Curator's Corner

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Curator's Corner

National Coffee Day: Elizabeth Murray

Monday, September 29, 2025 | Karl Cole

Cups of coffee appeared frequently in Elizabeth Murray's paintings.  National Coffee Day was first celebrated in about 2005, but did not take off as a holiday until September 29, 2009. That&rs ...

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Curator's Corner

Artist Birthday: Laura Shechter

Tuesday, August 26, 2025 | Karl Cole

Laura Shechter is an extraordinarily gifted, contemporary realist still life artist who is part of the large body of American artists who have persisted in pursuing the cherished American love of obse ...

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Curator's Corner

Artist Birthday: Jess (Collins)

Wednesday, August 6, 2025 | Karl Cole

Jess (Collins) is probably best known for his incredibly complex collages. He was a painter who initially worked as a chemist. He started doing collages in the early 1950s after seeing the works o ...

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Curator's Corner

National Oyster Day: Osias Beert, the Elder

Tuesday, August 5, 2025 | Karl Cole

Art historians consider Osias Beert possibly the first significant Baroque Flemish still life painter. The still life medium was just catching on in popularity during his period of activity, ...

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Curator's Corner

Artist Birthday: Gustav Klimt

Monday, July 14, 2025 | Karl Cole

Gustav Klimt, along with Oskar Kokoschka (1886–1980) was a leading Austrian modernist at the turn of the 1900s. Although noted as a society portrait painter in an Art Nouveau/Byzantine mosaic li ...

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Curator's Corner

Artist Birthday: Juan Sánchez Cotán

Wednesday, June 25, 2025 | Karl Cole

Juan Sánchez Cotán was a Spanish Baroque painter who helped popularize the still life genre in Spanish Baroque painting. Spanish Renaissance and Baroque art were greatly influenced by th ...

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Curator's Corner

Artist Birthday: Ernst Wilhelm Nay

Wednesday, June 11, 2025 | Karl Cole

Nay, who was forbidden by the Nazis to paint or even buy art supplies after 1937, painted abstractions secretly in a French sculptor’s cellar while serving as a cartographer in the German army i ...

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Curator's Corner

Artist Birthday: Marlow Moss

Thursday, May 29, 2025 | Karl Cole

Marlow Moss was a major figure in abstraction between the world wars. She was very active in the Abstraction-Creation group of abstract artists in the between-the-wars School of Paris, and she was act ...

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Curator's Corner

Artist Birthday: Thomas Gainsborough

Wednesday, May 14, 2025 | Karl Cole

Thomas Gainsborough’s art was the epitome of the elegant, sophisticated and generally low-key Rococo style that characterized late 1700s British art. It was a major contrast to the flamboyant, o ...

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Curator's Corner

Artist Birthday: Jules Breton

Thursday, May 1, 2025 | Karl Cole

Jules Breton was a unique artist of the Realism movement in France in the mid-1800s. Having grown up with poor rural farmers in northern France, he understood their lives and labors. His paintings pre ...

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