Past ART CART Artists

I was the eldest of four children from a working class family in which curiosity and creativity were not valued. After high school I wosorked as a secretary in an advertising company. Ten years and two daughters later, my husband encouraged me to find and pursue a creative passion and this led me to photography. With camera in hand I found myself drawn to family relationships and the pivotal life events: birth, aging, illness and death. I made portraits of an elder generation of country farmers, urban and rural mothers and daughters, my grandmother in Brooklyn and self-portraits with my mother. Over the course of my journey as an artist, the passage of time continued to intrigue me. I focused on honoring family history, relationship to family and to one’s self, and the physical beauty of my subject’s bodies and gestures. I was fascinated by the way in which these elements are both rendered and revealed in a two-dimensional photograph. More recently, as a part of my own aging process, my work has become more abstract. I now find myself eager to be surrounded by nature, meditating and photographing in a dynamic yet peaceful way. I have taken part in solo and group exhibitions both nationally and internationally. My photographs are in many private collections and in the Fogg Art Museum, The Berkshire Museum and the Museum Of Fine Arts in Houston. My work has been featured in numerous books including “Sacred Connections: Stories of Adoption” and “A Gate Unfastened” which chronicles my journey through breast cancer. I have received two artist fellowships and the Catalogue Project Award from the New York Foundation for the Arts, been a fellow at the Yaddo and MacDowell Art Colonies and have received the Annenberg Medical Art Award for “When Death Comes” a photo essay about the death of my husband Peter.

The New York Times noted in 1992 that Cummings “… draws inspiration from Africa and the art of African Americans, particularly the great quilters of the South.” Cummings’ keen sense of history, his reverence for the spiritual, and his reworking the possibilities of the present and the future make his quilts striking” I guess you could say that my home is like my art: It is a living, breathing collage or a shadow-box filled with objects like Joseph Cornell’s artworks.” It is filled with African and African American art, period furniture and art from other countries. In addition to an HBO commission, Cummings has had solo exhibitions with Bates College in Maine, Hallmark Cards, New York City’s Cinque Gallery and the Studio Museum in Harlem. Group shows include the Cincinnati Art Museum, Renwick Gallery in Washington, DC, New York City’s American Craft Museum, Yale University and Atlanta’s High Museum of Art. Cummings’ work appears in some notable collections — Bill and Camille Cosby, Whoopi Goldberg, Alonzo Mourning, Renwick Gallery (Smithsonian Institution), American Craft Museum (NYC), the Studio Museum in Harlem, and recently added to the American Embassy collection in Mali.

Cummings’ work can also be found in many books, Pioneering Quilt Artists 1960-1980 by Sandra Sider (2010), Masters/Art Quilts by Martha Sielman, 2008; the Japanese publication “Patchwork” (Tsushin, February 2011); Facts & Fabrications Unraveling the History of Quilts & Slavery by Barbara Brackman (2006), Spirits of the Cloth: Contemporary African American Quilts by Carolyn Mazloomi, A Communion of the Spirits: African-American Quilters. He illustrated a children’s book entitled In the Hollow of Your Hand. He has appeared on several local and national television programs including Martha Stewart and Home and Garden.

Cummings was commissioned by Emory University to create etchings for a limited edition and had a solo exhibition in Japan in 2011.

Cecily Barth Firestein is a painter who combines methodologies of printmaking and collage while working within the framework of abstraction. Firestein studied with Hans Hofmann, Hale Woodruff and Yasuo Kuniyoshi, among others, leading her to embrace and question aspects of abstraction, expressionism and surrealism. Over the past six decades she bravely resisted joining any particular artistic movement, opting instead to synthesize, hence cultivating her own unique language. Her paintings arrest us with structured compositions, lush palettes and lyrical movements while surprising us with curious imagery and wit. Firestein initiates each painting as an abstract monotype using oil-based printing ink. Once the ink has dried, she addresses the paper covering the monotype with a wash of tempera paint in both opaque and transparent layers. Firestein’s source material archive is extensive, complete with Japanese color prints – Ukiyoye, early European and American printed ephemera and other themes that interest her. A penchant for surprising juxtapositions, a visual acumen of modern abstraction and a keen imagination fuse to determine both the selection and eventual position of images from the archive. The collage elements shape the narrative route of the painting. Constantly probing for and disseminating trans-historical narratives, Firestein draws from her wealth of experience, travels and multicultural studies. In addition to painting, she specialized in the ancient Chinese art and modern craft of “lifting rubbings”. Her engagement with materials is incredibly palpable and involves pressure and sensitivity lending itself to an intimacy that is unusual given the large size of the paintings. Cecily Barth Firestein creates evocative and highly distinctive tableaux that defy gravity.

