December 11, 2018—Anonymous Was a Woman today announced the ten recipients of its 2018 awards, which recognize women artists over 40 years of age who have made significant contributions in their fields to date, while continuing to create new work. Each recipient receives an unrestricted grant of $25,000.

Beverly Fishman’s high gloss surfaces have an inscrutable beauty. The shape and color of each work looks both estranging and familiar, and whilst the combinations of sometimes acidic or synthetic color entrance, they do not comfort. The reason, I suspect, is because not only are the multiple variations of geometric abstraction present but also the nagging solicitations of brand imaging. Fishman is of the generation of abstract painters who came to abstraction after it was cleansed of the conceit of purity. Abstraction had entered the realm of the senses by way of referential visions that embraced the world at large, free of dogma, or certainty, or for that matter a sure sense of subjectivity. 

Federico Luger Galery is pleased to present:

"SELFPORTRAITAS" by Franklin Evans

22 November 2018 – 17 January 2019

A public reception for the artist will be held Thursday 22 November, 6:30 – 9:00 PM

The Bruce Museum is pleased to present:

Downsized: Small-Scale Sculpture by Contemporary Artists

3 November 2018 - 27 January 2019

An artists panel discussion will be held on Thursday 8 November from 6 – 8pm

The New York Studio School presents Known: Unknown, an exhibition that brings together power players of painting today and emerging creators of tomorrow. We invited a select group of prominent artists to participate in this exhibition, with an added twist—each invited artist chose one emerging or lesser known artist to also be included in the show.

Opening Reception: Thu, November 01, 2018, 6:00PM - 8:00PM

by Lukas Périer

In September of 2014 The Anderson Collection at Stanford University opened in a 30,000-square-foot-building designed by Ennead Architects, showcasing 121 works from 86 artists (among them, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Wayne Theibaud). 

"Sculptors ReCollected" turns the Massry Gallery at the College of Saint Rose into what is almost a primer on contemporary sculpture and sculptural installation. Francis Cape, James Clark, and Judy Pfaff are each given a third of the gallery to make very different dimensional statements as part of a splashy 10th anniversary celebration of the Massry.

Many people scoff at abstract art, saying that it requires no skill to make. But new studies show that even the untrained eye detects the differences that set apart the work of real artists.

A few years back, Evan Maurer visited James Hayward at his farm in Moorpark, California, for a barbeque.

Maurer, a curious sort who was the Minneapolis Institute of Art’s director and president from 1988-2005 and a long-time friend of the artist, entered Hayward’s studio to check out some of his art – including a series Hayward had painted depicting the Stations of the Cross. The 14 pieces have never been shown in public.

Maurer told Hayward he had the perfect place to show them – Saint John’s University.

Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present:

Isca Greenfield-Sanders: INHERITED LANDSCAPE

18 OCTOBER - 21 NOVEMBER 2018

An opening reception will be held on Thursday 18 October, 5 – 7pm

Miles McEnery Gallery is featuring works by Beverly Fishman at the New York venue.

The inviting, and deeply intriguing wall reliefs on view through November 10, 2018 at Miles McEnery Gallery are a continuation of a series Fishman began in 2012.

The works on display are made using urethane paint on cut wood panels.

Their large size and bright color palette are confrontational and bursting with tensions that beguile the viewer’s senses. By painting the edges of the pieces with gleaming fluorescent tones, the colors interact with the white of the wall behind it and give the illusion of a neon glow.

New York Academy of Art is pleased to present: 

Betsy Eby & Bo Bartlett in conversation with Alyssa Monks

October 10th 2018, 6:30pm

The Schneider Museum of Art at Southern Oregon University is pleased to present: 

Terrain: The Space Between from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation, Ffeaturing work by Vija Celmins, Judy Pfaff and Ed Ruscha

28 September, 2018 – 5 January, 2019

Brattleboro Museum & Art Center is pleased to present:

Emily Mason: To Another Place

5 October 2018 – 10 February 2019

Opening reception: Friday, 5 October at 5:30 pm

Artist Talk: Friday, 19 October at 7 pm

MCASD Downtown is pleased to present:

Being Here with You/ Estando aquí contigo

20 September 2018 – 03 February 2019

Kalamazoo Institute of Arts is pleased to present:

A Fine Line

15 September – 6 January 2019

Opening Reception: 27 September, 5:30 – 8:00pm

The UCI Institute and Museum for California Art is pleased to present:

First Glimpse: Introducing the Buck Collection 

Curated by Kevin Appel, Cécile Whiting, and Stephen Barker.

