#50 Jennifer Bartlett

Jennifer Bartlett was born in Long Beach California in 1941. In 1963 she received her BA from Mills College in Oakland, California. While studying at Mills College in Oakland she met mixed media sculptor Elizabeth Murray. In 1965 Bartlett received her MFA from the Yale School of Art and Architecture. During this time minimalism was at a high point. Jennifer is considered to be a conceptual artist.

Bartlett is best known for her paintings and prints that contain subjects that are considered be me mundane such as houses. They are treated both as realistic and also abstract. In 1981 Jennifer created a 200 foot mural for the Federal Building in Atlanta Georgia. Bartlett has work in many collections such as the Cleveland Museum of Art, The Contemporary Museum, The Tate Gallery, and the Whitney Museum of American Art just to name a few.

http://www.artinfo.com/galleryguide/19630/6176/16195/james-goodman-gallery-new-york/artist/jennifer-bartlett/biography/

#49 Alexander Ney

Alexander Ney was born in 1939 in Leningrad, Russia. He is an American sculptor and painter. He immigrated to the United States in 1974 and has lived and worked in New York ever since. Alexander developed many individualistic styles of modern art but he is most famous for his unique work in Terra cotta sculpture that are heavily perforated surfaces and intriguing forms.

Ney's childhood was not an easy one. He was born into the time of World War II when the Siege of Leningrad was launched, this is marked by historians as the second most lethal battle in the wars tragic history. The cities rail connections were severed cutting off all access to and food and power supplies. That following winter between two and three million civilians were killed during the Leningrad Blockade, including 400,000 children. Alexander was given private art lessons from Russian sculptor V.V. Lishev. After receiving these private lessons Ney decided to study at the Art School of the Leningrad Academy of Arts from 1954-1957. Next he attended the Art School at the Surikov Moscow Art Institute from 1957-1959. Ney befriended many progressive-minded art students who are now stars of the contemporary Russian art scene such as Leonid Sokov and Lev Nussberg. Ney was relentless at trying to create striking and new interpretations of art, this is what quickly made him legendary amongst his peers.

From 1965 to 1967 Ney taught sculpture to children at the house of Young Pioneers in Leningrad. In 1967 to 1969 he went back to school to study art history and theory courses.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Ney

http://www.alexanderney.com/flash/alexanderney.html

#48 Chris Ofili

Chris Ofili was born on October 10, 1968 in Manchester. Chris is a British painter who is best known for his works of art that reference his Nigerian heritage and his incorporation of elephant dung. Ofili attended a catholic school which was a school for boys. After that he attended Xaverian College in Victoria Park Manchester. He also studied in London at the Chelsea School of Art from 1988 to 1991 and then at the Royal College of Art from 1991 to 1993. Ofili was established because of exhibits by Charles Saatchi at his art gallery in north London and also because of the traveling exhibition called "Sensation" in 1997. Because of this he became recognized as one of the few British artists of African/Caribbean descent to break through as a member of the "Young British Artists" group. Chris Ofili has had many solo exhibits since the early 1990s including the Serpentine Gallery. In 1992 Chris received a scholarship that allowed him to travel to Zimbabwe where he studied cave paintings that ended up having an effect on his style. With this new style he began to work with elephant dung that people though he splatter on his paintings but in reality he applies it to his painting in the form of round spheres, and he sometimes uses it as foot stands on his paintings. Not only do Ofili's painting reference his Nigerian Heritage they also reference gangster rap seeking to question racial and sexual stereotypes in humorous ways. His work is often build up in layers of different materials to create a collage. In 1998 Chris Ofili won the Turner Prize.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Ofili

#47 Judy Chicago

"The Dinner Party"

I picked Judy Chicago for this post because when I took ceramics with professor Hayes we actually did a version of her "Dinner Party" to help support the food bank of Virginia. We had a No Dinner Dinner Party where everyone made "plates" that somehow represented hunger. For mine I made a set of hands holding up a piece cardboard that has written on it "will work for food".

