Experience

Born in Sedalia, Missouri, Patten was an only child whose parents divorced when she was very young. She grew up close to her grandfather, Marion Hall, who sparked her early love of horses. In 1965 she graduated with a B.A. in German from the University of Kansas. Later, when one of her favorite horses was accidentally electrocuted, she suffered a bout with mental illness. In a television interview nearly twenty years later, Patten recalled with certainty that it was this ?sick and pitiful? period in her life which led to her discovering she really wanted to be an artist. She acted on this realization and received her B.F.A. from the Kansas City Art Institute in 1979. The unique and rather eccentric style of art that Patten brought to her work had no precedent in the Kansas City area. Her tendency to overload canvases with layer upon layer of oil paint with a palette knife gave her works a dramatic and emotional quality. Patten preferred working with canvases of up to nine feet or more in size. Patten?s independent vision resulted in wide recognition in her short sixteen years as an artist. In 1988 she won the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship with just a few slides and a one-page resume. Her work was featured in Art in America in June of 1995. Patten was 52 when she died in December 1995, a few short months after receiving the news she had liver cancer.

Aplomb

Born in Sedalia, Missouri, Patten was an only child whose parents divorced when she was very young. She grew up close to her grandfather, Marion Hall, who sparked her early love of horses. In 1965 she graduated with a B.A. in German from the University of Kansas. Later, when one of her favorite horses was accidentally electrocuted, she suffered a bout with mental illness. In a television interview nearly twenty years later, Patten recalled with certainty that it was this ?sick and pitiful? period in her life which led to her discovering she really wanted to be an artist. She acted on this realization and received her B.F.A. from the Kansas City Art Institute in 1979. The unique and rather eccentric style of art that Patten brought to her work had no precedent in the Kansas City area. Her tendency to overload canvases with layer upon layer of oil paint with a palette knife gave her works a dramatic and emotional quality. Patten preferred working with canvases of up to nine feet or more in size. Patten?s independent vision resulted in wide recognition in her short sixteen years as an artist. In 1988 she won the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship with just a few slides and a one-page resume. Her work was featured in Art in America in June of 1995. Patten was 52 when she died in December 1995, a few short months after receiving the news she had liver cancer.

Untitled

Born in Sedalia, Missouri, Patten was an only child whose parents divorced when she was very young. She grew up close to her grandfather, Marion Hall, who sparked her early love of horses. In 1965 she graduated with a B.A. in German from the University of Kansas. Later, when one of her favorite horses was accidentally electrocuted, she suffered a bout with mental illness. In a television interview nearly twenty years later, Patten recalled with certainty that it was this ?sick and pitiful? period in her life which led to her discovering she really wanted to be an artist. She acted on this realization and received her B.F.A. from the Kansas City Art Institute in 1979. The unique and rather eccentric style of art that Patten brought to her work had no precedent in the Kansas City area. Her tendency to overload canvases with layer upon layer of oil paint with a palette knife gave her works a dramatic and emotional quality. Patten preferred working with canvases of up to nine feet or more in size. Patten?s independent vision resulted in wide recognition in her short sixteen years as an artist. In 1988 she won the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship with just a few slides and a one-page resume. Her work was featured in Art in America in June of 1995. Patten was 52 when she died in December 1995, a few short months after receiving the news she had liver cancer.

Untitled

This work was found leaning up against the north wall of the Collections Storage room in 2013. It was attached upright to a piece of cardboard with binder clips and had a sheet of butcher paper covering the surface. There is a sticker with the original ID # attached upside down on the wrong end of the print. This piece is too large to fit in the flat file and since there is no room to lay it flat is leaning up against the end of a row of shelves and is clipped to a piece of foam core using plastic paper clips at the upper corners. This piece needs to be rehoused ASAP. M. Clouse, 5/2013

Geisha

The youngest daughter of a New York State Supreme Court Justice, Helen made her own mark in the world early in her career as a painter. Influenced by the Abstract Expressionists, Helen experimented with techniques of staining a canvas after watching Jackson Pollock using his drip method. In 1952 she made her breakthrough into the art world when she painted Mountains and Sea. In this painting she used her own method of staining an unprimed canvas with paint. In 1958 she married fellow Abstract Expressionist painter Robert Motherwell but the marriage ended in 1971. She made sets and costumes for the ballet in the past and taught art over the years. Today she is recognized as one of the most important female artists of the second half of the twentieth century.

Palette

Born in Sedalia, Missouri, Patten was an only child whose parents divorced when she was very young. She grew up close to her grandfather, Marion Hall, who sparked her early love of horses. In 1965 she graduated with a B.A. in German from the University of Kansas. Later, when one of her favorite horses was accidentally electrocuted, she suffered a bout with mental illness. In a television interview nearly twenty years later, Patten recalled with certainty that it was this ?sick and pitiful? period in her life which led to her discovering she really wanted to be an artist. She acted on this realization and received her B.F.A. from the Kansas City Art Institute in 1979. The unique and rather eccentric style of art that Patten brought to her work had no precedent in the Kansas City area. Her tendency to overload canvases with layer upon layer of oil paint with a palette knife gave her works a dramatic and emotional quality. Patten preferred working with canvases of up to nine feet or more in size. Patten?s independent vision resulted in wide recognition in her short sixteen years as an artist. In 1988 she won the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship with just a few slides and a one-page resume. Her work was featured in Art in America in June of 1995. Patten was 52 when she died in December 1995, a few short months after receiving the news she had liver cancer.

Moonscape

Andoe received his Bachelors of Fine Arts and Masters of Fine Arts degrees from the University of Oklahoma in Norman, Oklahoma. In 1993 he became an Honorary Chair of the College of Fine Arts at the University of Oklahoma. This award is among the many accomplishments achieved by this Oklahoma native. Andoe has exhibited in solo and group shows in museums and galleries across the United States and in Canada, Italy, and Finland. His works are represented in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Saint Louis Art Museum in Missouri, the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery in Lincoln, Nebraska, and the Detroit Institute of Art in Michigan.

Lyle

The Tate in London and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. are among the numerous museums throughout the world that have Close?s work in their collections. Both the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art have had retrospectives of his work. Early in 2000 Close was named to the board of trustees at the Whitney Museum of American Art. This is significant since he is the first artist ever to serve on the board. Close was influenced by Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock during his early years of painting. In the 1960s he tired of abstraction and began making photorealistic images of the human face. He took photographs of his friends and family and turned them into enormous portraitures. He did this by employing a labor-intensive grid system where he copied each photograph square by square. Close suffered a spinal artery collapse in 1988 that resulted in his partial paralysis. With his wife?s encouragement and physical therapy he returned to painting and remains one of the most important artists living today. His most recent work reflects his return to his roots in Abstract Expressionism. This does not imply that he has abandoned his rigid grid system that earned him such recognition. He still uses his systematic grid, but combines it with his earlier abstract style.