September 29, 2018 – January 5, 2019

Opening Reception: 29 September, 2018  |  2:00 – 5:00 p.m.

Garrison Art Center is pleased to present: 

COLOR COMPOSITIONS

15 September – 14 October 2018

Opening Reception: 15 September, 4 – 7 pm

Senior & Shopmaker is pleased to present Spheres of Influence: Al Held, Michael Craig-Martin, Judy Pfaff, and Stanley Whitney, a group exhibition of drawings by preeminent abstract painter and former Yale professor, Al Held (1928-2005), along with three illustrious former students from the Yale School of Art graduate program, Michael Craig-Martin (MFA 1966); Judy Pfaff (MFA 1973); and Stanley Whitney (MFA 1972). 
Craig-Martin, Pfaff, and Whitney have each acknowledged the impact Held had on the development of their critical thinking and practice during their student years and beyond. This exhibition brings together works on paper, dating from 1963 to 2018, from which common themes emerge.

I remember the first time I saw Jo Baer’s painting ‘H. Arcuata’. It wasn’t at a museum or gallery; it was the same kind of encounter I had with most art that hit me as an undergraduate at Penn State University. It was in a magazine. Even in print the painting knocked me out. It was so unlike any other work I had seen up until that time. It was painted three years before I was born in 1971. The stretcher was just deep enough to separate it from the depth of a normal canvas. This seemed a purposeful choice to make the painting more sculptural in its read. 

Culver Center of the Arts is pleased to present:

Yunhee Min & Peter Tolkin: Red Carpet in C

18 August - 29 December 2018
Opening Reception: Saturday 29 September, 2018, 6 – 8pm

L.A. Louver is pleased to present:

EVOLVER

20 June – 17 August 2018

A color explosion is on view at Miles McEnery’s booth, where the Chelsea-based gallery has brought a wide spectrum of pigment-heavy offerings. The German Markus Linnenbrink’s horizontally situated work is dappled with tiny pools of colored rings, mesmerizing and impressive in its formal qualities. A highlight of the gallery’s display is Tomory Dodge’s Figment, a prime example of the artist’s ability to distill photographs into purely abstract gestures that evoke the pigmentation of colorists like Joan Mitchell and Gerhard Richter, with a frenetic dynamism that is completely his own.

True Colors

Nothing in art is more powerful than color. From Monet and Matisse to Mark Rothko and Frank Stella, and onward to the huge Color Field canvases and pulsing neon sculptures of today, color as a means of expression is the keynote for this wildly exuberant show. Potent even to the point of being considered dangerous, it is the most exciting element of art, the strongest tool in the toolbox. “Color, above all, is a means of liberation,” Matisse declared.

Gaa Gallery Wellfleet is pleased to present:

Judy Pfaff :  × × × ÷ ÷ ÷ = = = + + +,

July through 11 August, 2018

Earlier this year, the New York gallery formally known as Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe changed its name to Miles McEnery Gallery. Today, the gallery, whose headquarters are located on West 22nd Street in Chelsea, announced the opening of a second location in the neighborhood, at 520 West 21st.

Harper's Books is pleased to present: 

Beverly Fishman 

Opening reception 17 August 2018 from 5-8PM 

The Nevada Museum of Art is pleased to present:

Manet to Maya Lin

9 June – 2 September, 2018

Abstract Room at Université de Strasbourg is pleased to present: 

Abstraction & Architecture

10 – 20 October, 2018
​Opening: Friday, 12 October, 5 – 8 pm

Bo Bartlett’s newest paintings at Miles McEnery Gallery balance the public and private spheres. 

In 1807 William Wordsworth published a sonnet that could have been written yesterday. The World Is Too Much With Us today as it was then, perhaps even more so with 24-hour news providing information into conflicts around the globe and on our failure to be caring stewards of the world we live in.

