Fine Art
The Art of Dignity: Making Beauty Amid the Ugliness of WWII Japanese American Camps
By Lisa Hix — On December 7, 1941, Imperial Japanese war planes bombed an unsuspecting American naval base in Pearl Harbor, Hawai‘i, killing 2,403 Americans and destroying 188 aircraft. The next day, the U.S. Congress declared war on Japan, bringing the United States into World War II, which had been raging since 1939. "When the powers that be take everything away from you, the only thing left is your own creative expression, what you have in your mind." Right away, U.S. authorities in California,...
Lightman Fantastic: This Artist Drenched '60s Music Lovers in a Psychedelic Dream
By Ben Marks — When kindly old grandparents beckon their fresh-faced grandchildren into their rock-poster-lined man caves and she sheds, to vape sweet kush and wax nostalgic about the San Francisco music scene of the 1960s, their rambling recollections are often accompanied by the sounds of “Cheap Thrills” or “Aoxomoxoa”—cranked to 11. "When you are painting with light, if people aren’t there, nobody sees it." Getting high with grandma and grandpa while listening to Big Brother and the Holding Company...
Before Mondrian, Native American Women Painted Abstract Art on Saddlebags
By Lisa Hix — Europeans and European Americans didn’t fully embrace abstract art until the early 20th century, when artists like Piet Mondrian and Ilya Bolotowsky used color, lines, and geometric forms as their means of expression. However, shapes in bold hues have long been a part of the visual language for Native Americans, centuries before their invaders got obsessed with color blocks. Similarly, before Louis Vuitton steamer trunks became all the rage, Plains and Plateau tribes—who became increasingly...
Double the Fun: The Husband-Wife Team Who Made Everyone Want to Chew Gum
By Ben Marks — As a kid growing up in Seattle, art director and design historian Norman Hathaway got his first taste of Otis Shepard graphics the same way most of us did—by chewing a piece of gum. He didn’t know it yet, but from the 1930s to the 1960s, Shep, as Otis was known, designed everything from the slender sleeves that wrapped sticks of Spearmint, Doublemint, and Juicy Fruit to the enormous billboards that promoted these iconic Wrigley’s products to the world. "Otis was a pragmatic person when it...
My Goodness! Guinness Collectors Snap Up Secret Stash of Unpublished Advertising Art
By Ben Marks — The biggest cliché in the collecting world is the “discovery” of a previously unknown cache of stuff that’s been hidden away for years until one day, much to everyone’s amazement, the treasure trove is unearthed and the collecting landscape is changed forever. As a corollary to this hoary trope, if you are in the right place at the right time, you can get in on the action before the word gets out. "Some of the canvases were 80 years old, dating from 1930." Cliché or not, that’s roughly...
Pin-Up Queens: Three Female Artists Who Shaped the American Dream Girl
By Lisa Hix — It’s easy to think of pin-up art as a charming relic of the old boys’ club—images that might line the walls of a Mid-Century smoking room where Don Draper and Roger Sterling slap each other on the back. And the names of the artists that come up over and over again are men: Alberto Vargas, George Petty, and Gil Elvgren. "She was an icon for women in a man's world, especially when it came to her pin-ups." So you might be surprised to learn that, according to pin-up art expert Louis K....