100 Notable alumni of
San Francisco Art Institute
Updated:
San Francisco Art Institute is 617th in the world, 226th in North America, and 208th in the United States by aggregated alumni prominence. Below is the list of 100 notable alumni from San Francisco Art Institute sorted by their wiki pages popularity. The directory includes famous graduates and former students along with research and academic staff.
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Courtney Love
- Occupations
- actorcomposerrecording artistfilm producerguitarist
- Biography
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Courtney Michelle Love is an American singer, songwriter, guitarist, and actress whose career has spanned four decades. She has had a significant impact on female-fronted alternative acts and performers, with NME naming her one of the most influential singers in alternative culture between 1990 and 2020.
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Spike Jonze
- Occupations
- music video directoractortelevision actordirectorfilm actor
- Biography
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Adam Spiegel, known professionally as Spike Jonze, is an American filmmaker, actor, musician, and photographer. His work includes films, commercials, music videos, skateboard videos and television.
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Kathryn Bigelow
- Occupations
- screenwriterexecutive producerfilm directorfilm producer
- Biography
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Kathryn Ann Bigelow is an American film director, producer, and screenwriter. Her accolades include two Academy Awards, two BAFTA Awards, and a Primetime Emmy Award.
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Jerry Garcia
- Occupations
- composerguitaristfilm directorbanjoistsinger
- Biography
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Jerome John Garcia was an American musician who was the lead guitarist and a vocalist with the rock band Grateful Dead, which he co-founded and which came to prominence during the counterculture of the 1960s. Although he disavowed the role, Garcia was viewed by many as the leader of the band. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994 as a member of the Grateful Dead.
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Annie Leibovitz
- Occupations
- fashion photographerphotographerfilm director
- Biography
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Anna-Lou Leibovitz is an American portrait photographer best known for her portraits, particularly of celebrities, which often feature subjects in intimate settings and poses. Leibovitz's Polaroid photo of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, taken five hours before Lennon's murder, is considered one of Rolling Stone magazine's most famous cover photographs. The Library of Congress declared her a Living Legend, and she is the first woman to have a feature exhibition at Washington's National Portrait Gallery.
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Chrisann Brennan
- Occupations
- painteressayist
- Biography
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Chrisann Brennan is an American memoirist and painter. She is the author of The Bite in the Apple, an autobiography about her relationship with Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. They had one child, Lisa Brennan-Jobs.
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Devendra Banhart
- Occupations
- singerguitaristsinger-songwriterdraftspersonmusician
- Biography
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Devendra Obi Banhart is an American singer-songwriter and visual artist. He was born in Texas and grew up in Venezuela and California. In 2000, he dropped out of the San Francisco Art Institute in San Francisco to pursue a musical career. In 2002, Banhart released his debut album and he is best known for his albums in the late 2000s such as Cripple Crow and Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon. He has since expanded his career to incorporate his interest and training in the visual arts.
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Gale Harold
- Occupations
- television actoractorfilm actorassociation football player
- Biography
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Gale Morgan Harold III is an American actor, known for his leading and recurring roles on Queer as Folk, Deadwood, Desperate Housewives, Grey's Anatomy, The Secret Circle and Defiance. He also starred in the romantic comedy Falling for Grace.
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Gutzon Borglum
- Occupations
- paintersculptor
- Biography
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John Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum was an American sculptor best known for his work on Mount Rushmore. He is also associated with various other public works of art across the U.S., including Stone Mountain in Georgia, statues of Union General Philip Sheridan in Washington, D.C., and in Chicago, as well as a bust of Abraham Lincoln exhibited in the White House by Theodore Roosevelt and now held in the United States Capitol crypt in Washington, D.C.
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Errol Morris
- Occupations
- produceractordirectornon-fiction writerfilm producer
- Biography
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Errol Mark Morris is an American film director known for documentaries that interrogate the epistemology of their subjects, and the invention of the Interrotron. In 2003, his The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. His film The Thin Blue Line placed fifth on a Sight & Sound poll of the greatest documentaries ever made. Morris is known for making films about unusual subjects; Fast, Cheap & Out of Control interweaves the stories of an animal trainer, a topiary gardener, a robot scientist, and a naked mole-rat specialist.
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Don Ed Hardy
- Occupations
- artisttattoo artist
- Biography
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Don Ed Hardy is an American tattoo artist known for his tattoos, strong influence on the development of modern tattoo styles, and his eponymous brand.
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Kehinde Wiley
- Enrolled in San Francisco Art Institute
- Studied in 1999
- Occupations
- painter
- Biography
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Kehinde Wiley is an American portrait painter based in New York City. He is known for his naturalistic paintings of Black subjects that reference the work of Old Master paintings. In 2017, Wiley was commissioned to paint former U.S. President Barack Obama's portrait for the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution. The Columbus Museum of Art hosted an exhibition of his work in 2007 and describes his paintings as "heroic portraits which address the image and status of young African-American men in contemporary culture."
