George McNeil - Avant Garde Art

George McNeil (1908 – 1995) was an American abstract expressionist painter.George McNeil was born in Queens, New York, on February 22, 1908, the youngest child of an Irish Catholic working-class family. He attended Brooklyn Tech High School and the Pratt Institute, which he left before gaining his degree.
From the Cubist-influenced compositions of his earlier Hofmann student years, McNeil moved to full abstraction by 1936. His early 1950s paintings were "both abstract and expressionist" with an active surface “ very moving, full of feeling, emotional”displaying the “painterly touch” that was identified with the artists exhibiting at the Charles Egan Gallery. His paintings remained fully abstract until the early 1960s when figures and faces began to appear in the abstract field, particularly in the "Dancer" and "Bather" series. McNeil commented to art historian Irving Sandler in 1968: my work has always had not a human figure image, but it always had a figural image. There always seems to be some kind of center image...that is figural, or imagistic.... is not only found: it’s completely abstract. You see this is the whole thing: I’m not a figure painter at all. I’m an abstract painter where I hope that bringing in the figure brings in certain human or psychological connotations or associations.
From 1980, dynamic situations such as discos, New York City, football, street life or graffiti activate his paintings. His work is characterized by profound attention to color and complex abstract volumes. Wikipedia

Meinrad Craighead - Artist, Scholar, and Vsionar

Meinrad Craighead (1936–2019) was an artist, scholar, and visionary, influential in the field of woman-centered religious art. Her work explores the human relationship to the Divine, particularly feminine images of God

Craighead moved to the Southwest after graduating from the University of Wisconsin to accept a teaching job in the art department at the College of St. Joseph on the Rio Grande in Albuquerque. Here, she taught classes, began printing gesso relief prints, and explored Native American traditions in the Southwest.

"Her approach to her work, as a sacred calling, as a communication with the many spirits she was in contact with, is an inspiration. 

She wrote:

My personal vision of God the Mother, incarnated in my mother and her mother, gave me, from childhood, the clearest certainty of woman as the truer image of Divine Spirit. Because she was a force living within me, she was more real, more powerful than the remote Fathergod I was educated to have faith in. I believed in her because I experienced her.…

I draw and pain from my own myth of personal origin. Each painting I make begins from some deep source where my mother and and grandmother, and all my fore-mothers, still live; it is as if the line moving from pen or brush coils back to the original Matrix. Sometimes I feel like a cauldron of ripening images where memories turn into faces and emerge from my vessel. So my creative life is itself an image of God the Mother and her unbroken story of emergence in our lives. "

Abstract Sculpture David Hayes

David Hayes (March 15, 1931 – April 9, 2013) was an American sculptor.
Hayes received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Notre Dame in 1953, and a M.F.A. degree from Indiana University in 1955 where he studied with David Smith.Smith pioneered sculpture in metal and Hayes also made his sculpture using metal, formed in graceful curves, shapes abstracted from sketches of objects and ideas.He received a post-doctoral Fulbright Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He was a recipient of the Logan Medal of the Arts for Sculpture and an award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. During his life, he had 300 exhibitions and his work is included in 100 institutional collections including those of the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York City.In 2007, he was conferred an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree by Albertus Magnus College.Hayes resided in Coventry, Connecticut since 1958, where he had 57 acres of land to exhibit his works. He died of leukemia at his home there on April 9, 2013. He was 82.Wikipedia

Boris Margo

Boris Margo, inventor, painter, sculptor, and printmaker, was born on November 7, 1902, in the small Ukrainian town of Volochisk.  He studied at the Polytechnik of Art in Odessa from 1918 to 1923. The following year, in Moscow, he participated in the Workshop for the Art of the Future known as Futemas, and between 1927 and 1929, he studied in Leningrad, first at the Hermitage and then with the cubist/surrealist painter Pavel Filinov at the Analytical School of Art.  In 1928, with the permission of the Soviet government to study abroad, Margo traveled to Montreal where he worked as a muralist before immigrating to the United States in 1930.  He began studying at the Roerich Museum and two years later was teaching there. 

 In 1931, Margo began experimenting with celluloid and he developed the cellocut, a new approach to printmaking. He dissolved sheets of celluloid into a viscous liquid that he poured onto masonite and then worked the hardened surface with printmaking tools.
Margo married Jan Gelb in 1941 and became an American citizen in 1943. He joined the stable of artists with the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York in 1947 and that same year his works were included in the exhibition of Abstract and Surrealists American Art at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of The Century Gallery, and he won the first of many purchase awards from the Brooklyn Museum.

 Margo was visiting artist at the American University in Washington, D.C. in 1946 and in the late 1950s he was visiting professor for two years at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1988 a retrospective exhibition of his work was mounted at the Provincetown Art Association. His work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; Brooklyn Museum; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Boris Margo died in Hyannis, Massachusetts on July 5, 1995. (annexgalleries.com)