from the Waterfall Series (Untitled)

Steir has been the recipient of grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim as well as an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Art from the Pratt Institute. Her works have appeared in numerous exhibitions throughout the world in cities such as Paris, Amsterdam, New York, Washington, D.C., and Geneva. She has taught at the Parsons School of Design, Princeton University, and California Institute of the Arts, and was a founding board member of the Printed Matter bookshop, New York City, and “Heresies” magazine. The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Brooklyn Museum, the Hirshorn Museum, the Wadsworth Athenaeum, the National Gallery of Art, and the Musee d?art et Archaeologie are among the numerous public collections where her works are represented. Steir is considered one of the most accomplished contemporary painters of our time. In this work from her “Waterfall” series, the blurring of abstraction with reality is realized by the artist?s ability to meld the two together. Steir makes it clear that she believes abstraction and reality are really the same thing. According to Steir, the only difference between the two is how one chooses to view them.

Red Apples, Black Eggs

Since 1977 Sultan has had an extensive number of solo exhibitions in cities around the world including Paris, Tokyo, Rome, London, Switzerland, San Francisco, Chicago and New York. He was the recipient of the Creative Artists Public Service Grant in New York in 1978-79 and the National Endowment for the Arts in 1980-81. His works are in the public collections of such prominent museums as The Art Institute of Chicago, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Sultan executes the traditional still-life in such an extraordinary manner that the viewer is forced to challenge his preconceived notions about it. Sultan has taken the traditional still-life to new heights and moved it into the next century.

Hand in Blue

James Surls is nationally recognized for his poetic, anthromorphic, sculptures and prints. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Albright Knox Gallery, Dallas Museum of Art; Guggenheim Museum of Art; Whitney Museum of Art. The artist’s public commissions include Family, (collaboration with Charmaine Locke), Mariposa Park, Corpus Christi, TX; There Used to be a Lake, (collaboration with poet Robert Creely), Citicorp Plaza, Los Angeles and many others.

Camouflage

An icon of the twentieth century, Warhol remains one of the most contemporary artists of our time. His early beginnings were at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now called Carnegie Mellon University) where he graduated with a degree in design. After graduating, he worked as an illustrator for a number of magazines, including Vogue, Glamour, and The New Yorker. His first solo show took place at the Hugo Gallery in 1952, and since that time his works have appeared in countless exhibitions in museums and galleries throughout the United States and abroad, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the Museum St. Ingbert in Germany. Warhol was a prolific artist who not only produced paintings (many of them portraitures), but also created drawings, silkscreens, and films. This remarkable artist did many other things, too, including publishing a magazine, creating two cable television shows and writing several books. The list of his achievements goes on and on, and in the last years of his life he collaborated with several younger artists, Francesco Clemente, Jean-Michel Basquait, and Keith Haring. Camouflage is part of a series of works by Warhol. Although he did others in this series, this group of eight silkscreens is significant because they are the last ones the artist completed prior to his death. After surviving a near fatal shooting in 1968, the artist died following a routine gall bladder surgery in 1987. Two years later, a major retrospective of Warhol?s work was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. This piece consists of a series of 8 images each 36″ square.

Armor

Fay received his Bachelors of Fine Arts degree from Kansas City Art Institute in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1967 and received his Masters of Fine Arts degree in 1970 from the University of California in Santa Barbara, California. Fay has been active in non-profit art organizations and the avant-garde art scene in New York. He founded a group with several other Chinese-American artists called Epoxy. Some of his recent awards and grants include artist in residence in the Art/Industry program at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center; Percent for Art, P.S. 7, Elmhurst, Queens, Department of Cultural Affairs, New York City; and Lila Wallace-Reader?s Digest Arts Partners Program. His work has appeared in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States and in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Some of his solo exhibitions include the Hong Kong Institute for Promotion of Chinese Culture in Hong Kong, the Kansas City Art Institute in Missouri, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Articles about his work have appeared in such publications as Art in America and Arts Magazine. This unique sculpture is constructed of a malleable paper pulp mixture on a metal framework. Paper is Fay?s favorite choice of materials, although he also uses acrylic paint, metal, glass, clay and porcelain in some of his works. There is a sense of mortality in his mixed media sculptures since they are made of materials which will eventually decay.

Five Panel L. Steel Structure in Black #5

Freed received his B.F.A. degree in 1967 and his M.A. degree in 1968 from Fort Hays State University in Kansas. He was the founding director of The Daum Museum of Contemporary Art. Freed was also the head of the art department at State Fair Community College from 1968 to 2002 and served as the Director of Goddard Gallery in Sedalia, Missouri. Freed has been an advocate for the arts for many years. As a result of his active participation in the arts, Freed received a gubernatorial appointment to the Missouri Arts Council Board from 1984-1988. He also served as the legislative liaison for the Missouri Citizens for the Arts/Senate and Legislature. Besides receiving a National Endowment for the Arts in 1987 for a Design Arts Project Special Project Grant and a ?Creative Artist Project Grant? from the Missouri Arts Council in 1990, Freed has received several other grants and fellowships. His works appear in numerous collections such as the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Newark Museum in New Jersey, the Steinberg Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and the Museum of Art and Archaeology at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri. During the past twenty years he has exhibited extensively throughout the United States. Freed is represented by galleries on the east coast, west coast, and the heartland.