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Emily Carr
- Occupations
- painterwriterautobiographerartistceramicist
- Biography
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Emily Carr was a Canadian artist who was inspired by the monumental art and villages of the First Nations and the landscapes of British Columbia. She also was a vivid writer and chronicler of life in her surroundings, praised for her "complete candour" and "strong prose". Klee Wyck, her first book, published in 1941, won the Governor General's Literary Award for non-fiction and this book and others written by her or compiled from her writings later are still much in demand today.
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Paul McCarthy
- Enrolled in San Francisco Art Institute
- In 1969 graduated with Bachelor of Fine Arts
- Occupations
- creatorillustratorphotographertelevision producerlecturer
- Biography
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Paul McCarthy is an American artist who lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
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Stan Brakhage
- Enrolled in San Francisco Art Institute
- Studied in 1953
- Occupations
- film producerfilm directoruniversity teacherfilm editorcinematographer
- Biography
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James Stanley Brakhage was an American experimental filmmaker. He is considered to be one of the most important figures in 20th-century experimental film.
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Zulfikar Ali Bhutto
- Occupations
- human rights defendervisual artistpolitician
- Biography
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Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Jr. is a Pakistani visual artist, politician, and human-rights activist. Born and raised in Syria by his Lebanese mother Ghinwa Bhutto, he is a member of the Bhutto family; and is the son of Murtaza Bhutto and a grandson of his namesake, former Pakistani president and prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Bhutto lives in Karachi, Pakistan, and is active in politics.
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Elizabeth Falkner
- Occupations
- celebrity chefchef
- Biography
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Elizabeth Falkner is an American chef and restaurateur. She has appeared as a competitor and a judge on reality television cooking competitions, and she is a Top Chef television series alum.
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Karen Finley
- Occupations
- musicianperformance artistillustratorartistpoet
- Biography
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Karen Finley is an American performance artist, musician, poet, and educator. The case, National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley (1998), argued in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, was decided against Finley and the other artists. Her performance art, recordings, and books are used as forms of activism. Her work frequently uses nudity and profanity. Finley incorporates depictions of sexuality, abuse, and disenfranchisement in her work. She is a professor at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University.
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Luis Mandoki
- Occupations
- screenwriterfilm directordirectorfilm producer
- Biography
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Luis Mandoki is a Mexican film director, working in Mexico and Hollywood.
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Catherine Opie
- Enrolled in San Francisco Art Institute
- In 1985 graduated with Bachelor of Fine Arts
- Occupations
- university teacherphotographerfilm director
- Biography
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Catherine Sue Opie is an American fine art photographer and educator. She lives and works in Los Angeles, as a professor of photography at the University of California, Los Angeles.
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Barry McGee
- Enrolled in San Francisco Art Institute
- In 1991 graduated with Bachelor of Fine Arts
- Occupations
- new media artistpaintermultimedia artistdraftsperson
- Biography
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Barry McGee is an American artist. He is known for graffiti art, and a pioneer of the Mission School art movement. McGee is known by his monikers: Twist, Ray Fong, Bernon Vernon, and P.Kin.
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Laura Kipnis
- Occupations
- video artistessayistwriter
- Biography
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Laura Kipnis is an American cultural critic, essayist, educator, and former video artist. Her work focuses on sexual politics, gender issues, aesthetics, popular culture, and pornography. She began her career as a video artist, exploring similar themes in the form of video essays. She is professor of media studies at Northwestern University in the department of radio-TV-film, where she teaches filmmaking. In recent years she has become known for debating sexual harassment, and free speech policies in higher education.
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Mary Colter
- Occupations
- architectdesigner
- Biography
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Mary Elizabeth Jane Colter was an American architect and designer. She was one of the very few female American architects in her day. She was the designer of many landmark buildings and spaces for the Fred Harvey Company and the Santa Fe Railroad, notably in Grand Canyon National Park. Her work had enormous influence as she helped to create a style, blending Spanish Colonial Revival and Mission Revival architecture with Native American motifs and Rustic elements, that became popular throughout the Southwest. Colter was a perfectionist, who spent a lifetime advocating and defending her aesthetic vision in a largely male-dominated field.
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Hernán Jiménez
- Occupations
- film actorscreenwriterfilm director
- Biography
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Hernán Jiménez is a Costa Rican film director, screenwriter, actor and stand-up comedian.
