Painting

Joan Brown was born in 1938 in San Francisco, CA. She attended the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute) and received her BFA in painting. Brown has long been recognized as one of the most important artists to emerge from the creative milieu of the San Francisco Bay Area of the late 1950s. She created a body of work distinguished by its breadth and personal vision. Brown’s style incorporated abstract expressionism and figurative painting. One of California's pre-eminent figurative artists, she died in October 1990, at the age of 52, in India.

Jeremy Blake used digital media to create works that function on a flexible spectrum between being more painting-like or more film-like. He created continually looping digital animations with sound to be projected or presented on plasma screens. Blake often began by making the digital C-prints, which he conceived to be somewhat like paintings; if the imagery and idea of one of these works lent itself as such, he might extrapolate from and expand on it to begin creating a digital animation, which could range from 3 to 20 minute repeating loops.

Painter and multi-media artist Jack Goldstein lived and worked in New York City. His airbrushed paintings of lightning and night skies are shown here accompanied by synthetic music, which the artist also composed. Goldstein committed suicide in 2003.

Interviewed by Jim Johnson.

Pat Steir is an American painter and printmaker, whose work has resisted artworld currents and factions for decades while expanding its reach and maintaining enthusiastic critical support. She graduated from Pratt in 1962 and in 1964 was included in the show Drawing at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and had her first solo exhibition at the Terry Dintenfass Gallery, New York.

Nancy Graves was a sculptor, painter, and filmmaker who used natural history as a reference for dealing with the relationships between time, space, and form. In this interview she discusses her transition from a static form (sculpture) to a moving form (film), and finally, to painting. She lived in New York until her death in 1995.

“The making of it and the viewing of it are the areas with which I’m most concerned, because I’m an artist, not a philosopher,” Graves says in this interview with Kate Horsfield.

Miriam Schapiro was one of the great forces behind the feminist art movement in Los Angeles. Originally painting in an Abstract Expressionist manner, she developed a new, more personal style of assemblage she called “femmage” as she became more politically involved. She was also one of the first to create a curriculum on Feminist Art at CalArts.

Interview by Lyn Blumenthal.

A historical interview originally recorded in 1976 and re-edited in 2006.

Marcia Tucker was the founding director of the New Museum of Contemporary Art from 1977 to 1999, during which time she organized major exhibitions like The Time of Our Lives (1999), A Labor of Love (1996), and Bad Girls (1994); and edited the series Documentary Sources in Contemporary Art, five books which the New Museum also published. Tucker considered the museum a “laboratory” organization where both art and the practices of the institution itself were always in question.