Barbara Chase-Riboud, Vitreous painting on glass, 8 x10”
Barbara Chase-Riboud was born on June 26, 1939, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to Vivian and Charles Chase. She was an only child. During her childhood, she became involved in many aspects of the arts. As early as five years of age, she began taking dance lessons, which were followed by piano and art lessons. At the age of eight, she won a prize for an art piece she constructed, after studying sculpture and ceramic at Fletcher Art Memorial in Philadelphia. Barbara went on to study at the Philadelphia Museum School of Art until 1954. At the age of fifteen, she won an award from Seventeen magazine for a print, later purchased by the Museum of Modern Art. Chase earned BFA from Tyler School at Temple University in 1957. She was awarded with the Purchase Prize from Philadelphia Art Alliance, and first prize in the National College Board Art Contest from Mademoiselle magazine. Chase studied abroad for a year under a John Hay Whitney Fountain Fellowship. In Rome, she made her first bronze pieces. In Cairo, she learned of non-European art, which she had never been exposed to. Upon her return, Barbara began to study at Yale University to obtain her M.F.A. She married French photographer, Mark Riboud, on December 25, 1961, in Mexico. Traveling with her husband, Barbara was the first American woman to visit the People’s Republic of China after the Revolution in 1949.
Throughout the 1970s, her art pieces won several awards and were exhibited in museums in the United States and Europe. Barbara Chase-Riboud’s first book of poems, From Memphis to Peking, was published in 1974. She completed her first novel, Sally Hemings, based on a slave girl who was a mistress to President Thomas Jefferson in 1979; Her second novel, Valide, was published in the same year. She released her second book of poems, Love Perfecting, and her third novel, Echo of Lions in 1980. Barbara Chase-Riboud was the fourth annual Artist in Residence at Pasadena College in California, where she lectured and produced sculptures in 1990. She continues to enrich African-American culture with her artworks in Paris, as did famous artists of yesterday.
Laurie Anderson, Vitreous painting on glass, 8 x 10”
Laurie Anderson, (born June 5, 1947, Wayne, Illinois, U.S.)
American performance artist, composer, and writer whose work explores a remarkable range of media and subject matter.
Anderson began studying classical violin at five years of age and later performed with the Chicago Youth Symphony. In 1966 she moved to New York City, where she attended Barnard College (B.A., 1969) and Columbia University (M.F.A., 1972). For two years she taught art history at the City University of New York.
One of Anderson’s early performance art pieces was Automotive (1972), for which she orchestrated car horns at the Town Green in Rochester, Vermont. In Duets on Ice, another early piece, Anderson wore ice skates frozen in blocks of ice; she then proceeded to play a duet with herself on an altered violin that she described as like a “ventriloquist’s dummy”—she replaced the bow hair with prerecorded audiotape and the strings with a tape head. The piece ended as soon as the ice melted.
To support her work in performance art, Anderson worked as a freelance interviewer and art critic for ARTnews and Artforum. By 1974 she had received several grants that gave her more freedom to pursue her artistic explorations. She came to rely on a driving rock beat as a backdrop to many of her word-oriented pieces; this led to a musical single, “It’s Not the Bullet That Kills You—It’s the Hole” (1977). Another song, the eight-minute “O Superman” (1981), reached the number two spot on England’s pop charts. She released the recordings You’re the Guy I Want to Share My Money With(1981), Big Science (1982), and Mister Heartbreak (1984) before producing a massive four-part multimedia extravaganza, United States I–IV. It combined music, photography, film, drawings, and animation with text and consisted of 78 segments organized into four sections: Transportation, Politics, Money, and Love. First performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1983, it ran for more than six hours and employed more than 1,200 photos, cartoons, and films. She used some of the same material again in writing, directing, and performing in the film Home of the Brave (1986). Anderson collaborated on Set and Reset (1983) with visual artist Robert Rauschenberg and choreographer Trisha Brown, whose dance company premiered the piece. Anderson’s later recordings include Strange Angels (1989), Bright Red (1994), and The Ugly One with the Jewels and Other Stories(1995).
