest sense, have never been seen publicly until now.