When I come across a work of art as weird and seductive and startlingly beautiful as an Inka Essenhigh painting, I haven’t the faintest desire to engage in my critical faculties. I just want to be overcome by the supple, erotic strangeness of her surrealist narratives; the chitinous sheen of her works’ surfaces; her Prada-meets-Star Trek palette; and the gelatinous, ectomorphic figures. You want to dissolve into an Essenhigh painting, in the same way that she dissolves virtually all solidity within her forms and spaces. Every body, every thing looks as though it’s made of melted caramel, or flowing silk, or liquid latex suspended midair, or some sinuous, alien protein.

Bo Bartlett brings the narrative painting tradition up to date, merging the historical with the personal.

Essenhigh reveals a freedom that resonates with all manner of fusion: of figure and design, of abstraction and narrative, of sentiment and humor, and more generally, of ambitious painting with a readable narrative.

New York—Wood slabs, branches and roots are the canvases for Hudson Valley artist Jason Middlebrook, whose works overlay nature’s geometries with his own. Those include Eleven Ways to Get Your Groove On, an acrylic painting on a cross section of maple, an upcoming commission for a courthouse in Mobile, Alabama, and a series of graphic planks coming to New York’s Miles McEnery Gallery.

Fredric Snitzer Gallery is pleased to present Cut Figure, by Iva Gueorguieva. The artist’s second solo exhibition at the gallery features works ranging from paintings on stretched canvas to relief sculptures made with steel, wood, cardboard and muslin. Gueorguieva views them as spatial constructions related to the work of Lucio Fontana and Thornton Dial, in a lineage including Russian Constructivism, American Assemblage and Dada.

Next to Nothing presents a group exhibition that revisits early Modern figurative painting and Symbolist poetry through the recent work of 12 contemporary artists. The artists in the exhibition inflect Modernist forms with contemporary perspectives on intimate subjects including: the poetics of domestic architecture, the pertinence of ancient myth, and the solipsism of art history.

1. To truly understand the work of David Allan Peters, you have to know the process behind it. After layering countless sheathes of paint, the artist carves the surface, removing small chunks and lines that when viewed from far away, reveal an intricate geometric pattern. 

Inka Essenhigh's paintings, which combine twisted narratives, liquid line work, and oneiric imagery, are at once otherworldly and rooted in specific times and places. This season, that dissonance will be on display in a trio of new projects. This month, the artist’s surreal landscapes and fever-dream interiors will occupy the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art. In April, New York’s Drawing Center will present Manhattanhenge, a site-specific mural for the Soho building’s stairwell. And later that month, she’ll open her first solo show with Miles McEnery Gallery in Chelsea.

This exhibition reexamines the important contemporary art movement that found its roots in the late 1960s in California and New York and continues today known as Photorealism. Aligned with Pop Art, Photorealism features ordinary elements of contemporary life such as vehicles, buildings, streets, and consumer products in an objective, often clinical, manner. Artists Richard Estes, Audrey Flack, and Ralph Goings use photography as a tool to help them reproduce the image as realistically as possible on canvas. 

As part of its ongoing series of commissions for the Stairwell, The Drawing Center has asked New York artist Inka Essenhigh to create a site-specific wall drawing. Essenhigh’s installation will be the third in the series, following Gary Simmons’s  Ghost Reels (2016–18) and Abdelkader Benchamma’s Dark Matter (2015–16).

This exhibition reexamines the important contemporary art movement that found its roots in the late 1960s in California and New York and continues today known as Photorealism. Aligned with Pop Art, Photorealism features ordinary elements of contemporary life such as vehicles, buildings, streets, and consumer products in an objective, often clinical, manner. Artists Richard Estes, Audrey Flack, and Ralph Goings use photography as a tool to help them reproduce the image as realistically as possible on canvas. 

The Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) celebrates the opening of Inka Essenhigh: A Fine Line. Essenhigh gained national attention in the late 1990’s and is known for her experiments with enamel paint, traditional oils, and printmaking. Inspired by time spent in New York City and Maine, Essenhigh developed her signature use of line by practicing automatic drawing. Fantastical images of the everyday, both urban and rural, distinguish her work.

THERE ARE NO BOUNDARIES IN THE WORLD OF COLOR. Travelers who wander there find it filled with infinite possibility, a universe limited only by their willingness to experiment, explore and reach into the unknown. Painter Emily Mason has followed her intuition into these lands for more than six decades, traveling through the looking glass to produce an original body of work that mesmerizes and excites its viewers as few American abstractionists have done before.

