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. "

Jan Berdyszak

Jan Berdyszak (15 June 1934 –18 September 2014) was a Polish artist. From 1952 to 1958, he studied at the Sculpture Department of the State College of Fine Arts in Poznań (now Fine Arts Academy), where he eventually returned as a lecturer. He participated in numerous exhibitions both in Poland and abroad. His works were exhibited in the Foto-Medium-Art Gallery in 1980, 1986, 1995 and 2007.
In honor of his merits for culture he was appointed a Knight of Polonia Restituta Order in 1988 and an Officer of Polonia Restituta in 2001. He also received the Doctorate Honoris Causa of Fine Arts Academy in Bratislava in 1999.
Berdyszak's artistic projects cover a wide range of fields and techniques, including graphic design, sculpture, installations, photography, and stage designs for theatre performances. His art is frequently analytical and academic, and he frequently deliberates on variations of a particular problem, sometimes bringing threads from past projects into subsequent ones.A number of Berdyszak's works concentrate on the issue of space, which he defined as "the original being, and also density, darkness, void, transparency and potentiality." He later focused on notions of sacrum, space-time continuum and infinity. His sculpture projects and stage designs frequently reflect on light, words, and movement. Wikipedia

Norman W. Lewis

Norman W. Lewis (July 23, 1909 – August 27, 1979) was an African-American painter, scholar, and teacher. He is associated with Abstract Expressionism who also used representational strategies to focus on black urban life and his community's struggles. Lewis was African-American, of Bermudian descent.
Norman Wilfred Lewis was born in Harlem, New York to Bermudan parents. Always interested in art, he had amassed a large art history library by the time he was a young man. A lifelong resident of Harlem, he also traveled extensively during the two years that he worked on ocean freighters. An important early influence was the sculptor and teacher Augusta Savage, who provided him with open studio space at her Harlem Community Art Center. He also participated in WPA art projects, alongside Jackson Pollock, among others.Lewis began his career in 1933, with earlier mostly figurative work. He at first painted what he saw, which ranged from Meeting Place (1930), a swap meet scene, and The Yellow Hat (1936), a formal Cubist painting, to Dispossessed (1940), an eviction scene, and Jazz Musicians (1948), a visual depiction of the bebop that was being played in Harlem.Norman Lewis was the only African- American artist among the first generation of Abstract Expressionists.His work was overlooked many times because of his political involvement, and also because of the area where he lived. His skin colour at this time period had a major impact on his work life.

 In the late 1940s, his work became increasingly abstract. His total engagement with abstract expressionism was due partially to his disillusionment with America after his wartime experiences in World War II. It seemed extremely hypocritical that America was fighting "against an enemy whose master race ideology was echoed at home by the fact of a segregated armed forces."[4] Seeing that art does not have the power to change the political state that society was in, he decided that people should develop their aesthetic skills more, instead of focusing on political art. Tenement I (1952), Harlem Turns White (1955), and Night Walker No. 2 (1956) are all examples of his style. Twilight Sounds (1947) and Jazz Band (1948) are examples of his interest in conveying music.

 One of his best known paintings, Migrating Birds (1954), won the Popular Prize at the Carnegie Museum's 1955 Carnegie International Exhibition, the New York Herald-Tribune calling the painting "one of the most significant of all events of the 1955 art year." His signature style in those decades included repetitive ideographic or hieroglyphic elements that allowed Lewis to incorporate narrative sequences into his paintings.Wikipedia