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Jenny Odell
- Occupations
- university teachermultimedia artistwriter
- Biography
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Jenny Odell is an American multidisciplinary artist, writer, and educator based in Oakland, California. She taught Internet art and digital/physical design at Stanford University from 2013 to 2021. She wrote The New York Times best-selling book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (2019).
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Ralph Gibson
- Occupations
- musicianwriterjournalistartistphotographer
- Biography
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Ralph Gibson is an American art photographer best known for his photographic books. His images often incorporate fragments with erotic and mysterious undertones, building narrative meaning through contextualization and surreal juxtaposition.
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Joan Brown
- Occupations
- painterartist
- Biography
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Joan Brown was an American figurative painter who lived and worked in Northern California. She was a member of the "second generation" of the Bay Area Figurative Movement.
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Matthew Rolston
- Occupations
- photographermusic video directorcamera operatorfashion photographerfilm director
- Biography
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Matthew Russell Rolston is an American artist, photographer, director and creative director, known for his lighting techniques and detailed approach to art direction and design. Rolston has been identified throughout his career with the revival and modern expression of Hollywood glamour.
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Lewis Baltz
- Occupations
- photographer
- Biography
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Lewis "Duke" Baltz was an American visual artist, photographer, and educator. He was an important figure in the New topographics movement of the late 1970s and was one of the photographers featured in the seminal New Topographics exhibition at the Eastman House. His best known work was monochrome photography of suburban landscapes and industrial parks which highlighted his commentary of void within the "American Dream".
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Sally Cruikshank
- Occupations
- film directorcomics artistproduceranimator
- Biography
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Sarah "Sally" Cruikshank is an American cartoonist, animator and artist, whose work includes animation for the Children's Television Workshop program Sesame Street, and whose short Quasi at the Quackadero (1975) was inducted into the United States National Film Registry.
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Penelope Houston
- Occupations
- composersinger-songwritersingermusician
- Biography
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Penelope Houston is an American singer-songwriter best known as the singer for the San Francisco-based punk rock band the Avengers. She was raised in Seattle. In the mid-1970s she attended Fairhaven College in Bellingham, Washington. In 1977, Houston moved to San Francisco, attended the San Francisco Art Institute, and shortly after became the lead singer and songwriter for the Avengers. That band released one album, their eponymous debut in 1983.
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Chryssa
- Enrolled in San Francisco Art Institute
- Studied in 1954-1955
- Occupations
- designerpaintersculptor
- Biography
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Chryssa Vardea-Mavromichali was a Greek American artist who worked in a wide variety of media. An American art pioneer in light art and luminist sculpture, known for her neon, steel, aluminum and acrylic glass installations, she always used the mononym Chryssa professionally. She worked from the mid-1950s in New York City studios and worked since 1992 in the studio she established in Neos Kosmos, Athens, Greece.
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Natalia Leite
- Occupations
- actorscreenwriterfilm director
- Biography
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Natalia Leite is a Brazilian writer and director. She is best known for directing the indie hit film M.F.A., a feminist rape-revenge thriller that spurred debates at the start of the #MeToo movement. Subsequently, she went on to direct episodes of The Handmaid's Tale. Her work has been described as having “a bracing, assertive style”, "emotional intelligence" (Los Angeles Times), and as “cementing the reign over highly stylized, sexually progressive dramas” (Slant). Leite is known to incorporate her documentary subjects into her scripted films.
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Guy Rose
- Occupations
- painter
- Biography
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Guy Orlando Rose was an American Impressionist painter and California resident, who received national recognition in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
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Daniel Turner
- Occupations
- installation artistpaintersculptor
- Biography
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Daniel Turner is an American artist based in New York City. His media include sculpture, photography, video and drawing.
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Edward McKnight Kauffer
- Occupations
- visual artistgraphic designerdesignerpainter
- Biography
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Edward McKnight Kauffer was an American artist and graphic designer who lived for much of his life in the United Kingdom. He worked mainly in poster art, but was also active as a painter, book illustrator and theatre designer.
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Mark Pauline
- Years
- 1953-.. (age 73)
- Occupations
- inventorperformance artist
- Biography
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Mark Pauline is an American performance artist, new media artist, and machine inventor. He is known as founder and director of Survival Research Laboratories.
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Jesse Hernandez
- Occupations
- tattoo artistgraphic designerartist
- Biography
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Jesse Hernandez is an American tattoo artist and graphic designer for video games and collectible toys. He was a part of the urban vinyl art movement of the 2010s. He was also the lead character and prop designer on United Front Games' ModNation Racers. His designs have been featured on Kidrobot's Dunny toys, including one owned by singer-songwriter Usher.
