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LeRoy Johnson (artist)
Leroy Johnson (1937 – July 8, 2022) was a largely self-taught African American artist who used found materials to create mixed-media works. He was known for his paintings, assemblage sculptures and collages that were inspired, influenced and reflective of African American history and his experiences living in the inner city of Philadelphia. Early life and education Leroy Johnson was born in 1937 in the Eastwick community of Southwest Philadelphia to Harry and Louetta Cowan Johnson. His father worked as a janitor at the Frankford Arsenal. When Johnson was about 7 or 8 years old, he read Richard Wright’s novel “Native Son,” and asked his mother who wrote it, he said in video interviews. She said it was written by a “colored man,” he said. Then he heard a voice telling him that he would be an artist, and so he did, according to Johnson. As a child, he said, he enjoyed drawing and reading, and he copied cartoons. Will Eisner was among his favorite cartoonists, along with ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, often called Philly, is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the sixth-largest city in the U.S., the second-largest city in both the Northeast megalopolis and Mid-Atlantic regions after New York City. Since 1854, the city has been coextensive with Philadelphia County, the most populous county in Pennsylvania and the urban core of the Delaware Valley, the nation's seventh-largest and one of world's largest metropolitan regions, with 6.245 million residents . The city's population at the 2020 census was 1,603,797, and over 56 million people live within of Philadelphia. Philadelphia was founded in 1682 by William Penn, an English Quaker. The city served as capital of the Pennsylvania Colony during the British colonial era and went on to play a historic and vital role as the central meeting place for the nation's founding fathers whose plans and actions in Philadelphia ultimately inspired the American Revolution and the nation's inde ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
University Of The Arts (Philadelphia)
The University of the Arts (UArts) is a private art university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Its campus makes up part of the Avenue of the Arts in Center City, Philadelphia. Dating back to the 1870s, it is one of the oldest schools of art or music in the United States. The university is composed of two colleges and two Divisions: the College of Art, Media & Design; the College of Performing Arts; the Division of Liberal Arts; and the Division of Continuing Studies. It is accredited by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education. In addition, the School of Music is accredited by the National Association of Schools of Music. History The university was created in 1985 by a merger between the Philadelphia College of the Performing Arts and the Philadelphia College of Art, two schools that trace their origins to the 1870s. In 1870, the Philadelphia Musical Academy was created. In 1877, the Philadelphia Conservatory of Music was founded. After graduating from South Phil ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Romare Bearden
Romare Bearden (September 2, 1911 – March 12, 1988) was an American artist, author, and songwriter. He worked with many types of media including cartoons, oils, and collages. Born in Charlotte, North Carolina, Bearden grew up in New York City and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and graduated from New York University in 1935. He began his artistic career creating scenes of the American South. Later, he worked to express the humanity he felt was lacking in the world after his experience in the US Army during World War II on the European front. He returned to Paris in 1950 and studied art history and philosophy at the Sorbonne. Bearden's early work focused on unity and cooperation within the African-American community. After a period during the 1950s when he painted more abstractly, this theme reemerged in his collage works of the 1960s. ''The New York Times'' described Bearden as "the nation's foremost collagist" in his 1988 obituary.Fraser, C. Gerald Romare Bearden, Collagist and Pai ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lonnie Holley
Lonnie Bradley Holley (born February 10, 1950) sometimes known as the Sand Man, is an American artist, art educator, and musician. He is best known for his assemblages and immersive environments made of found materials. He was born the 7th of 27 children during the Jim Crow laws, Jim Crow era and claims to have been traded for a bottle of whiskey when he was four. Holley's work is included in the representation of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, Souls Grown Deep foundation. Early life Lonnie Holley was born on February 10, 1950, in Birmingham, Alabama, (during the Jim Crow laws, Jim Crow era). From the age of five, Holley worked various jobs: picking up trash at a drive-in movie theatre, washing dishes, and cooking. He lived in a whiskey house, on the state fairgrounds, and in several foster homes. His early life was chaotic and Holley was never afforded the pleasure of a real childhood. Born the 7th of 27 children, Holley claims to have been traded for a bottle of whiskey when he ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Thornton Dial
Thornton Dial (10 September 1928 – 25 January 2016) was a pioneering American artist who came to prominence in the late 1980s. Dial's body of work exhibits formal variety through expressive, densely composed assemblages of found materials, often executed on a monumental scale. His range of subjects embraces a broad sweep of history, from human rights to natural disasters and current events. Dial's works are widely held in American museums; ten of Dial's works were acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2014. Biography Thornton Dial was born in 1928 to a teenage mother, Mattie Bell, on a former cotton plantation in Emelle, Alabama, where relatives in his extended family worked as sharecroppers. He lived with his mother until he was around three when Dial and his half-brother Arthur moved in with their second cousin, Buddy Jake Dial, who was a farmer. When Thornton moved in with Buddy Jake, he farmed and learned about the sculptures that Buddy Jake made from items lyi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Upton Sinclair
