Contemporary Art Gallery Online is Celebrating Pride Month
Below please find a short synopsis of the Artists we are Celebrating this year.
Joan E. Biren (JEB), an award-winning documentary photographer and filmmaker, has been chronicling the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender individuals for more than 30 years. Her most recent film, No Secret Anymore: The Times of Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, tells the story of the two women who, in 1955, founded the Daughters of Bilitis, the first public organization for lesbians in America.
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Rosa Bonheur, born Marie-Rosalie Bonheur (16 March 1822 – 25 May 1899), was a French artist, mostly a painter of animals (animalière) but also a sculptor, in a realist style. Her paintings include Ploughing in the Nivernais, first exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1848, and now at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, and The Horse Fair (in French: Le marché aux chevaux), which was exhibited at the Salon of 1853 (finished in 1855) and is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York City. Bonheur was widely considered to be the most famous female painter of the nineteenth century.
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Cathy Cade (born 1942, Hawaii), is an American photographer noted for her work in documentary photography, including photos about lesbian mothering. She has been a feminist and lesbian activist since the early 1970s, having gotten her start as an activist and seen the power of photography in the early 1960s as part of the Southern Civil Rights Movement. She currently lives in Berkeley, Ca. and is working with her archives at The Bancroft Library at the University of California at Berkeley. She is a member of the Bay Area Civil Rights Veterans and has memoir material at the Civil Rights Movement Archive. She is a member of Old Lesbians Organizing for Change.
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Tammy Rae Carland (born January 27, 1965), is a photographer, video artist, zine editor, current provost at California College of the Arts (CCA), and former co-owner of the independent lesbian music label Mr. Lady Records and Videos. Her work has been published, screened, and exhibited around the world in galleries and museums in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Berlin, and Sydney. Carland was born in Portland, Maine in 1965. She grew up with 4 siblings and was raised by her single mother. She was the first in her family to graduate from high school. Carland's photographs appear in the book The Passionate Camera: Photography and Bodies of Desire edited by Deborah Bright and Lesbian Art in America edited by Harmony Hammond. Carland has several bodies of work that have been shown in museums and galleries. She is currently represented by Jessica Silverman Gallery.
Carland has described herself as a maker rather than a documentarian, with regard to her art practice. In general, her photographs are carefully staged rather than captured in the moment. She has cited Bernd and Hilla Becher, Felix Gonzales-Torres and Imogen Cunningham as influences, especially on her "Lesbian Beds" series. The series contains photographs of her friends' unmade beds, all taken from the same aerial perspective, just minutes after being vacated. In the series "Horror Girls", Carland dresses up to recreate scenes and characters from horror movies.
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Anna Elizabeth Klumpke (October 28, 1856 – February 9, 1942) was an American portrait and genre painter born in San Francisco, California, United States. She is perhaps best known for her portraits of famous women including Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1889) and Rosa Bonheur (1898). Anna's father, John Gerald Klumpke, born in England or Germany, was a successful and wealthy realtor in San Francisco. Her mother was Dorothea Mattilda Tolle. Anna was the eldest of eight children, five of whom lived to maturity. Among her siblings were the astronomer Dorothea Klumpke-Roberts, the violinist Julia Klumpke, and the neurologist Augusta Déjerine-Klumpke.
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Agnolo di Cosimo (November 17, 1503 – November 23, 1572), usually known as Bronzino or Agnolo Bronzino was an Italian Mannerist painter from Florence. His sobriquet, Bronzino, may refer to his relatively dark skin or reddish hair.
He lived all his life in Florence, and from his late 30s was kept busy as the court painter of Cosimo I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany. He was mainly a portraitist but also painted many religious subjects, and a few allegorical subjects, which include what is probably his best known work, Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time, c. 1544–45, now in London. Many portraits of the Medicis exist in several versions with varying degrees of participation by Bronzino himself, as Cosimo was a pioneer of the copied portrait sent as a diplomatic gift.
He trained with Pontormo, the leading Florentine painter of the first generation of Mannerism, and his style was greatly influenced by him, but his elegant and somewhat elongated figures always appear calm and somewhat reserved, lacking the agitation and emotion of those by his teacher. They have often been found cold and artificial, and his reputation suffered from the general critical disfavor attached to Mannerism in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Recent decades have been more appreciative of his art.
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Enrico Corte (born June 21, 1963) is an Italian contemporary artist. He works in the fields of painting, sculpture, drawing, video art and photography. His exhibitions often include multimedia installations that mix diverse genres and form relationships both with the surrounding area and the viewing public by means of ever-changing combinations. He has lived for extended periods of time in Rome, London, Berlin, Paris and New York, always immersing himself in the contemporary culture and assimilating the tensions of the metropolitan counter-cultures. His works can be found in both private and public collections in Europe and the USA.
Some recurring themes constitute the artist’s poetic core. One element is the so-called "impossibility of the Tragic" within the system of contemporary art. Another theme is the co-existence of creation and destruction in the process of realizing a work, along with the analysis of the “dark side” of creativity which often coincides with the self-destruction of the artist’s personality.
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Richard Fung (born 1954) is a video artist, writer, public intellectual and theorist who currently lives and works in Toronto, Ontario. He was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad and is openly gay. Fung is a professor at OCAD University. He earned an undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto, and received a MEd in sociology and cultural studies at University of Toronto. Fung's work in video explores the role of Asian men in gay pornography, while addressing the intersections between colonialism, immigration, racism, homophobia, and AIDS. Many of his works have been presented at venues in Canada and the United States of America. Fung is an activist and founded the Toronto-based organization Gay Asians of Toronto in 1980. In 2019, he was presented the Bonham Centre Award from The Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, University of Toronto, for his contributions to the advancement and education of issues around sexual identification.
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Michael Derek Elworthy Jarman (31 January 1942 – 19 February 1994) was an English film director, stage designer, diarist, artist, gardener, and author. Jarman was born at the Royal Victoria Nursing Home in Northwood, Middlesex, England. The son of Elizabeth Evelyn (née Puttock) and Lancelot Elworthy Jarman. His father was a Royal Air Force officer, born in New Zealand. On 22 December 1986, Jarman was diagnosed as HIV positive and discussed his condition in public. His illness prompted him to move to Prospect Cottage, Dungeness in Kent, near the nuclear power station. In 1994, he died of an AIDS-related illness in London, aged 52. He was an atheist. He is buried in the graveyard at St Clement's Church, Old Romney, Kent.
A blue plaque commemorating Jarman was unveiled at Butler's Wharf in London on 19 February 2019, the 25th anniversary of his death.
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David Hockney, OM, CH, RA (born 9 July 1937) is an English painter, draftsman, printmaker, stage designer, and photographer. As an important contributor to the pop art movement of the 1960s, he is considered one of the most influential British artists of the 20th century.
Hockney has owned a residence and studio in Bridlington and London, as well as two residences in California, where he has lived intermittently since 1964: one in the Hollywood Hills, one in Malibu, and an office and archives on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood, California.
On 15 November 2018, Hockney's 1972 work Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) sold at Christie's auction house in New York City for $90 million (£70 million), becoming the most expensive artwork by a living artist sold at auction. This broke the previous record, set by the 2013 sale of Jeff Koons' Balloon Dog (Orange) for $58.4 million. Hockney held this record until 15 May 2019, Jeff Koons reclaimed the honor when his Rabbit sold for more than $91 million at Christie's in New York.