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Artist Birthday

Curator's Corner

Artist Birthday: Alvar Aalto

Monday, February 3, 2025 | Karl Cole

Alvar Aalto designed all of the furnishings for his buildings. Using native birch, Aalto designed a number of chairs and stools made entirely of bent plywood and laminated wood. He also invented some ...

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Curator's Corner

Artist Birthday: Barnett Newman

Wednesday, January 29, 2025 | Karl Cole

Barnett Newman’s earliest paintings share the organic/biomorphic abstract forms of Mark Rothko’s early works from the 1940s. By 1946, however, his forms began to be more abstract and shed ...

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Curator's Corner

Artist Birthday: Claes Oldenburg

Tuesday, January 28, 2025 | Karl Cole

Claes Oldenburg believed that art should literally be made of the ordinary world. His theory was that the reality of art would replace everyday reality. An important early work was The Street (1960). ...

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Curator's Corner

Artist Birthday: Francis Picabia

Wednesday, January 22, 2025 | Karl Cole

Francis Picabia was a standout Cubist painter who avoided the common subject matter of Cubism, still life and portraits, opting for documenting personal experiences and memories. ...

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Curator's Corner

Artist Birthday: José Campeche y Jordán

Tuesday, December 3, 2024 | Karl Cole

As with portraiture in mainland Spanish colonial cultures, wealthy Puerto Ricans emulated their European counterparts in the never-ending obsession of Spanish colonials that they were “pure Span ...

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Curator's Corner

Artist Birthday: Carlos Mérida

Monday, December 2, 2024 | Karl Cole

In 1941 Mérida was invited to teach frescoes at the University of Austin in Texas. He remained there two years. Tempo in Red Major dates from that visit. It certainly reflects, in its title the ...

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Curator's Corner

Artist Birthday: Pierre Prins

Tuesday, November 26, 2024 | Karl Cole

Pierre Prins is one of the finest, if not the finest, pastel artists of any of the Impressionists, or any other artists in late 1800s France. He is sometimes called “the forgotten Impressionist& ...

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Curator's Corner

Celebrating Rembrandt's Birthday

Monday, July 15, 2024 | Karl Cole

As one of the most remarkable talents of the Dutch Golden Age of painting, Rembrandt had the distinction of becoming a fantastically successful artist. Although his contemporaries raved about him, Rem ...

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Curator's Corner

May Day Artist Birthday: Cecilia Beaux

Monday, May 1, 2023 | Karl Cole

The American Renaissance was a period when more American artists traveled to Europe in order to enrich their artistic vision. They brought back such styles as Impressionism, Dark Impressionism, B ...

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Curator's Corner

Happy Birthday Adélaïde Labille-Guiard

Monday, April 11, 2022 | Karl Cole

April 11th is the birthday of one of the leading women artists of pre-Revolutionary France, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard. A fantastic portraitist, she’s right up with her contemporary &Ea ...

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Curator's Corner

June Birthday Boy: John Constable

Tuesday, June 11, 2019 | Karl Cole

John Constable’s birthday is June 11th, and I never miss an excuse to feature a brilliant landscape painter who has inspired my own painting. But, instead of featuring The Hay Wain, which is in ...

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Curator's Corner

An April Birthday Boy: Antoine Vollon

Tuesday, April 23, 2019 | Karl Cole

Antoine Vollon, known primarily for his excellent still-life paintings, had a birthday on April 23rd. In the glory days of the annual academic Salon in Paris (1760s–1890s)—when the self-ap ...

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Curator's Corner

November Birthday of a Brilliant Artist: Neda Al-Hilali

Monday, November 26, 2018 | Karl Cole

I have come to the point where I no longer like to designate artists to any particular medium. This is due to the fact that so many artists do not confine their interests to a single medium. All the s ...

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Curator's Corner

Artists with August Birthdays: Sakai Hōitsu and George Bellows

Monday, August 6, 2018 | Karl Cole

Monthly artists’ birthdays are a good way to introduce you to a variety of artists I actually adore, while contrasting art from vastly different cultures. I’m not going to call it “i ...

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Curator's Corner

Happy Birthday Francis Picabia

Monday, January 22, 2018 | Karl Cole

I always like to celebrate artists who show a wide variety of stylistic exploration. Francis Picabia is certainly one of them. ...

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Curator's Corner

August Artist Birthday to Recognize: Hedda Sterne

Wednesday, August 10, 2016 | Karl Cole

Give credit where credit is due, I always say. Sadly, that isn’t something a lot of art history texts do when it comes to women artists. For instance, there were many women practicing some form ...

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