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Lourdes Portillo
- Enrolled in San Francisco Art Institute
- 1980-1985 graduated with Master of Fine Arts
- Occupations
- screenwriterfilm directorvideo artistfilm producer
- Biography
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Lourdes Portillo was a Mexican film director, producer, and writer. The political perspectives of Portillo's films have been described as "nuanced" and versed with a point of view balanced by her experience as a lesbian and Chicana woman. Portillo films have been widely studied and analyzed, particularly by scholars in the field of Chicano studies.
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Barbara Stauffacher Solomon
- Occupations
- paintergraphic designerlandscape architectarchitect
- Biography
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Barbara Ethel Stauffacher Solomon was an American landscape architect and graphic designer. She was best known for her large-scale interior supergraphics and the exterior signs at Sea Ranch, a private estate with a Utopian vision in Sonoma County, California.
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Rigo 23
- Occupations
- painter
- Biography
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Rigo 23 is a Portuguese-born visual artist. He is known in the San Francisco community for having painted a number of large, graphic "sign" murals including: One Tree next to the U.S. Route 101 on-ramp at 10th and Bryant Street, Innercity Home on a large public housing structure, Sky/Ground on a tall abandoned building at 3rd and Mission Street, and Extinct over a Shell gas station. He resides in Los Angeles, California.
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Dame Darcy
- Occupations
- musicianfilm directorwriterillustratorcartoonist
- Biography
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Dame Darcy Pleasant, better known by the pen name Dame Darcy, is an American alternative cartoonist, fine artist, musician, cabaret performer, and animator/filmmaker. Her "Neo-Victorian" comic book series Meat Cake was published by Fantagraphics Books from 1993 to 2008. The Meat Cake Bible compilation was released in June 2016 and nominated for an Eisner Award in July 2017. Vegan Love: Dating and Partnering for the Cruelty-Free Gal, with Fashion, Makeup & Wedding Tips, written by Maya Gottfried and illustrated by Dame Darcy, was the Silver Medalist winners of the Independent Publisher Book Awards in 2018.
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Manuel Neri
- Occupations
- paintersculptor
- Biography
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Manuel John Neri Jr. was an American sculptor who is recognized for his life-size figurative sculptures in plaster, bronze, and marble. In Neri's work with the figure, he conveys an emotional inner state that is revealed through body language and gesture. Since 1965 his studio was in Benicia, California; in 1981 he purchased a studio in Carrara, Italy, for working in marble. Over four decades, beginning in the early 1970s, Neri worked primarily with the same model, Mary Julia Klimenko, creating drawings and sculptures that merge contemporary concerns with Modernist sculptural forms.
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Liza Lou
- Occupations
- sculptorartistprintmaker
- Biography
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Liza Lou is an American visual artist. She is best known for producing large scale sculpture using glass beads. Lou ran a studio in Durban, South Africa from 2005 to 2014. She currently has a nomadic practice, working mostly outdoors in the Mojave Desert in southern California. Lou's work is grounded in domestic craft and intersects with the larger social economy.
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Ronnie Landfield
- Occupations
- printmakerpainter
- Biography
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Ronnie Landfield is an American abstract painter. During his early career from the mid-1960s through the 1970s his paintings were associated with Lyrical Abstraction (related to Postminimalism, Color Field painting, and Abstract expressionism), and he was represented by the David Whitney Gallery and the André Emmerich Gallery.
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Emmy Lou Packard
- Occupations
- paintersocial activistprintmakerillustrator
- Biography
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Emmy Lou Packard, also known as Betty Lou Packard, was an American visual artist and social activist in San Francisco, California. She was known for her paintings, printmaking, and murals, which were often political.
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Sargent Claude Johnson
- Occupations
- printmakerpaintergraphic designersculptorceramicist
- Biography
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Sargent Claude Johnson was one of the first African-American artists working in California to achieve a national reputation. He was known for Abstract Figurative and Early Modern styles. He was a painter, potter, ceramicist, printmaker, graphic artist, sculptor, and carver. He worked in a variety of media, including ceramics, clay, stone, wood, terra cotta, tiled murals, watercolor, oil on canvas, porcelain enamel on steel, and lithography. Despite having lived in San Francisco for most of his adult life, Johnson is considered one of the stellar artists of the Harlem Renaissance.
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Xavier Martínez
- Occupations
- painteruniversity teacher
- Biography
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Xavier Timoteo Martínez was a Mexican-born American artist active in California the late 19th and early 20th century. He was a well-known bohemian figure in San Francisco, the East Bay, and the Monterey Peninsula and one of the co-founders of two California artists' organizations and an art gallery. He painted in a tonalist style and also produced monotypes, etchings, and silverpoint.
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Kevin Larmee
- Occupations
- painter
- Biography
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Kevin Larmee is an American painter, best known for his association with the East Village art movement in New York City in the 1980s.