In 1994 a book of her work was published entitled Stories from the Nerve Bible: A Retrospective, 1972–92. A year later, Anderson embarked on a multimedia tour entitled The Nerve Bible, in which she read excerpts from the retrospective book and incorporated elements of music, comedy, illusion, dance, film, songs, and a simulated tornado into her performance. In 1995 she also crafted, with designer Hsin-Chien Huang, the highly complex, interactive CD-ROM Puppet Motel (1995). Anderson next toured in 1999 with Songs and Stories from Moby Dick, a multimedia, musical event.
Audrey Flack, Vitreous Painting on Glass, 8 x 10”
Artist's Statement:
Credo
I believe in art.
I do not believe in the “art world” as it is today.
I do not believe in art as a commodity.
Great art is in exquisite balance. It is restorative.
I believe in the energy of art, and through the use of that energy, the artist’s ability to transform his or her life and, by example, the lives of others.
I believe that through our art, and through the projection of transcendent imagery, we can mend and heal the planet.
~ Audrey Flack
Audrey Flack (1931- ) holds a graduate degree and an honorary doctorate from Cooper Union in New York City, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Yale University. She also attended New York University's Institute of Fine Arts, where she studied the history of art.
She was awarded the St. Gaudens Medal from Cooper Union, and the honorary Albert Dome professorship from Bridgeport University. She is an honorary professor at George Washington University, and is currently a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
A pioneer of Photorealism and a nationally recognized painter and sculptor, Ms. Flack's work is in the collections of major museums around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Whitney Museum of American Art and the National Museum of Art in Canberra, Australia. She was the first photorealist painter to have work purchased by the Museum of Modern Art.
Throughout her career, Ms. Flack's work has been featured in numerous traveling museum exhibitions, including: Twenty-two Realists (1972) at the Whitney Museum of American Art; Super Realism (1975-76) at the Baltimore Museum of Art; American Painting of the Seventies (1979) at the Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Contemporary American Realism (1981-83) at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; Toyama Now, 1981 (1981) at the Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Japan; and Making Their Mark: Women Artists Move into the Mainstream (1989), which traveled to the Cincinnati Art Museum, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Ms. Flack has also held numerous solo exhibitions at venues including: the Roko Gallery, New York; French & Company, New York; and the Louis K. Meisel Gallery, New York, among others.
Among her public commissions are a Monumental Gateway to the city of Rock Hill, South Carolina, consisting of four twenty-foot high bronze figures on granite pedestals, and Islandia, a nine-foot high bronze sculpture for the New York City technical college in Brooklyn.
Audrey Flack lives and works in New York City and Long Island.
Annie Leibovitz , Vitreous painting on glass, 8 x 10”
Annie Leibovitz was born on October 2, 1949, in Waterbury, Connecticut.
Her father was an officer in the Air Force and her childhood was spent on a
succession of military bases. She began her career as a photojournalist for
Rolling Stone in 1970, while she was still a student at the San Francisco Art
Institute. Her pictures have appeared regularly on magazine covers ever
since. Leibovitz’s large and distinguished body of work encompasses some
of the most well-known portraits of our time.
Leibovitz’s first major assignment was for a cover story on John
Lennon. She became Rolling Stone’s chief photographer in 1973, and by the
time she left the magazine, ten years later, she had shot one hundred and
forty-two covers and published photo essays on scores of stories, including
her memorable accounts of the resignation of Richard Nixon and of the 1975
Rolling Stones tour. In 1983, when she joined the staff of the revived Vanity
Fair, she was established as the foremost rock music photographer and an
astute documentarian of the social landscape. At Vanity Fair, and later at
Vogue, she developed a large body of work—portraits of actors, directors,
writers, musicians, athletes, and political and business figures, as well as
fashion photographs—that expanded her collective portrait of
contemporary life. In addition to her editorial work, she has created several
influential advertising campaigns, including her award-winning portraits
for American Express and the Gap.