Judy Chicago was born on July 20th 1939 in Chicago IL. She received her Bachelor Degree and Masters degree both at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1962 and 1964. Judy is another one of those artists that isn't just an artist she is an author, educator, feminist, and an intellectual whose career has now spanned over five decades. Just Chicago has been a huge influence both within and beyond the art community which can be shown by the numerous inclusions in publications throughout the world. Chicago's work has been on exhibit frequently in the United States and Canada as well as in Asia, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. In addition to her art exhibits many of the books she has written have also been published in foreign editions, which enables her to bring her art and philosophy to many readers around the world. After taking time off from teaching for 25 years in 1999 she returned to teaching at the University of Indiana, Bloomington. Although Judy has been an influential teacher and a prolific author her primary focus throughout her career has been her studio work. In 1974 Chicago turned her attention to the subject of women's history as she created her most well know work "The Dinner Party" which was executed from 1974 to 1979 with the participation of hundreds of volunteers. This was an extremely monumental multimedia project with was symbolic history of women in the western civilization. The Dinner Party has been seen by more than one million viewers during its sixteen exhibitions held at venues spanning six countries.

http://www.judychicago.com/about-judy-chicago/biography

#46 Ashley Bickerton

I absolutely love Ashley Bickertons work. I especially love the use of bright colors. This one is my favorite of his because of the interesting look on the persons face. It almost looks like the person is pieced together from different features of other people. The eyes are the main part of this that really draw me into his work. The eyes are very intense and I think that is what makes this piece of work so wonderful.

Ashely Bickerton was born in Barbados in 1959. He studied at the California Institute of Arts where he graduated in 1982. Next he went on to study at the Whitney Museum Independent Studies program in New York. He continued to live and work in New York until 1993. Since living in New York Bickerton has moved to Bali where he currently lives and works. Bickerton has had exhibits worldwide and many of his works are included in many museums and public collections. Bickerton is considered to be a mixed media artist because he often mixes photographic and painterly elements with industrial and found objects. Ashley Bickerton has been associated with the 1980s art movement called Neo-Geo, which also includes artists Jeff Koons and Peter Halley. Bickertons work has explored the issues of contemporary art related to the commidification of the art object itself. The objects in Bickertons work are often grotesque in a self aware manner and are often a critique of capitalism.



http://www.whitecube.com/artists/bickerton/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashley_Bickerton

#45 Jasper Johns

"Flag"

Encaustic,oil and collage on fabric mounted on plywood

Jasper Johns was born on May 15, 1960 in Augusta Georgia. He spent the majority of his life living in South Carolina. Jasper started drawing at the age of three and has been creating art ever since. Jasper began his studies at the University of South Carolina where he studies for a total of three semester in 1947-1948. After that he moved to New York City where be studied briefly at the Parsons School of Design in 1949. He had a brief stint in the military where he was stationed in Sendai Japan from 1952-1953 during the Korean War. In 1954 Jasper returned to New York City where he met Robert Rauschenberg and they became long term lovers. Together they began to explore the contemporary art scene and began developing their ideas on art. In 1958 John's was discovered by gallery owner Leo Castelli while he was visiting Rauschenbergs studio. Castelli was the one who gave John's his first solo show and it was at this show that Alfred Barr the founding director of New York's Museum of Modern Art purchased four of his works of art. In 1963 Johns and Cage founded Foundation for Contemporary Performing Arts, which is now know and Foundation for Contemporary Arts in New York City. Jasper is best know for his painting Flag (1954-55) which he painted after he had a dream about the American flag. Johns work is often described and Neo-Dadaist as opposed to pop art, even though his work often included subject matter, images, and objects from popular culture. Jaspers early works were normally composed of simple things such as flags, maps, targets, letters, and numbers. Johns treats the surface of his work and it is often lush and painterly. He is famous for incorporating media such as encaustic, and plaster relief in his paintings. Not only does he create paintings but he also creates intaglio prints, sculptures, and lithographs with similar motifs that he creates with his paintings. Johns breakthrough move which was to inform much later work by others, was to appropriate popular iconography for painting thus allowing a set of familiar associations to answer the need for the subject.







http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jasper_Johns

#44 Joan Snyder

Joan Snyder was born on April 16, 1940 in Highland Park, New Jersey. Joan received her A.B from Douglass College in New Brunswick, New Jersey in 1962 and then her M.F.A. from Rutgers University also in New Brunswick, NJ, in 1966. Joan's introduction to the New York art scene began with a series of her "stroke" paintings that were completed in the 1970s. These paintings were the basis for her first solo shows in New York and San Francisco. Joan's painters are often placed under various art movement categories such as Abstract Expressionism, Neo-Expressionism, and Feminist Art but the changing nature of her work combined with her use of personal iconography, female imagery, and aggressive brush stokes have kept her steadily untagged. Throughout her career Joan has received many fellowships, the National Endowment for the Arts in 1974, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 1983, and in 2007 she received a MacArthur Fellowship. Joan has work in many different collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and The Guggenheim just to name a few.

http://joansnyder.net/bio.php