Artist Inka Essenhigh spent the early years of her career thinking that her fluid, feminine paintings were a no-no.

As she painted graceful fairies, ghosts and woodland creatures that played in colorful, mystical universes, her art friends called them lightweight and kitschy.

But the work felt right, so the New York-based artist kept creating.

Through her painting, Inka Essenhigh provides an authentic voice. Since her emergence into the art world during the late 1990’s, she has created a path for herself that consistently questions and redefines her relationship with her media. She has moved from using enamel paint to traditional oils and back; creating hybrids of the two. Her substrates have included paper, canvas, and panels. Throughout each phase of experimentation, she created dialogues with her work, navigating how the media and brush interact, sometimes with genuine surprise at the result.

Sophia Contemporary is pleased to announce Portal, the first two-person show of American artists Iva Gueorguieva and Dona Nelson. Gueorguieva and Nelson come from two successive generations of artists whose work is at the forefront of contemporary abstraction in the United States. Through painting and sculpture, both artists grapple with the history of painting, redefining abstraction and challenging the material and conceptual boundaries of their media. The exhibition initiates an intergenerational visual dialogue through fifteen works including Iva Gueorguieva’s vibrant acrylic and collage works and Dona Nelson’s signature double-sided freestanding paintings. Portal will open to the public with a talk by both artists from 6-7PM on Thursday, March 15, 2018 followed by a private view from 7-9PM. The exhibition will remain on view through May 3, 2018.

The Painting Center presents Cultivate Your Own Garden, an exhibition of twelve contemporary artists: Cecile Chong, Elisabeth Condon, Daniel Dallmann, Carlo D’Anselmi, Lois Dodd, Ashley Garrett, Xico Greenwald, Eric Holzman, Wolf Kahn, Judith Linhares, Carol March and Ruth Miller on view through March 24th.

The title for the show comes from the Voltaire novel Candide (1759) and refers to the idea of taking care of one’s own needs before taking care of others’. The idea of connecting to nature despite the cacophony of the world around us seems apt at this moment in history. Curators Patricia Spergel and Shazzi Thomas selected artists for this exhibition who reference garden and landscape in their work in a variety of ways – traditional observational painting, works with subtle satirical and political commentary and paintings that lean towards abstraction. What all these paintings have in common is a love for nature and paint, and a clear, focused approach to transmitting that passion.

It’s another unseasonably warm winter day in New York City. Tuesday February 13th, early evening and dark out. It’ll be in the 50’s tomorrow and in the 60’s the day after. I’m trying to remember if I’ve ever experienced such a warm February in NYC. There’s an unsettling mist and fog in the air as I weave through end of the day rush hour hordes of people – many bumping into each other as they walk with illuminated faces absorbed in their handheld screens. The pedestrian crowd dissipates as I walk through Chelsea and finally step into Miles McEnery Gallery to meet up with artist Brian Alfred for a look and talk about his current one-person show of 15 paintings and one animated video projection.

By Brian Boucher

What the Gallery Says: “Taking its title from Alvin Toffler’s 1970 novel and Herbie Hancock’s 1983 album, Brian Alfred’s Future Shock embraces both of their messages and expands upon them. Toffler warns of an impending information overload as well as humanity’s inability to adapt to the ever-increasing speed of industry and consumerism. Alternatively, Hancock’s album welcomes the so-called information overload, praising the expansion of musical possibilities brought on by technology.”

We live in a world where Instagram rules culture; where our President, instead of sending out official memos, types obscenities and presses 'tweet.' When everything you could ever need is accessible with just one click, our society's need for constant consumption has turned into the information overload. So, what do we do - embrace it or treat the fuck out? These are the questions artist Brian Alfred asks in his latest exhibition, Future Shock, at Miles McEnery Gallery in Chelsea

FOR AN ARTIST who emerged from the Sturm-und-Drang­ driven Abstract Expressionist movement of 1950s New York, Emily Mason's work is remarkably serene. This quality is not only apparent in the way vibrant swaths of oil paint harmonize with each other on the canvas; it also comes through in the way her career has quietly percolated along through the decades since, without drama or self-promotion, with no clearly delineated sty­ listic phases or periods. Mason, now 86, is still making new work the way she always has-by intuition, without any need for theo­ ries, without measuring herself against others. 