My father was a painter originally from Odessa, Ukraine who traveled the world with my mother before I was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1926. He encouraged me to be a painter and had me sit beside him at his easel with a brush and paints and beginning at age six he was there to spur me on. When I came to San Francisco, California in 1951 I found the major turning point for my future life as a painter. From the academic approach to painting I learned in art school, I went to totally abstract work, particularly influenced by the paintings of Clyfford Still who had been a major force at the California School of Fine Arts just previous to my arrival. Although I never studied with him, I saw several wonderful examples of what he had been doing and that opened a door for me. My paintings are abstract with suggestions of architecture and nature and occasionally, the figure. During the last six months I have worked in a way similar to the energetic way I painted 50 years ago in San Francisco. Drawing is always as important to me as is painting and I look forward to documenting it all. My work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, San Francisco MOMA, the Whitney Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Menil Collection, Houston, Texas, among many others. I have been exhibiting since 1948 and my most recent exhibition was of 1950s paintings at Nyehaus Gallery, NYC in 2011. The catalog of that show can be seen online at Nyehaus.com. There is also an interview by Faye Hirsch, Senior Editor at Art in America which can be seen online at ArtinAmerica.com. An article titled “Can We Still Learn to Speak Martian” by John Yau written for Hyperallergic, an online art magazine dated April 29, 2012 discusses my early work along with other Bay Area painters.

As a painter, Norma Greenwood’s inspiration often comes from the way she sees the world through the lens. Her photographs are distilled through the painting process and the painting becomes a means for pushing the boundary between abstraction and figurative expression. In her early teens, she attended children’s Saturday morning drawing classes at the Brooklyn Museum and then classes at Pratt Institute for high school students.

Greenwood has a graduate degree in Fine Arts from Hunter College, New York where she had the good fortune to study with masters such as Robert Motherwell and William Baziotes. She is the recipient of three grants from the New York State Council on the Arts, the Abby Austin Mural Arts Fellowship from the National Academy Museum. Additionally, she received a George Sugarman Award, a Ludwig Vogelstein grant and the Queens Council on the Arts Individual Artists Initiative Award. This year, she was awarded a NYFA Workshop Award, “Artist As Entrepreneur Boot Camp”.

In 2008 she was awarded a public art commission to create a permanent art installation for the International Airport in Jacksonville Florida. The work titled ”CLOUDSCAPES” consists of two 7 x 10 ft. mosaic tiled walls.

Greenwood exhibits her work widely and has had several solo exhibitions. She is currently exhibiting her work at the Katonah Museum, in Katonah, NY. Her work is represented in private and public collections including AT&T, Citicorp, CUNY Art Gallery, the Museum of American Folk Arts and Columbia Pictures Ltd.

I’m a first generation American whose entire immigrant family worked in the garment industry. They were pressers, pattern makers, cutters, salesman, contractors, seamstresses, finishers and sample makers. I believe my artwork honors my family and their professions by making use of clothing, fabric and needlework – skills I learned from my relatives. Although my work seemingly deals only with issues of central importance to women, both past and present, if one looks deeply at it s/he will note the matters being discussed are really beyond gender and politics. My works are actually explorations of tradition and identity. By constructing works about women and women’s issues, I note the accomplishments and importance of many “invisible” women who comprise approximately fifty-one percent of the population and their “voices” need to be heard. In my use of fabric, lace and articles of clothing as my media I maintain the memory of my immigrant family’s participation in the garment industry. By reaching back into my history, I honor their history.