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Jeremy Fish
- Occupations
- artist
- Biography
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Jeremy Dan Fish is an American illustrator and artist. He lives and works in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco.
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Sharon Lockhart
- Occupations
- artistdocumentary filmmakervisual artistconceptual artistphotographer
- Biography
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Sharon Lockhart is an American artist whose work considers social subjects primarily through motion film and still photography, often engaging with communities to create work as part of long-term projects. She received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1991 and her MFA from Art Center College of Design in 1993. She has been a Radcliffe fellow, a Guggenheim fellow, and a Rockefeller fellow. Her films and photographic work have been widely exhibited at international film festivals and in museums, cultural institutions, and galleries around the world. She was an associate professor at the University of Southern California's Roski School of Fine Arts, resigning from the school in August 2015 in response to the continued administrative turmoil at Roski to take a position at the California Institute of the Arts. Lockhart lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
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William T. Wiley
- Occupations
- illustratorperformance artistuniversity teacherdesignerarchitectural draftsperson
- Biography
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William Thomas Wiley was an American artist. His work spanned a broad range of media including drawing, painting, sculpture, film, performance, and pinball. At least some of Wiley's work has been referred to as funk art.
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Robert Ingersoll Aitken
- Occupations
- sculptor
- Biography
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Robert Ingersoll Aitken was an American sculptor. Perhaps his most famous work is the West Pediment of the United States Supreme Court Building.
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Uri Katzenstein
- Occupations
- visual artistsculptorvideo artistmusician
- Biography
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Uri Katzenstein was an Israeli visual artist, sculptor, musician, builder of musical instruments and sound machines, and film maker.
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Mona Kuhn
- Occupations
- photographervideo artist
- Biography
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Mona Kuhn is a Brazilian-born American contemporary photographer best known for her large-scale photographs of the human form and essence. An underlying current in Kuhn's work is her reflection on our longing for spiritual connection and solidarity. As a result, her approach is unusual in that she develops close relationships with her subjects, resulting in images of remarkable intimacy. Kuhn's work shows the human body in its natural state while simultaneously re-interpreting the nude as a contemporary canon of art. Her work often references classical themes, has been exhibited internationally, and is held in several collections including the J. Paul Getty Museum, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hammer Museum and the Pérez Art Museum Miami.
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Grace Hudson
- Occupations
- painterphotographerartist
- Biography
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Grace Carpenter Hudson was an American painter based in Northern California. She was nationally known during her lifetime for a numbered series of more than 684 portraits of the local Pomo natives. She painted the first, National Thorn, after her marriage in 1891. Her last work was completed in 1935.
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Anne-Marie O'Connor
- Occupations
- journalistwriter
- Biography
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Anne-Marie O'Connor is an American journalist and writer who authored The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt's Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer. This bestselling story is about the eight-year legal battle by Vienna emigre Maria Altmann, represented by Los Angeles attorney E. Randol Schoenberg, to reclaim five Gustav Klimt paintings from her native Austria. This saga that also inspired a Harvey Weinstein movie, Woman in Gold, in which Helen Mirren played Maria Altmann. One of the paintings, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, sold for a record $135 million in 2006 to Ronald Lauder's Neue Galerie New York, where the painting is on view.
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Ralph Stackpole
- Occupations
- paintersculptorgraphic artistteacher
- Biography
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Ralph Ward Stackpole was an American sculptor, painter, muralist, etcher and art educator, San Francisco's leading artist during the 1920s and 1930s. Stackpole was involved in the art and causes of social realism, especially during the Great Depression, when he was part of the Public Works of Art Project, Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration, and the Treasury Department's Section of Painting and Sculpture. Stackpole was responsible for recommending that architect Timothy L. Pflueger bring Mexican muralist Diego Rivera to San Francisco to work on the San Francisco Stock Exchange and its attached office tower in 1930–31. His son Peter Stackpole became a well-known photojournalist.
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Enrique Chagoya
- Occupations
- graphic artistartistuniversity teacherpaintersculptor
- Biography
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Enrique Chagoya is a Mexican-born American painter, printmaker, and educator. The subject of his artwork is the changing nature of culture. He frequently uses shocking imagery, irony, and Mesoamerican icons to convey his point in his artwork. Chagoya teaches at Stanford University in the department of Art and Art History. He lives in San Francisco.
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Jimmy Swinnerton
- Occupations
- paintercaricaturistcomics artistlandscape painterillustrator
- Biography
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James Guilford Swinnerton was an American cartoonist and a landscape painter of the Southwest deserts. He was known as Jimmy to some and Swinny to others. He signed some of his early cartoons Swin, and on one ephemeral comic strip he used Guilford as his signature. Experimenting with narrative continuity, he played a key role in developing the comic strip at the end of the 19th century.