Six Panel Vertical Steel Structure #9

Freed received his B.F.A. degree in 1967 and his M.A. degree in 1968 from Fort Hays State University in Kansas. He was the founding director of The Daum Museum of Contemporary Art. Freed was also the head of the art department at State Fair Community College from 1968 to 2002 and served as the Director of Goddard Gallery in Sedalia, Missouri. Freed has been an advocate for the arts for many years. As a result of his active participation in the arts, Freed received a gubernatorial appointment to the Missouri Arts Council Board from 1984-1988. He also served as the legislative liaison for the Missouri Citizens for the Arts/Senate and Legislature. Besides receiving a National Endowment for the Arts in 1987 for a Design Arts Project Special Project Grant and a ?Creative Artist Project Grant? from the Missouri Arts Council in 1990, Freed has received several other grants and fellowships. His works appear in numerous collections such as the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Newark Museum in New Jersey, the Steinberg Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and the Museum of Art and Archaeology at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri. During the past twenty years he has exhibited extensively throughout the United States. Freed is represented by galleries on the east coast, west coast, and the heartland.

Reclining Figure

Born the son of a coal miner, Moore attended the Leeds School of Art and the Royal College of Art in London in the early 1920s. He served as a part-time instructor at the Royal College of Art from 1932-1939. His greatest influences growing up were the Classical, pre-Classical, African and pre-Columbian art. He often visited the British Museum while he was growing up. Moore developed as a mature artist during the years he was an instructor at the Royal College of Art. The style which he became known for is not considered purely abstract since it appears too humanistic. His works probe the viewer?s psychic and have an obvious primitiveness about them. The Toltec sculpture of Chac-Mool, the Mexican Rain Spirit inspired Moore when he made one of his early masterpieces in sculpture, the 1929 Reclining Figure. In this seventh edition completed in 1939, Moore holds to his belief of remaining true to his materials. The principle of staying true to one?s materials evolved during the English Arts and Crafts movement. The image of the reclining figure dominated much of Moore?s work. He did versions of it in wood, stone and cast metal.

Fish Wish

The daughter of a three-star admiral, Onofrio grew up on the Atlantic seaboard scouring the beach for shells, sticks and other treasures. Both of her parents were avid collectors and this love for amassing objects became an obsession with Onofrio. Her great-aunt Trude was another influential family member that shared her obsession. She fondlyrecalls the magical garden that Aunt Trude created from the many objects she had amassed over a lifetime. The playful and total lack of reverence evident in California artist Robert Arneson?s work appealed to Onofrio and was a major influence upon her career. This unorthodox approach led the artist to incorporate fantasy into her mixed media pieces. Her work became much more passionate as she relaxed in a style that fit her perfectly. After more than twenty years of working in ceramics, soft sculpture, performance, installation and fiber art she had finally discovered her true passion for constructing imaginative works from her own collection of accumulated treasures. Onofrio received the Arts Midwest/National Endowment for the Arts Regional Fellowship Grant in 1994, the Bush Artist Fellowship in 1998 and the McKnight Foundation Fellowship in the Visual Arts in 1995. She exhibits both nationally and internationally and has her works in the collections of museums such as the Copper-Hewitt Museum, the Smithsonian?s National Museum of Design in New York and the Arabia Museum in Helsinki, Finland. According to the artist, this mystifying mixed media creation titled Fish Wish is actually a metaphor for putting yourself in a gambling situation. Onofrio states that, ?it is about the fantasy of fishing and having no idea what you are going to catch.? The situation requires searching and being involved with change. Onofrio adds that ? this can refer to the process in my studio with my work and in my everyday life or with any situation that comes up.? The lavish embellishments allover this figurative work literary dazzles the eye of the viewer as it stimulates the imagination.

Thermi

Steiner was part of a group of artists called Bennington School because of his association with Bennington College. Many students from Bennington became imitators of the sculpture artist,Anthony Caro. Caro was influenced by the art critic Clement Greenberg and worked in a narrow aesthetic and formal style. Steiner?s work echoes elegance and reflects the formal qualities of his predecessor, Anthony Caro. The Vulcan is an example of the artist putting abstract theory into effect without regard to practical difficulties. One can see the impracticalities of this work and appreciate the skill and thought that went into making it. Instead of using scrap metal like many sculpture artists, Steiner makes his own pieces. He merges these hand-crafted pieces till they look like something. In his more recent works Steiner exhibits his use of hand-crafted objects by integrating them till they become a unified whole.