Haynes was born in 1947 and moved to New York in 1967. She lives and works in Red Hook, Brooklyn and the Huerfano Valley Colorado. Haynes’ exhibition history begins in 1978 at the Hundred Dollar Gallery, in NYC. She is presently included in group exhibits at Danese Gallery, NY and Regina Rex Gallery in Bushwick, Queens, NY and is represented by George Lawson Gallery in LA and Hubert Winter Gallery in Vienna. Her work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of Art and numerous other museums in the US and Europe. Honors and awards include grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Her non-representational/conceptual paintings’ subject matter is mostly deconstruction, light and a sensation of impermanence. The paintings are generally oil on linen although in the past Haynes used glow in the dark acrylic a great deal. One of the artists she most admires is On Kawara.

Morgan O’Hara was born in Los Angeles, grew up in Japan, earned a Master’s Degree in Art from California State University at Los Angeles, and had her first solo exhibition in the Musée Cantonal des Beaux Arts in Lausanne, Switzerland in 1978. She began working internationally in performance art festivals in 1989, did her first site specific wall drawings at De Fabriek in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, and began the practice of the Japanese martial art, aikido, all in the same year. She teaches master classes in drawing and the psychology of creativity in art academies in the US, Europe and Asia. O’Hara has done many international residencies including two sessions at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire. She is recipient of grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Gottleib Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Leon Levy Foundation, the David and Rosamond Putnam Travel Fund and the Milton and Sally Avery Foundation. Her work is in the permanent collections of many institutions, including: Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock, Arkansas; Czech National Gallery, Prague; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, California; Hood Museum of Art – Dartmouth College, New Hampshire; the Moravian Gallery, Wannieck Gallery and the Janacek Museum, all in Brno, Czech Republic; Macau Art Museum, Macau, China, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Olomouc Museum of Art, Czech Republic, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Vrije Universiteit OZW, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Wannieck Gallery, Brno, Czech Republic, Weatherspoon Gallery, Greensboro, North Carolina. Her permanent site specific wall drawings can be found in the Macau Art Museum, Macau, China; The Canadian Academy Kobe, Japan and the Free University OZW Building, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. O’Hara lived in Europe for 25 years (Berlin and Paris, Italy for 21). O’Hara became a member of the Elizabeth Foundation in 2010.

I was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Those were the grimy years of Pittsburgh, when the sky and rivers were ablaze with colors of fire reflected from the steel mills. Soot crusted the white snow, and you could watch the passing seasons blister and peel the painted surfaces of the houses. It was a great visual education for future artists. My other education included BA and M.Litt degrees from the University of Pittsburgh and then a four-year-certificate training at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. After graduating from the Academy I moved to Dallas, Texas, where I made and exhibited art for seven years, alongside an exciting community of artists. Finally, in 1981, I made the big move to New York City. Here I have been fortunate to be awarded a New York State Council on the Arts Project Grant, a Penny McCall Foundation Grant, a New York Foundation of the Arts Fellowship Grant in Sculpture and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. I have shown work in galleries, alternative spaces, and museums in the United States, and in Sweden and Brazil. My work is included in the Jewish Museum, NY; the Burchfield-Penny Art Center, Buffalo, NY; the Morris Museum, Morristown, NJ; the Surdna Foundation, NY; and other public and private collections. I have been teaching at the New School in New York for 28 years.