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Marc Horowitz
- Occupations
- new media artist
- Biography
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Marc Horowitz is an American artist who works in a large variety of media including painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, performance and video.
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Nao Bustamante
- Occupations
- multimedia artist
- Biography
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Nao Bustamante is a Chicana interdisciplinary artist, writer, and educator from the San Joaquin Valley in California. Her artistic practice encompasses performance art, sculpture, installation, and video and explores issues of ethnicity, class, gender, performativity, and the body. She is a recipient of the 2023 Rome Prize.
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Steve Lambert
- Occupations
- multimedia artistartist
- Biography
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Steve Lambert is an American artist who works with issues of advertising and the use of public space. He is a founder of the Anti-Advertising Agency, an artist-run initiative which critiques advertising through artistic interventions, and of the Budget Gallery (with Cynthia Burgess) which creates exhibitions by painting over outdoor advertisements and hanging submitted art in its place. Lambert's artistic practice includes drawing, performance, intervention, culture jamming, public art, video, and internet art. He has worked with the Graffiti Research Lab, Glowlab, and as a senior fellow at Eyebeam.
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Edgar Honetschläger
- Occupations
- film directorscreenwriter
- Biography
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Edgar Honetschläger is an Austrian artist, filmmaker, environmental activist and is the co-creator of Chickens Suit, a clothing range for chickens.
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David Johnson
- Occupations
- photographerphotojournalist
- Biography
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David S. Johnson was an American photographer. He was known for his portrayal of society, urban life, and the jazz culture of San Francisco's Fillmore District in the 1940s and 1950s, as well as figures of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Born in Florida under segregation and trained at the California School of Fine Arts, he was the first African American student of photographer Ansel Adams.
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Herman George Scheffauer
- Occupations
- science fiction writerpoetwritertranslatordramaturge
- Biography
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Herman George Scheffauer was a German-American poet, architect, writer, dramatist, journalist, and translator.
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Yun Gee
- Occupations
- painter
- Biography
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Yun Gee was a Chinese American modernist artist of the School of Paris. He lived and painted in San Francisco, Paris, and New York City, and was considered one of the most daring avant-garde painters during his time.
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Addie L. Ballou
- Occupations
- suffragistpainterwriternursepoet
- Biography
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Addie Lucia Ballou was an American suffragist, poet, artist, author, and lecturer.
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Adolph Treidler
- Occupations
- painterdesigner
- Biography
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Adolph Treidler was an American artist known for his illustrations, posters, commercial art, and wartime propaganda posters. His magazine covers and advertisement work appeared in McClure's, Harper's, the Saturday Evening Post, Collier's, Century, Scribner's, and the Woman's Home Companion. He created ads for the Pierce Arrow automobile and for the French Line. His 1930s advertising work for the Bermuda Board of Trade was instrumental in promoting tourism in Bermuda. He was president of the Artist's Guild from 1936–1937.
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Stephanie Syjuco
- Occupations
- photographer
- Biography
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Stephanie Syjuco, is a Filipino-born American conceptual artist and educator. She works in photography, sculpture, and installation art. Born in the Philippines, she moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1977. She lives in Oakland, California, and teaches art at the University of California, Berkeley.
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Peter Reginato
- Years
- 1945-.. (age 81)
- Occupations
- artist
- Biography
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Peter Reginato, is an American abstract sculptor and painter.
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Ruth Reeves
- Occupations
- paintertextile designerillustrator
- Biography
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Ruth Marie Reeves was an American painter, Art Deco textile designer and expert on Indian handicrafts.
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Alice Brown Chittenden
- Occupations
- painter
- Biography
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Alice Brown Chittenden was an American painter based in San Francisco, California who specialized in flowers, portraits, and landscapes. Her life's work was a collection of botanicals depicting California wildflowers, for which she is renowned and received gold and silver medals at expositions. She taught at the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art (now the San Francisco Art Institute) from 1897 to 1941.
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Kathy Goodell
- Occupations
- teachersculptor
- Biography
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Kathy Goodell, is an American contemporary artist and educator, who works in sculptural objects, installation, drawing, and photography. She is a professor of painting and drawing at the State University of New York at New Paltz.
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Ala Ebtekar
- Occupations
- painter
- Biography
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Ala Ebtekar is an American contemporary visual artist, of Iranian descent. He is known for his work in painting, drawing, illumination, and installation. His work frequently orchestrates various orbits and cadences of time, bringing forth sculptural and photographic possibilities of the universe, and time, gazing back at us.
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Rinaldo Cuneo
- Occupations
- painter
- Biography
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Rinaldo Cuneo, was an American artist known for his landscape paintings and murals. He was dubbed "the Painter of San Francisco".