Growing up in Columbus, Georgia, Bo Bartlett did what was expected of him every Sunday. He listened intently to the preacher, prayed hard and committed those weekly lessons in morality and righteousness to the deep recesses of his dutiful mind. He was a good son, and his Sunday routine at the Baptist church was pure joy.

Ameringer McEnery Yohe Gallery, located in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York, is expanding its Twenty-Second Street headquarters and will reopen in February. Alex Greenberger of Artnews writes that the arts space is also being rebranded as Miles McEnery Gallery. “As an art dealer, you always want more ambitious space, to do more ambitious shows,” Miles McEnery, the gallery’s director, said in a statement. “We’re always looking to grow, both physically and conceptually.”

Correspondence between “M” and “Q” from the National Intelligence Archives on Declassification Day.

M:  It appears that, in recent years, Davis Cone has considerably advanced the genre of Photorealist painting.

Q: Indeed, Cone has achieved a greater sense of depth in the works he’s been producing over the past ten years. He doesn’t emphasize the inherent flatness of photographs, as other Photorealists have done.

The Bo Bartlett Center, an 18,500-square-foot interactive gallery space, was inaugurated at Columbus State University in Columbus, Georgia on Thursday, January 18. Located on the school’s River Park campus, the former textile warehouse turned arts center was designed by American architect Tom Kundig, owner of the Seattle-based firm Olson Kundig Architects.

Columbus artist Bo Bartlett put his hands in the praying position just below his chin and looked upward.

Thursday afternoon at the dedication of the new Bo Bartlett Center on the Columbus State University RiverPark campus, Bartlett was remembering those who were not with him to celebrate the moment.

The moment transpired in front of a 11 foot by 17 foot Bartlett work, entitled “Civil War,” painted in 1994.

Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects is pleased to announce the gallery’s eighth solo exhibition of new work by Patrick Wilson.

Patrick Wilson’s intensely colorful canvases are populated by hard-edged, quadrilateral planes in varying opacities, layered and cantilevered in carefully finessed compositions. His new works reflect an increasingly energetic complexity that Lilly Wei has described in a recent essay as “breathtaking and nuanced, the juxtapositions [between colors] often quirky and unpredictable.” 

(Los Angeles, CA) - DENK gallery is pleased to announce Shift, a painting exhibition featuring new works by Los Angeles-based artists Karen Carson, Kim Dingle, Iva Gueorguieva, and Elisa Johns. Each of these four painters is unique in her simultaneous exploration of both abstract and representational genres. This show will present new and recent pieces by each of the four painters, focusing on the often ambiguous transitions in their works and practices from the referential to the abstract.

From the gallery to the city, Brian’s work explores mediums as those of collage, painting and animation. From large scale works to small scale, the relationship between these is continuously considered whilst trying to address larger contemporary issues. Oscillating between artists and curator, Brian also hosts a ‘Sound and Vision’ podcast, conversations with fellow artists and musicians on the creative process, ‘discussing life as a creative person.’

The Bo Bartlett Center will be a 18,425 square foot interactive gallery space, housed on the River Park campus of Columbus State University. The red brick, former textile warehouse turned gallery space, designed by AIA award winning architect, Tom Kundig, sits on the banks of the Chattahoochee River in Bartlett’s hometown, Columbus Georgia. As a cornerstone of the College of the Arts’ Corn Center for Visual Arts, The Bo Bartlett Center will be a pivotal element in the continued emergence of a national and international presence originally established by the College’s Schwob School of Music and its Legacy Hall. Complementing exhibitions in the CSU Department of Art’s acclaimed Norman Shannon and Emmy Lou P. Illges Gallery, The Bo Bartlett Center will serve as an experiential learning center and cultural hub for the visual arts while affording visitors a broad range of arts experiences offered within the College’s arts district.

Jacob Hashimoto is interviewed by Cassie Davies for Studio International.

La galleria Maurizio Caldirola arte contemporanea è lieta di presentare la prima mostra personale italiana di Markus Linnenbrink, artista tedesco residente a Brooklyn, New York.