Susan May Tell is an award-winning fine art photographer whose work has been showcased in solo exhibitions at the Museum of Art | Fort Lauderdale; Griffin Museum of Photography; University of California at San Francisco; and Avenue B Gallery. Solo exhibitions include A Requiem: tribute to the spiritual space at Auschwitz; Structured Moments; and Real / Unreal: urban landscapes of the 1980’s. Tell’s photographs are in the Samuel Wagstaff Collection at the Smithsonian Museum and have been featured in group exhibitions at the Monmouth Museum; Hudson River Museum; Phoenix Art Museum; Center for Fine Art Photography; and Barrett Art Center, where Malcolm Daniel, Curator in Charge of the Department of Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, awarded her First Place. Nat Trotman, Associate Curator of Art, Guggenheim Museum of Art, included her work in New Directions / Art he juried at that same venue. Also a successful photojournalist, Tell spent four years based in Cairo and four years in Paris working for the New York Times, LIFE, TIME, and Newsweek Magazines. This was followed by ten years as a staff photographer and photo editor at the New York Post. Tell’s subjects have been diverse and include: a 9-month project with Egypt’s drug enforcement agency; the women fighters of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front; Iraqi Kurdish refugees in Turkey; Islamic and Pharaonic Monuments in Egypt; the National Basketball Association Finals; lunch with Yasser Arafat and his entourage in Kuwait; murders; car accidents; perp walks; stake-outs; actors; hot air ballooning; 3-star restaurants and 5-star hotels. In 2008 Tell became involved in the 1,000 member New York chapter of the American Society of Media Photographers (ASMPNY) and was appointed to the Board and the newly created position of Fine Art Chair. She founded programs including Fine Art Salon Conversations with museum curators, gallery directors, critics, and other well-known fine art photography luminaries.

Akili Ron Anderson is a lifetime resident of Washington, DC. He has successfully practiced as a full time visual artist for more than thirty years. Mr. Anderson is primarily a public artist. He designs, fabricates and installs stained glass windows, sculptural forms, and fine art paintings. Mr. Anderson attended The Corcoran School of Art (1964-65) and Howard University, School of Fine Arts (1965-1969), (2005-2008), BFA, MFA. He held the position of Artist in Residence for the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities (1971-73) and was the first chairperson of the Visual Arts Department at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts (1974-76), in Washington DC. Mr. Anderson was chosen to exhibit and perform at the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC) in Lagos, Nigeria (1977). He has also had major one-man exhibits at the Corcoran Gallery of Art (1973), the Gallery of Fine Art at Howard University (1973) and the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corp (1975). Mr. Anderson has also exhibited nationally and internationally in group shows, primarily as a member of the “AfriCOBRA” artist collective. Mr. Anderson has designed theater sets for the Kennedy Center (Eisenhower Theater 1975), The DC Black Repertory Theater (1974-75) and the Ira Aldridge Theater at Howard University (1969).

Lila Oliver Asher was born in Philadelphia, Pa. She studied there with Joseph Grossman, Frank B.A. Linton and at the Fleischer Memorial Art School. She was also a pupil of Prof. Gonippo Raggi and held a four year scholarship to the now University of the Arts. She moved to Washington D.C. in 1946 and established a studio for painting, sculpture and prints. She taught art at the college level from 1947, as instructor in the Art Department of Howard University 1947-51, then at Wilson Teachers College 1953-54, before returning to Howard University in 1961, later Oliver was promoted to Assistant Professor in 1964, to Associate Professor in 1966, and to full Professor in 1971. Since 1991 she has been Professor Emeritus and continues to work in her studio.

I was born March 30 1945, the day Anne Frank died, and the same birth date (month and day) of Van Gogh and Goya. I grew up in University City Missouri, in a small apartment in what I called “a Jewish ghetto neighborhood.” My parents had graduated from high school and listened to baseball games and music from the 1920s on the radio. I had no art or art training, no lessons of any kind save violin in school, no arts people in the family or anywhere in sight. I worked very hard in school, received a full scholarship to Washington University (walking distance from where we lived), and after one year, inspired by a visit to a friend’s art class, was allowed to switch to the art school there at Wash. U.

In my junior year I had a wonderful painting teacher on sabbatical from NYC. He told me I was an artist, needed to leave St. Louis and go to NYC, and helped me get accepted into the graduate painting program at Queens College, CUNY. At Queens, my goal was to discover and work with the artist in me that was not, in my words, “a western European male artist.” I did not want to be Cezanne. At the end of my first year I was making headway, working with folded fabric sewn to canvas, adding sand and paint. My mentor was encouraging. The graduate committee of 5 men did NOT like my direction. “You are using mixed media. We don’t think you are a serious artist. You need to go have babies and teach grade school.” I left. That was 1969, before feminism was on the scene.