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Richard Sexton
- Occupations
- photographer
- Biography
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Richard Sexton is an American photographer, author, teacher, and architectural critic with a studio based in New Orleans, Louisiana. He is best known for his architectural photography publications and exhibitions, which have been shown internationally. Sexton was born in 1954 in Atlanta, Georgia, and currently resides in both New Orleans, Louisiana, and Walton County, Florida.
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Mabel Dwight
- Occupations
- printmakergraphic artistlithographerpainterillustrator
- Biography
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Mabel Dwight was an American artist whose lithographs showed scenes of ordinary life with humor and tolerance. Carl Zigrosser, who had studied it carefully, wrote that "Her work is imbued with pity and compassion, a sense of irony, and the understanding that comes of deep experience." Between the late 1920s and the early 1940s, she achieved both popularity and critical success. In 1936, Prints magazine named her one of the best living printmakers, and a critic at the time said she was one of the foremost lithographers in the United States.
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Daniela Franco
- Occupations
- artist
- Biography
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Daniela Franco is a French-Mexican conceptual artist and writer of Syrian origin who lives and works in Paris. Her body of work is interdisciplinary and explores intersections between experimental writing, pop music and visual art through the creation of archives, temporary fictions and video. She is a San Francisco Art Institute and École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts alumna as well as a Fulbright scholar. Her projects have received support and grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Mexican National Council for Culture and Arts and Colección Júmex.
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Hassel Smith
- Occupations
- painter
- Biography
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Hassel Smith was an American artist and teacher. He is considered to have been one of the USA's foremost West Coast artists, emerging in the decade after World War II as an innovative, potent, witty and often challenging exponent of Abstract Expressionism. He was a "generous and gregarious" teacher of great influence at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco and subsequently at the University of California and in later years at the Royal West of England Academy Art Schools in Bristol, England. His work was exhibited widely, particularly in California, and he is represented in prominent museums and found in private collections around the world. A strongly left-leaning iconoclast, well-known for a confrontational nature and as a drinker, he was at the same time loving, caring and shy. Art critics revered him as a "West Coast underground legend".
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Megan Wilson
- Occupations
- artist
- Biography
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Megan Wilson is an American visual artist, writer, and activist based in San Francisco. Known for her large-scale installations, public projects, and street art, she incorporates a broad range of pop culture methodologies and aesthetics to address conceptual interests that include home, homelessness, social and economic justice, anti-capitalism, impermanence and generosity. Wilson's art practice is influenced by Buddhism and Vipassanā meditation, often creating work that is conceptually rooted in elements of these practices and that is intentionally ephemeral or given away.
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Bryan Davis
- Occupations
- inventor
- Biography
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Bryan Davis is an American inventor and distiller. He is most noteworthy for inventing and patenting the first process documented to successfully replicate some of the effects of barrel ageing of distilled spirits in a laboratory (the Davis method). He is the founder of Lost Spirits an award-winning distilled spirits manufacturing company which uses the technology to manufacture its products as well as license the technology to third parties.
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René Yañez
- Occupations
- painteractivistcurator
- Biography
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René Yañez was a Mexican-American painter, assemblage artist, performance artist, curator and community activist located in San Francisco, California. He was a well-known contributor to the arts of San Francisco and is a co-founder of Galería de la Raza, a non-profit community focused gallery that features Latino and Chicano artists and their allies. In the early 1970s, he was one of the first curators in the United States to introduce Mexico's Día de Muertos (Day of the Dead) as a contemporary focus and an important cultural celebration.
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Taravat Talepasand
- Occupations
- artist
- Biography
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Taravat Talepasand is an Iranian-American visual artist, activist, and educator. She is known for her interdisciplinary painting practice including drawing, sculpture and installation. As an Iranian-American woman, Talepasand explores the cultural taboos that reflect on gender and political authority. Her approach to representation and figuration reflects the cross-pollination, or lack thereof, in our Western Society. Talepasand previously held the title of the chair of the painting department at San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI). She is an assistant professor in art practice at Portland State University.
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Bill Martin
- Occupations
- painter
- Biography
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Bill Martin was a realist and visionary artist. "Bill Martin's images possess an inexplicable compelling power," wrote Walter Hopps, the Smithsonian Institution's Curator of the 20th Century American Art Collection.
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Louise Janin
- Occupations
- painter
- Biography
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Louise Janin was an American painter who settled in Paris in 1923. Her work relates to symbolism and musicalism (the attempt to interpret music in painting).
