Judy Chicago (81) is a pioneering feminist artist whose most well-known works include The Dinner Party, International Honor Quilt, The Birth Project, Powerplay, and The Holocaust Project. During the 1970s, she founded the first feminist art program in the United States at California State University Fresno (formerly Fresno State College) and acted as a catalyst…
Gertrud Kauders (1883 — 1942) was a talented Jewish-Czech artist who was murdered by the Nazis in the Majdanek concentration camp. Her family had pleaded with her to leave Czechoslovakia early on, but she refused. It would prove to be a fatal mistake. Kauders was almost lost to history until recently, when some 700 of…
Riva Lehrer (b. 1958) is a celebrated painter, writer, teacher, speaker, and activist. Lehrer was born with spina bifida, a “birth defect in which there is incomplete closing of the spine and the membranes around the spinal cord during early development in pregnancy.” Her art focuses on physical identity and the socially challenged body, especially…
Peter Max (82) is a visual artist who uses extremely bright colors in his work. He has employed a variety of media in his creative endeavors — including painting, drawing, etchings, collage, print making, sculpture, video, and digital imagery. Max often features images of celebrities, politicians, athletes and sporting events, and other pop culture subjects.…
Herbert (Aug. 16, 1922 – July 22, 2012) and Dorothy (1935 — ) Vogel, who worked as civil servants for more than 50 years, managed to amass an enormously important post-1960 art collection numbering thousands of pieces. They never sold any of the collection even though it had appreciated greatly and was worth millions of…
One word often used to describe 93-year-old Herbert Lust: eccentric. Educated to be a university literature professor — his profession for years — Lust eventually found himself working on Wall Street, a sojourn that made him an investment banking tycoon. Since then he has become one of the world’s premier art collectors, who has raised…
Barnett Newman (Jan. 29, 1905 — July 4, 1970) was a major abstract expressionist and color-field painter. His artwork is on display in many museums, including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (New York City), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York City), the Museum of Contemporary Art…
Acclaimed art critic and columnist Jerry Saltz, 69, was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2018. Since 2006, he has been the senior art critic for New York magazine; his writing has also appeared in The Village Voice, Art in America, and Modern Painters, among other publications. In addition to the Pulitzer, Saltz has…
Lenore “Lee” Krasner (October 27, 1908 – June 19, 1984) is sometimes identified as the wife of pioneering abstract expressionist painter Jackson Pollack -– which is unfortunate, since she was an extremely talented artist in her own right. Her paintings have been exhibited in numerous art museums; New York’s Museum of Modern art held a…
Julie Schumer is an abstract expressionist painter who works out of her studio in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Although always passionate about art, she took an extended career detour after becoming an attorney. In 2000, at the urging of longtime friend and artist James Koskinas, Schumer got back on track to creating art full-time. Her…
To learn about these and many more AmazingJews, watch a compilation put together by JewOfTheWeek.net in 2015 and posted on YouTube.