Annie Leibovitz

Annie Leibovitz is known as a celebrity portrait photographer, and has become just as famous as the people she photographs. A master at capturing popular culture icons in dramatic and innovative ways, she has paved the way for other contemporary commercial photographs, like those of Mario Testino, to also be seen as legitimate works of art.

Continue reading

Louise Lawler

Lawler’s nuanced form of Institutional Critique has suggested a way forward for subsequent generations of artists who would come to examine their own position as creators. Her chief emphasis on the conditions of presentation and reception have paved the way for many strands of contemporary art’s practices that emphasize situation and relationality as an indispensable factor of any artistic experience.

Continue reading

Laurie Simmons

Simmons’ use of dolls to explore prescribed gender roles and representations of femininity has opened up space in which other feminist artists can work, facilitating the legitimacy of styles of cultural critique that do not fit within masculine molds.

Continue reading

Martha Rosler

RRosler became a leading figure in the Feminist art movement because much of her work revealed the divide between how women were portrayed as individuals whose only place was within the confines of home, marriage, kitchen, and motherhood and the way they actually felt by being pigeonholed into said domestic roles. She also used brave new technologies such as video to differentiate herself from the male art stars and their traditional mediums that had come before.

Continue reading

Barbara Kruger

Barbara Kruger’s work has an integral place in the history of feminist, postmodern, and conceptual art. Connected with this, Kruger dissects contemporary culture in her unique combinations of image and text, often targeting multiple oppressions or hypocrisies.

Continue reading

Elaine De Kooning

Elaine de Kooning’s legacy has received increased attention in recent years. Her large, colorful, gestural works of the 1960s show her to be an adept Abstract Expressionist, and her sensitive and dynamic portraits of friends, athletes, and strangers widen the understanding of what Abstract Expressionism can be. But beyond her painting, de Kooning’s astute and rigorous analyses of painting in the 1940s and 1950s, helped to shape what we know of Abstract Expressionism as a whole.

Continue reading

Lee Bontecou

Bontecou’s persistent experimentation – her use of non-traditional techniques and materials – set her apart from other artists of the period and, particularly, the Abstract Expressionists, who still relied largely on conventional materials and processes despite their rejection of objective representation.

Continue reading

Mary Kelly

Kelly’s pioneering, diaristic approach to making art through gradual, methodological practices has been especially influential on following generations of women artists, both directly and indirectly. Parallel approaches and methods can be seen in work by these younger women artists, for example, whose careers’ followed Kelly’s.

Continue reading

Pat Steir

Pat Steir is a strongly process-driven painter. She says “I think of painting as a research. I’m not a product-maker. I’m a researcher.” Her signature drip-style painting emerged from a desire to demonstrate that painting, too, can be conceptual.

Continue reading