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Phoebe Man
- Occupations
- artist
- Biography
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Phoebe Man is a conceptual artist, media sculptor and independent curator based in Hong Kong. Her works have been shown in local and international art exhibitions, including Venice Biennale, Shanghai Biennale, Gwangju Biennale, and European Media Art Festival. Her works were included in Asian Art, The Art of Modern China and Hong Kong Eye: Hong Kong Contemporary Art.
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Emil Janel
- Occupations
- wood carver
- Biography
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Emil Janel was a Swedish-born, American artist. A still life painter, he is mainly known for his caricatures in the Scandinavian flat-plane style of woodcarving, and is considered by many to be one of the best of this genre.
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M. Evelyn McCormick
- Occupations
- painter
- Biography
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Mary Evelyn McCormick was an American painter.
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Tullio DeSantis
- Occupations
- artist
- Biography
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Tullio Francesco DeSantis, also known as Tullio, is an American contemporary artist, writer, technologist, and teacher. His work is informed by ancient and contemporary philosophy, science, and the relationship between art and life.
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Allan Amato
- Occupations
- film producerphotographerfilm director
- Biography
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Allan Amato is an American portrait photographer, author, and film director.
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Lucy Hanna
- Occupations
- photographer
- Biography
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Lucy Hanna is an American artist, photographer, and filmmaker based in Seattle, Washington and San Francisco, California.
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Janet Delaney
- Years
- 1952-.. (age 74)
- Occupations
- photographer
- Biography
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Janet Delaney is an American photographer and educator based in Berkeley, California. Her books include South of Market (2013), Public Matters (2018), and Red Eye to New York (2021), all published by MACK, and Too Many Products Too Much Pressure (2025) published by Deadbeat Club.
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Perham Wilhelm Nahl
- Occupations
- university teacherpainterprintmaker
- Biography
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Perham Wilhelm Nahl was an American printmaker, painter, illustrator and an arts educator active in Northern California.
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Lynn Marie Kirby
- Born in
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United States - Occupations
- artistvideo artist
- Biography
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Lynn Marie Kirby is an American visual artist, filmmaker and teacher. She lives in San Francisco, and is professor emerita at the California College of the Arts (CCA).
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Mary DeNeale Morgan
- Occupations
- printmakerpainter
- Biography
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Mary DeNeale Morgan also known as M. DeNeale Morgan, was an American plein air painter, especially in watercolor, and printmaker. She was the director the Carmel Summer School of Art sponsored by the Carmel Arts and Crafts Club and a founding member of the Carmel Art Association (CAA) in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California.
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George Albert Harris
- Occupations
- paintereducatorlithographermuralist
- Biography
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George Albert Harris, also known as George Harris, was an American painter, muralist, lithographer, and educator. He was a participant in the WPA Federal Art Project and was among the youngest artists on the mural project at Coit Tower. Harris' style is California Modernism, often working in abstraction, focusing primarily on still lifes and portraits.
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Renata Bernal
- Occupations
- contemporary artist
- Biography
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Renata Bernal (born February 3, 1937, in Munich, Germany is a contemporary American artist. Her work spans a broad range of media including oil paintings, acrylic paintings, pastel paintings, lithograph, woodcuts, and ink drawings. She has exhibited in New York City, San Francisco, Providence, Rhode Island, and in numerous cities in upstate New York, and her artwork can be seen in permanent collections at the Binghamton University Foundation and the historic Security Mutual Life building in Binghamton, New York.
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Janis Crystal Lipzin
- Years
- 1945-.. (age 81)
- Occupations
- filmmaker
- Biography
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Janis Crystal Lipzin, is an American artist and educator, working with film, photography, video, audio, multi-media installations, and media performance. Lipzin is known for her work in many media and taught at the San Francisco Art Institute for over three decades. Lipzin's films offer a unique blend of rigorous conceptual structure, formal investigation, and sensual discovery. The Bladderwort Document is a haunting visual fantasia of her life on a farm in the 1970s; Trepanations is a droll meditation on social forces and women's appearance; and Seasonal Forces, Part One creates a fluid and immediate record of the cultural and seasonal changes in the rural landscape where she lives. She has been an active filmmaker since 1974, when she became attracted to using Super-8 cameras, in part because of their easy portability and flexibility to make changes to a film up to the moment of projection. Her more recent work incorporates both digital and analog film methods. wherein light and photo-chemistry collide and conspire to reveal aspects of our world deserving of more careful scrutiny. Her work blends an enduring interest in the volatility of nature and human events with a sympathy for alternative, hand-made methods that she interweaves with digital processes. Lipzin is based in Sonoma County, California.
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Susan Cervantes
- Occupations
- paintermuralist
- Biography
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Susan Kelk Cervantes is an American artist. She is a leading member of the San Francisco mural movement and the co-founder and executive director of the community-based non-profit, Precita Eyes Muralists.