Upton Beall Sinclair Jr. (September 20, 1878 – November 25, 1968) was an American writer, muckraker, political activist and the 1934 Democratic Party nominee for governor of California who wrote nearly 100 books and other works in several genres. Sinclair's work was well known and popular in the first half of the 20th century, and he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1943. In 1906, Sinclair acquired particular fame for his classic muck-raking novel, ''The Jungle'', which exposed labor and sanitary conditions in the U.S. meatpacking industry, causing a public uproar that contributed in part to the passage a few months later of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act. In 1919, he published ''The Brass Check'', a muck-raking exposé of American journalism that publicized the issue of yellow journalism and the limitations of the "free press" in the United States. Four years after publication of ''The Brass Check'', the first code of ethics for journ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ben Shahn
Ben Shahn (September 12, 1898 – March 14, 1969) was an American artist. He is best known for his works of social realism, his left-wing political views, and his series of lectures published as ''The Shape of Content''. Biography Shahn was born in Kaunas, Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire, to Jewish parents Joshua Hessel and Gittel (Lieberman) Shan. His father was exiled to Siberia for possible revolutionary activities in 1902, at which point Shahn, his mother, and two younger siblings moved to Vilkomir (Ukmergė). In 1906, the family immigrated to the United States where they rejoined Hessel, a carpenter, who had fled Siberia and emigrated to the US by way of South Africa. They settled in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, New York, where two more siblings were born. His younger brother drowned at age 17.Berger, MauriceNew York." Jewish Museum (New York), 2004. Shahn began his path to becoming an artist in New York, where he was first trained as a lithographer. Shah ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ralph Ellison
Ralph Waldo Ellison (March 1, 1913 – April 16, 1994) was an American writer, literary critic, and scholar best known for his novel ''Invisible Man'', which won the National Book Award in 1953. He also wrote ''Shadow and Act'' (1964), a collection of political, social, and critical essays, and ''Going to the Territory'' (1986). ''The New York Times'' dubbed him "among the gods of America's literary Parnassus." A posthumous novel, ''Juneteenth'', was published after being assembled from voluminous notes he left upon his death. Early life Ralph Waldo Ellison, named after Ralph Waldo Emerson, was born at 407 NE 1st Street in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, to Lewis Alfred Ellison and Ida Millsap, on March 1, 1913. Oklahoma City's 407 East First Street buzzed with excitement as Ida Ellison, whom close friends called “Brownie,” neared term in early 1913. She and her husband Lewis lived in an apartment in a large rooming house owned by J. D. Randolph and his family. He was the second of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Horace Pippin
Horace Pippin (February 22, 1888 – July 6, 1946) was a self-taught American artist who painted a range of themes, including scenes inspired by his service in World War I, landscapes, portraits, and biblical subjects. Some of his best-known works address the U.S.'s history of slavery and racial segregation. He was the first Black artist to be the subject of a monograph, Selden Rodman'''Horace Pippin, A Negro Painter in America'' (1947, and the ''New York Times'' eulogized him as the "''most'' important Negro painter" in American history. He is buried at Chestnut Grove Cemetery Annex in West Goshen Township, Chester County, Pennsylvania. A Pennsylvania State historical Marker at 327 Gay Street, West Chester, Pennsylvania identifies his home at the time of his death and commemorates his accomplishments. Early life He was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania, on February 22, 1888, to Harriet Pippin; his father's identity is unknown. He grew up in and around Goshen, New York, but would ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Wanamaker
John Wanamaker (July 11, 1838December 12, 1922) was an American merchant and religious, civic and political figure, considered by some to be a proponent of advertising and a "pioneer in marketing". He was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and served as U.S. Postmaster General during the term of U.S. President Benjamin Harrison from 1889 to 1893. Early life and family Wanamaker was born on July 11, 1838, in a then-rural, unincorporated area that would in time come to be known as the Grays Ferry neighborhood of South Philadelphia. His parents were John Nelson Wanamaker, a brickmaker and native of Kingwood, New Jersey, and Elizabeth Deshong Kochersperger, daughter of a farmer and innkeeper at Gray's Ferry. Her ancestors came from Rittershoffen in Alsace, France, and from Canton of Bern in Switzerland. At the age of 19 he was hired by the Philadelphia YMCA, he was the first corresponding secretary in the YMCA movement. In 1860 John Wanamaker married Mary Erringer Brown (1839 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ink Wash Painting
Ink wash painting ( zh, t=水墨畫, s=水墨画, p=shuǐmòhuà; ja, 水墨画, translit=suiboku-ga or ja, 墨絵, translit=sumi-e; ko, 수묵화, translit=sumukhwa) is a type of Chinese ink brush painting which uses black ink, such as that used in Asian calligraphy, in different concentrations. It emerged during the Tang dynasty of China (618–907); it overturned earlier, more realistic techniques. It is typically monochrome, using only shades of black, with a great emphasis on virtuoso brushwork and conveying the perceived "spirit" or "essence" of a subject over direct imitation. Ink wash painting flourished from the Song dynasty in China (960–1279) onwards, as well as in Japan after it was introduced by Zen Buddhist monks in the 14th century. Some Western scholars divide Chinese painting (including ink wash painting) into three periods: times of representation, times of expression, and historical Oriental art. Chinese scholars have their own views which may be diffe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kiln
A kiln is a thermally insulated chamber, a type of oven, that produces temperatures sufficient to complete some process, such as hardening, drying, or chemical changes. Kilns have been used for millennia to turn objects made from clay into pottery, tiles and bricks. Various industries use rotary kilns for pyroprocessing—to calcinate ores, to calcinate limestone to lime for cement, and to transform many other materials. Pronunciation and etymology According to the Oxford English Dictionary, kiln was derived from the words cyline, cylene, cyln(e) in Old English, in turn derived from Latin ''culina'' ("kitchen"). In Middle English the word is attested as kulne, kyllne, kilne, kiln, kylle, kyll, kil, kill, keele, kiele. For over 600 years, the final "n" in kiln was silent. It wasn't until the late 20th century where the "n" began to be pronounced. This is due to a phenomenon known as spelling pronunciation, where the pronunciation of a word is surmised from its spelling an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