Il lavoro di Markus si contraddistingue per la sperimentazione di un nuovo processoo creativo legato all’astrazione. Astrazione derivata da un paziente processo sico, metodico, legato alla strati cazione di particolari colori resinosi. Nella serie “Drip” l’artista è costretto ad una paziente attesa che consente al colore, libero, di de uire verso il basso tramite preziosi telai lignei e il risultato che ne deriva è una sottile campitura e strati cazione di tante linee culminanti, al termine, in gocce (drip).

For the past thirty-two years Emily Mason has collaborated with five master printers to create works of a singular chromatic intensity, distinguishing and defining her prints as unique. Each printer offers individual direction which Mason modifies or personalizes to further stretch the boundaries of her gestures and color vocabulary. The exhibit represents several different printmaking techniques. What is common to all is that they start with one image on the first plate and end with a cohesive intense exchange between what we see and what lies beneath. Color, shape, and improvisational gesture are printed upon one another until the image is resolved in its final pass through the press. She embraces unique states, giving each work its own space. Imperfections are welcomed. If a tinge of red-orange reveals itself in the registration we read it not as a flaw, but as a brightly colored wink from Mason herself.

Mitchell•Giddings Fine Arts is pleased to offer a survey of Emily Mason’s prints from 1985 – 2016. This gallery-wide exhibit explores Mason’s adventurous approach to contemporary printmaking. Her monoprints, monotypes and solarplate prints epitomize her spontaneous and daring use of color and form. 

Over the course of his career, Tomory Dodge has become known for dynamic paintings that explore the representation and mechanics of picture-making. Thanks to mass media and modern technology, images today are on every conceivable surface and confront us at every moment. Painting, one of the oldest means of expression, remains a vital key to understanding the nature of images in modern life, whether they are experienced in the physical world, on our devices, or on-line.

The National Museum of History and Art dedicates for the first time in Luxembourg an exhibition to one of the main representatives of American Abstract Expressionism.

Hans Hofmann is one of the most important 20th century American modernist artists and art teachers. Born in 1880 in Weißenburg, Bavaria, Hofmann died in the United States in 1966. In his oeuvre, he combines the traditions of European modernist painting with influences from American postwar art.

Creation in Form and Color: Hans Hofmann is organized by University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, in collaboration with the Kunsthalle Bielefeld and the National Museum for History and Art Luxemburg.

A touring exhibition curated by Michael Petry and Roberto Ekholm.

The exhibition is based on Michael Petry's book Nature Morte: Contemporary Artists Reinvigorate the Still Life published by Thames & Hudson.

Travelling artists: Peter Abrahams, Sue Arrowsmith, Annie Attridge, Aziz + Cucher, Conrad Bakker, Barnaby Barford, Berthold Bell, Per Christian Brown, Mat Collishaw, Marcus Cope, Michael Craig-Martin, John Dugdale, Roberto Ekholm, Saara Ekström, Nancy Fouts, Nick Fox, Anya Gallaccio, Ana Genovés, Ori Gersht, Rigoberto A. Gonzalez, Cynthia Greig, Martin Gustavsson, Jefferson Hayman, Paul Hazelton, Todd Hebert, Renata Hegyi, Bill Jacobson, Alexander James, Peter Jones, Edward Kay, Rob Kesseler, Alana Lake, Janne Malmros, Carol Marin-Pache,Livia Marin, Caroline McCarthy, Damien Meade, John Mitchell, Polly Morgan, Dermot O'Brien, Gabriel Orozco, Bruno Pacheco, Guillaume Paris, Michael Petry, Marc Quinn, Eric Rhein, Miho Sato, Rebecca Scott, Andro Semeiko, Jane Simpson, Jim Skull, Matt Smith, Rob Smith, Jennifer Steinkamp, Richard Stone, Yuken Teruya, Maciej Urbanek, Mathew Weir, James White, Kraig Wilson, Cindy Wright

From Lens to Eye to Hand reexamines this important movement in contemporary art that found its roots in the late 1960s in California and New York and continues today. Photorealism reintroduced what many considered to be straightforward representation into an art world more attuned to the burgeoning conceptual framework of artistic practice coming out of Pop and into Minimalism, Land Art, and Performance Art. Often misunderstood and sometimes negatively criticized as being overtly tradition-al, these artists were, and are, trailblazers.