George Miyasaki (1935 Kalopa, HI – 2013 Berkeley, CA) was a painter and printmaker active in the San Francisco Bay Area arts scene during the mid-to-late twentieth century.
Miyasaki gained acclaim as a brilliant colorist in the late 1950s and early 60s for his Abstract Expressionist paintings and prints. Unlike his counterparts of the New York School, Miyasaki was concerned with the spontaneity and randomness of natural creation rather than expressing his own inner psychology. He often drew inspiration from the local landscape, referring to California and the American...
Mary Lovelace O'Neal (born February 10, 1942) is an American artist and arts educator. Her work is focused on abstracted mixed-media (primarily painting and printmaking) and minimalism. She is a Professor Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley and retired from teaching in 2006. O'Neal's art has been exhibited widely throughout North America and internationally, with group and solo shows in Italy, France, Chile, Senegal and NigeriaShe lives and works in Oakland, California, and maintains a studio in...
Chiura Obata (小圃 千浦, Obata Chiura, November 18, 1885 – October 6, 1975) was a well-known Japanese-American artist and popular art teacher. A self-described "roughneck", Obata went to the United States in 1903, at age 17. After initially working as an illustrator and commercial decorator, he had a successful career as a painter, following a 1927 summer spent in the Sierra Nevada, and was a faculty member in the Art Department at the University of California,...
Artist, curator, and art professor Worth Ryder was born on November 10, 1884, in Kirkwood, Illinois. His family moved to Berkeley, California, when Ryder was a child, and he would go on enroll at the University of California, Berkeley in 1904. He did not complete his degree, however, wanting instead to pursue art. He moved to New York in 1906 to study at the Art Students League, supporting himself as an usher at the Metropolitan Opera House, and in 1908 he studied for a year at the Royal Bavarian Academy in Munich (now the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich).
In the world of contemporary ceramics, Richard Shaw is the master of trompe-l’oeil sculpture. He has developed an astonishing array of techniques, including perfectly cast porcelain objects and overglaze transfer decals. By combining the commonplace with the whimsical, the humorous with the mundane, Shaw captures the poetic and the surreal with the sensibility of a comedian.
Shaw is one of the most respected and collected artists in contemporary ceramics. He came out of the San Francisco Bay Area art scene in the late 1960's and he continues to add to his skills...
Katherine Sherwood was born in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1952. She received a BA from the University of California, Davis, in 1975, and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1979. She taught at UC Berkeley for over thirty years until retiring in 2011. She currently lives and works in Rodeo, California.
Sherwood’s work addresses intersectionality, feminism and art history through the lens of disability. Her life and art completely changed when she had a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 44, which paralyzed the entire right side of her body. After a period of recovery, she...
April 10, 2001 — Figurative painter Wendy Sussman, a professor of art practice at the University of California, Berkeley, died of cancer on March 29 near her home in Oakland, Calif. She was 51.
In her large-scale canvases, diminutive figures materialize within vast fields of layered paint, deepening the metaphysical questions her paintings raise about the pressure of time and space on our mortality.
A passionate artist and inspirational teacher, Sussman was considered by many to be the "soul" of the Department of Art Practice....
After serving in the U.S. Army Air Force from 1943 to 1946, he entered Montana State College, earning a B.S. degree in 1951 and, the following year, an M.F.A. degree at California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. Returning to Montana in 1952, he established a pottery workshop in Helena. In 1953 while teaching a three-week summer course at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, Voulkos met innovative figures in the arts such as Josef Albers, Robert Rauschenberg, and John Cage, which significantly influenced the direction of his work.