In 1979 I entered a graduate program at Massachusetts College of Art. I needed to find out if I really was an artist, and if not, why I was still creating. I found a guru type mentor, delved into my creative self,  and ended with a thesis and exhibit titled “Expanding Unconscious Sources: A Return to My Inner Self.” I had mapped my psyche, and created work from what Jung calls “the dark side of the feminine.”

Since that time (1982) I have created several distinct bodies of work in many media, mostly content driven and non-traditional. I have worked with plaster, latex, bones, metal, wood, bricks, fabric, photo transfer onto many materials, printmaking, collage, and paint, in forms ranging from sculpture, installation and assemblage, to more traditional subject matter using oil or acrylic on canvas and encaustic paint on wood. I have exhibited my work continuously since 1982, locally and nationally.

My life in art, and the arts in general, has been a big surprise to me. I have been a survivor of poverty, as well as a lack of models or encouragement, overt sexism, and of course of “artists’ oppression.” Despite these and other obstacles, my creative productivity has never wavered, and may possibly be stronger and more focused than ever.

I studied oil painting in high school. During my senior year I dropped out of school and spent the last semester in night school to receive my diploma. That same year I enrolled in the Art Students League for one year, then transferred to the School of Visual Arts all evening classes for the next 7-8 years. In about 1968 I attended the School of Visual Arts full time for the first time. My journey as a young artist was very emotionally insecure.

But, I now know that my body of work was influenced and shaped by the powerful energy of the 1960s, The Civil Rights Movement, the deaths of Malcolm,  Medgar, & Martin. Black artists nationally and internationally developed the Black Arts movement.

This movement embraced the history, heritage, politics and culture of African people. The great James Brown sang “I’M BLACK and I’M PROUD” and Aretha Franklin sang “RESPECT”. During, the ‘60s & ‘70s the majority of my body of works was on paper.

I received a BA from the University of Florida, Tampa in 1975. Later, in 1987, I received a MFA from Howard University; my thesis was in Watercolor. I then began to translate the waters into 10 textile appliqué embroidered tapestries. Since that time I have become a textile/fiber artist creating with silk and wool fibers as a felter.

Lilian Thomas Burwell cites the influence of witnessing two creative parents overcome the devastating effects of the Great Depression as a fundamental source of her orientation toward the creative. Growing up in a family and a city in the throes of material lack but spiritual and cultural wealth spawned an attitude of actualizing thought and imagination. She grew up with highly educated and principled parents who had lost everything in ‘the crash’ except their spirit and determination to build a phoenix out of ashes.

Burwell attended the Little Red School House in Greenwich Village, this country’s first progressive school. She attended the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan. She returned then to her maternal heritage in Washington, D.C. to complete her secondary education at Dunbar High School, which at that time continued to graduate many of this country’s most prestigious African Americans. Returning to Brooklyn, New York, she received most of her professional training in art at Pratt Institute where she also taught during her teacher training. She credits years of studying with Benjamin Abramowitz as the greatest singular and specific influence on her art both in practice and philosophy. She finalized her undergraduate degree at the University of the District of Columbia after teaching art for over 14 years. She then earned her Masters of Fine Arts in Painting at Catholic University in consortium with American University during a sabbatical year.

In the eighty-fifth year of her life, she works nearly full time in her studio in Highland Beach near Annapolis, Maryland, continuing to create her cutting edge sculptural paintings which continue to evolve into newly explored media and installations. 

Rose was born in Brooklyn, New York. She has two grown sons and five granddaughters. After graduating Queens College with a BA in fine arts and a MA in art education, she had a long career as an art teacher in the New York City System. Rose retired early to pursue art full time; so far it has been very exciting. She does abstract acrylic paintings and collages. She is influenced by music, nature and especially art history, both past and present.

Marilee H. Shapiro was born in 1912 in Chicago and it was there she began her life as an artist studying sculpture, for a time even studying with renowned sculptor Alexander Archipenko. She moved to Washington, DC in 1943 and continued her education at American University and began exhibiting her artwork in and around the DC area earning her a number of awards and prizes. “Shapiro’s work is often figurative and relates to the human form without being representational: the masses and shapes are treated in a personal and interpretive manner that is abstract, stylistic and elegant.”

