Jerrold Ballaine, painter, sculptor, and educator, was born in Seattle, Washington on 16 February 1934. He attended the University of Washington at Seattle between 1952 and 1955 and, after serving in the military, he furthered his studies at the Art Center School in Los Angeles from 1958 to 1959. He earned his B.F.A. degree from the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco in 1959, where he studied under Richard Diebenkorn, and his M.F.A. degree from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1961.
Ballaine's early interest in Abstract Expressionism in the Bay Area placed him in in...
Elmer Nelson Bischoff (July 9, 1916 – March 2, 1991) was an American visual artist, from the San Francisco Bay Area. Bischoff, along with Richard Diebenkorn and David Park, was part of the post-World War II generation of artists who started as abstract painters and found their way back to figurative art.
Elmer Bischoff, second child of John and Elna (née Nelson) Bischoff, and grew up in Berkeley, California. He was the second-generation Californian, a son of a father of German descent, and a mother of mixed Swedish-Ecuadorian origin.
After attending the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute), Joan Brown found early success working in the style of her mentor, the Bay Area Figurative painter Elmer Bischoff. In 1964, however, she rebelled against stylistic constraints and retreated to her studio to experiment. She moved away from thick paint application and began to explore autobiographical and spiritual themes.
Her 1975 appointment to the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, allowed her greater independence from the art market. A few years later her work changed...
Squeak Carnwath draws upon the philosophical and mundane experiences of daily life in her paintings and prints, which can be identified by lush fields of color combined with text, patterns, and identifiable images. She has received numerous awards including the Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art (SECA) Award from San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, two Individual Artist Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Award for Individual Artists from the Flintridge Foundation, and the Lee Krasner Lifetime Achievement Award from the...
Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) is one of the most important figures of postwar American art. Celebrated for his exuberant, color-filled canvases, and renowned as an influential teacher for generations of artists—first in his native Germany, then in New York and Provincetown—Hofmann played a pivotal role in the development of Abstract Expressionism.
Between 1900 and 1930, Hofmann’s early studies, decades of painting, and schools of art took him to Munich, to Paris, then back to Munich. By 1933, and for the next four decades, he lived in New York and in Provincetown. Hofmann’s evolution...
Randy Hussong creates sculptural installations combining suites of objects, both two and three dimensional, that synthesize art historical and pop references with social, political, comical and sensual realities. His work incorporates print strategies, repetition and DIY fabrication from mixed materials. He received the James D. Phelan Art Award for Printmaking in 2007 and the Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of California in 2008–2009.
Acclaimed painter and printmaker Karl Kasten, a professor emeritus in the University of California, Berkeley’s Department of Art Practice and a leading figure in “The Berkeley School” of abstract expressionism, died at his Berkeley home on May 3, 2010, at the age of 94. He had suffered from pulmonary fibrosis.
Kasten’s art was exhibited around the world at major public and private museums, including San Francisco’s M. H. de Young Memorial Museum and California Palace of the Legion of Honor; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rennes,...
Sylvia Lark (1947-1990) was a Seneca abstract expressionist painter, printmaker and educator from Buffalo, New York. Lark received her M.F.A from University of Wisconsin, Madision in 1972 before moving to California where she began teaching printmaking at California State University, Sacramento. In 1977 she received a Fulbright grant to travel and study in Korea and Japan. She also began teaching at the University of California, Berkeley that same year where she remained a professor for the rest of her life. She was awarded the Distinguished Teaching Award for teaching art by the College...
John McNamara (born 1950) is an American artist who was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He graduated from the Massachusetts College of Art in 1971 with a BFA in painting and in 1977 with an MFA. In 1975, he began teaching painting at the Massachusetts College of Art and remained there until 1983. He received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 1981. Since 1993, he has taught at University of California, Berkeley. He currently lives in Novato CA with his wife, educator and writer Diane Darrow and sons filmmaker Jeremy McNamara and musician Seamus McNamara.
Jim Melchert was born in 1930 in Ohio. After his undergraduate studies in art history at Princeton he taught English in Japan for four years in exchange for the rich experience of living there. Returning to the States he earned degrees in painting at the University of Chicago and afterwards ceramics under Peter Voulkos at the University of California, Berkeley. Finding the Bay Area to be receptive to artists in the way that watering holes are to migratory birds, he settled in Oakland and thrived on the interaction among his colleagues and young artists at UC-Berkeley where he taught. In...
