Artists Lesson Plans
Artist Alex Katz has created important art works in the style of modern realism. His paintings and prints explore light, landscape, time, fashion, and human relationships. Katz’s trademark techniques include: pouncing (perforating a drawing and dusting it with chalk to transfer an image to canvas); using billboard-scale canvasses, and painting in strong flat colors. These techniques showcase composition, scale, light (natural and artificial) and the ephemeral nature of moments in time. His works appear deceptively minimal, and yet they contain a blunt and aggressive beauty.
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Berenice Abbott was born in Ohio in 1898; she lived and worked in Paris, Berlin, New York, and Maine, where she lived until the end of her life in 1991. She is best known for the photographs she made in the 1930s when she was working for the Federal Art Project. During the Great Depression, the government supported many artists who were out of work. Photographers, painters, and writers all recorded typical American life by documenting the daily activities of people throughout the country.
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Charles Knoll was born in Germany, but he immigrated to the United States and worked as an artist in New York City in the 1880s. Not much more is know about him. After he made this painting, he vanished. He may have gone back to Germany. Knoll is called a folk artist because he probably taught himself to paint rather than learning to make art in a school.
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Claes Oldenburg is well known for his large scale sculptures and for being a leader in the Pop art movement. Oldenburg radically changed the size of ordinary objects and used unexpected materials in making them. Have you ever seen a spoon with a cherry the size of a three-story building? He made a sculpture like this to be used in the outside garden fountain in Minneapolis!
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Fred Wilson is an artist born in the Bronx, New York in 1954. Wilson's work examines, questions, and takes apart the traditional way we display art and artifacts in the museums. For instance, he will sometimes put things in a museum that you would not expect to find there. By making art from non-traditional objects, he shows viewers that art and artifacts can mean different things in different places.
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