At the age of 89, Shapiro took her first computer graphics course at the Corcoran and now creates fluid, transparent and ethereal figures and images using her computer as an expressive painting tool. Over the past six decades, Marilee Shapiro has exhibited at the Smart Museum in Chicago, Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, locally at American University, Franz Bader Gallery, Washington Studio School, Studio Gallery, Cosmos Club and Warehouse Gallery, to name a few. 

Carmen Torruella Quander is a native Washingtonian, born of Dominican and Puerto Rican parents. Bilingual and bicultural, she was educated in local parochial elementary and secondary schools. Carmen vividly remembers working on “pictures” from the age of four. In school she was always the kid who could draw, and the one who consistently included expressive drawings to supplement her written reports.

Knowing she would have to earn a living, she opted to major in commercial art, which required her to focus upon perfecting her drawing skills. It was in her first figure class that the instructor informed her that she was going to be a truly fine artist. Carmen has never looked back. Her ability to capture a likeness and her love of realism bring a calm but passionate response to ordinary subjects.

Her extensive and continuous academic training includes: the Corcoran School of Art; Pratt Institute; New York University; the Art Students’ League; Catholic University; and the Repin Institute Academy of Fine Art, St. Petersburg, Russia.

An instructor of fine art for the past 15 years she demonstrates watercolor, oil, and acrylic methods throughout the Washington, D.C. area, often travels abroad for artistic inspiration and source material, including trips to Africa, Latin America, Europe, the Caribbean, the Middle East, and the Far East. Her artistic works hang in private, corporate, and public collections throughout the western world. She continues to participate in numerous exhibitions and competitions, and has received numerous recognitions and awards. In addition to being a representational artist, Carmen is a curator and an educator.

Born and raised in Washington, D.C. and nearby Bethesda, I now live three blocks from my childhood home.  My art work reflects this familiarity with place, but has taken me into many nooks and crannies made mysterious either through some new technique or new “life” experience.  After graduating from Duke University in 1953 with a degree in Psychology,  I worked in a psychology lab in Bar Harbor, Maine.  While there I began to draw the landscape and within a year declared myself to be an artist.  After marriage and children, I earned a Master’s degree in Painting at The American University in 1967.   In 1972 I began courses at Montgomery College in Etching and Lithography and started teaching printmaking in 1975.  In 1977 I started the Printmakers Workshop in my own studio which was used by many area printmakers until recently.  By concentrating most of my printmaking efforts on two subjects, “100 Views of Home”, from 1975 – 85, and “Garden Journals”, from 1988 – 2011, I’ve given myself a very large “canvas” to express through drawing and color, everything my life has had to offer.

Eva Deutsch Costabel was born in Yugoslavia to a middle class Viennese family. She fled her native town of  Zagreb in 1941 during the Nazi occupation, then began the odyssey and the flight from the Nazis until the end of the war. She spent eighteen months as a prisoner in two Italian concentration camps. After the Italian capitulation in 1943, she joined the Yugoslav resistance first as an army nurse and later as a staff artist for the resistance publications. In 1945 she was able to reach Bari, Italy and then to Rome, Italy where she was accepted in the Academy of Fine Arts to study painting, through the compassion and the generosity of the director of the Academy. As a refugee she had no money to pay for the tuition nor had she graduated from eight years of high school necessary to be accepted at the Academy. This human gesture changed the artist’s life, when after nearly five years of persecution and suffering she was again able to live a fairly normal life. On June 10, 1949 she received her visa and she sailed into the New York harbor.
After arriving in New York she studied in Pratt Institute, Brooklyn under Franz Kline the famous New York abstract expressionist painter. He had a strong influence on her artistic development, introducing her to abstract art. And for the next thirty years she would paint in the abstract style.

Grist started painting during his early teens to satisfy an intellectual curiosity giving rise to the question “What is a painting?” a question that continues to dominate his work.

In 1961, Grist moved to Madrid, Spain. His first stay in Europe was cut short when he was drafted and served in the United States Army.

After serving he returned to Europe, where he was invited to participate in the International Symposium: First Painters’ Weeks. This project was hosted by the Austrian Government and Black and Decker Tools.
In 1969, Grist exhibited works at two newly established outlets: The Studio Museum in Harlem and the Cinque Gallery.

Selected exhibitions of his works include: 2015, Omni Contemporary Art Gallery, Freeport, NY – Solo show; 2011, ArtCart, Macy Art Gallery, Columbia University, NY; 2007, The Parish Gallery, Washington, DC; 2000, The Broome Street Gallery, NY: “Ray Grist: Paintings from the 90s” (solo show); 199425th Anniversary Exhibition, The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; 1992, American House, Munich, Germany; 1992, Moira Fine Arts Gallery, Lisbon, Portugal;1984, The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY: “Ray Grist: Passages, 1974-1984” (solo show); 1974, Alaska State Museum, Juneau, Alaska (solo show);1974 Gallery Chemould, Bombay, India.

Diana Kurz was born in Vienna, Austria and lives in NYC. She received her B.A. from Brandeis University and M.F.A. from Columbia University.  She has been an exhibiting representational painter since the 1970s—her subject matter has included monumental figure paintings, landscapes, still lifes, portraits, and animal imagery, as well as an extensive series of works on the theme of the Holocaust.

Her art has been widely exhibited  in solo and group shows in museums and galleries throughout the United States and Europe, and is in many distinguished collections including The Corcoran Gallery of Art; Rose Art Museum; Historisches Museum der Stadt Wien, Vienna; The Jewish Museum of Vienna; Yad Vashem Museum, Jerusalem; Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Rowan University, and other public and private collections.

Kurz  has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards including, among others, a Fulbright Fellowship to France; American Center Residency in Paris; New York State Council on the Arts CAPS Grant; Austrian Federal Ministry of the Arts Artist-In-Residence in Vienna; Atlantic Center for the Arts and residencies at Yaddo and McDowell Colony. She has taught studio art at Queens College, Pratt Institute, Philadelphia College of Art, Cleveland Institute of Art, Virginia Commonwealth University, University of Colorado, Boulder, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Website: www.dianakurz.com

China Marks was born and educated in Kansas City, MO, earning a BFA in Sculpture from the Kansas City Art Institute. A Fulbright-Hayes fellowship took her Katmandu, Nepal, where she spent sixteen months constructing a major installation out of local materials. On her return to the United States, she was awarded a graduate fellowship by the Danforth Foundation. In 1976, having received an MFA in Sculpture from Washington University in St. Louis, China moved east to make art. She has received numerous grants and awards, including three fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, a Mid-Atlantic Arts fellowship, two George Sugarman Foundation grants, two New York Foundation for the Arts fellowships, most recently in 2011, when she was also named a Gregory Millard Fellow, and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant in 2013. Since 1999 China Marks has lived and worked in Long Island City, a block and a half from the East River. Her work is shown in galleries and museums in the United States and Europe.

Peter Ruta is a leading American landscape painter, now in his 90s. Born Germany, raised Italy, emigrated to New York 1936, studied  Art Students League.   Second World War, served  US infantry, Philippines, badly wounded on Bataan, 1945. Returned to Italy post war,  studied painting and mosaic at Rome and Venice academies on a Fulbright grant, lived and worked from 1953 to 1960 in Positano on the Amalfi coast, where Central European refugee painters influenced his style towards greater simplicity and Mediterranean clarity. In New York in the 1960s he edited ARTS magazine, published two books of architectural photography and painted in the Pop manner, large canvasses based on newspaper photos. From 1970 focussed on landscape painting, outdoors from the motif, in Chiapas, Northern New Mexico, France, Spain, New England and New York City. In 2000 and 2001 he painted New York City from a shared studio on the 9lst floor of the North Tower, World Trade Center.  Currently painting large complex still life compositions and city views in Italy and New York.  Recent major retrospectives include Museum of the City of New York (2004), Stadtgeschichtliches Museum Leipzig (2008) and Villa Rufolo, Ravello, Italy (2012). Learn more at peterruta.com.