How artists are reviving Mexico’s groundbreaking muralism a century later

Visitors look at the “Dream of a Sunday afternoon in Alameda Central Park” mural by Mexican artist Diego Rivera at the Diego Rivera Mural Museum, in Mexico City, Sunday, June 5, 2022. (AP Photo/Fernando Llano)

Mexican mural artist Janet Calderon paints a mural in San Salvador, Mexico, Saturday, July 30, 2022. The mural in progress is on three walls of a municipal building in San Salvador, a small town of about 29,000 people north of Mexico City in Hidalgo state. (AP Photo/Fernando Llano)

A pedestrian rides her bike in front of a mural painted by Mexican artist Jesus Rodriguez, in San Salvador, Mexico, Saturday, July 30, 2022. Artists helping to revive muralism or visual imagery to share messages of social and political importance, a movement that put Mexico at the vanguard of art a century ago. (AP Photo/Fernando Llano)

Mexican artist Jesus Rodriguez, right, instructs Luis Manuel Velez, during a painting session in front of a mural Rodriguez is painting on the facade of an auditorium in San Salvador, Mexico, Saturday, July 30, 2022. (AP Photo/Fernando Llano)

Artist Luz Asturizaga takes a break at the Siqueiros School in Poxindeje, Mexico, Saturday, July 30, 2022. The school is based in a converted elementary school, and one of its co-founders is Jesús Rodríguez Arévalo, a pupil of disciples of Mexico’s three muralism masters: Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco. Asturizaga, a 36-year-old sculptor from Bolivia, says she has enjoyed every moment of her stay in the iconic home of muralism. (AP Photo/Fernando Llano)

Mexican artist Jesus Rodriguez paints the finishing touches on a mural he is painting on the facade of an auditorium in San Salvador, Mexico, Saturday, July 30, 2022. Rodriguez is a co-founder of the Siqueiros School of Muralism whose teachers and students are on a mission to keep alive the practice of using visual imagery to share messages of social and political importance. (AP Photo/Fernando Llano)

“The new democracy” mural by Mexican artist David Alfaro Siqueiros is displayed in the Palacio Bellas Artes, in Mexico City, Tuesday, Aug. 2, 2022. The 88-year-old palatial art nouveau performing arts center's interior walls are graced with famous murals by Siqueiros, Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco. (AP Photo/Fernando Llano)

Mexican mural artist Janet Calderon paints on the facade of a municipal building in San Salvador, Mexico, Saturday, July 30, 2022. Calderon is part of a group of artists helping to revive muralism, a movement that put Mexico at the vanguard of art a century ago. (AP Photo/Fernando Llano)

Mexican artist Janet Calderon prepares to work on a mural she is helping to paint in San Salvador, Mexico, Saturday, July 30, 2022. The mural in progress is on three walls of a municipal building in San Salvador, a small town of about 29,000 people north of Mexico City in Hidalgo state. (AP Photo/Fernando Llano)

Mexican artist Jesus Rodriguez explains the significance of a mural painted on the facade of an auditorium in San Salvador, Mexico, Saturday, July 30, 2022. Teachers and students of the Siqueiros School of Muralism are on a mission to keep alive the practice of using visual imagery to share messages of social and political importance. (AP Photo/Fernando Llano)

Mexican artist Luis Manuel Velez retouches a mural painted on the facade of a municipal building in San Salvador, Mexico, Saturday, July 30, 2022. Murals being created in San Salvador and other small towns today have much in common with those created in the early 20th century: They encapsulate themes of war, injustice, and oppression — as well as 21st century issues such as climate change and violence against women. (AP Photo/Fernando Llano)

Mexican artist Janet Calderon balances on scaffolding while painting a mural in San Salvador, Mexico, Saturday, July 30, 2022. The mural in progress is on three walls of a municipal building in San Salvador, a small town of about 29,000 people north of Mexico City in Hidalgo state. (AP Photo/Fernando Llano)

Mexican artist Jesus Rodriguez places the finishing touches on a mural he is painting on the facade of an auditorium in San Salvador, Mexico, Saturday, July 30, 2022. Rodriguez is a co-founder of the Siqueiros School of Muralism whose teachers and students are on a mission to keep alive the practice of using visual imagery to share messages of social and political importance. (AP Photo/Fernando Llano)

Before the coronavirus shut down or limited the hours at many public venues, millions of people frequented art museums. In 2018, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s three New York museums alone saw nearly 7.4 million visitors. Now that museums have largely reopened, people are once again returning to their beloved art institutions. But exploring the art world and broadening the type of art you see can be daunting, and it can be tempting to go back to familiar haunts rather than trying somewhere new.

In order to offer some new options to those wishing to expand their artistic palates, or for those who have visited the Met a few too many times, Giggster surveyed the American art scene and highlighted 12 lesser-known yet celebrated art galleries and museums. While this is just a fraction of the thousands of art institutions around the country that aren’t household names like the Guggenheim or Smithsonian, you may be inspired to check out these galleries and museums in your state.

Dia Beacon is located on the scenic Hudson River in the Upstate New York city of Beacon. Known for its collection of contemporary art dating back to the 1960s, the museum opened in 2003 in a former Nabisco box printing factory, lending the large space an industrial edge. In its permanent collection, the museum houses a number of noted works by sculptor Louise Bourgeois as well as some of Charles Gaines’ oeuvre. One of the early 2022 exhibitions includes German artist Franz Erhard Walther’s interactive fabric sculptures. Dia Beacon is free for Hudson Valley residents on the last Sunday of each month.

The Nasher Museum of Art is part of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. The museum highlights historically underrepresented artists, with a particular focus on showcasing works of Black artists of African descent. Housed in its permanent collection, which boasts more than 13,000 works, are paintings by iconic Black artists Kehinde Wiley and Kerry James Marshall. Among the exhibitions unveiled in 2022 include “Reckoning and Resilience: North Carolina Art Now,” which brings together the work of 30 North Carolina artists in order to interrogate themes of history, identity, collective grief, and healing, and “Beyond the Surface: Collage, Mixed Media and Textile Works from the Collection,” an exhibition that assembles roughly 40 textural works from Nasher’s permanent collection.

Located in Manhattan’s East Village, Half Gallery has been showing works by both up-and-coming and established artists alike since 2008. The gallery is owned by Bill Powers, a former journalist turned art collector, and his wife, fashion designer Cynthia Rowley. The gallery shows the works of dozens of artists, including Che Lovelace, Eden Seifu, Ethan Cook, Hiejin Yoo, Kevin Reinhardt, and Umar Rashid. The artists’ styles and media of choice vary greatly, offering something for everyone.

Based in Lincoln, Nebraska, Kiechel Fine Art has been showing 19th- and 20th-century American art since 1986. Among the 2022 exhibitions is “Hollywood Drawings” by Thomas Hart Benton, the famous American regionalist painter who created the drawings during a 1937 trip to 20th Century Fox Studios, where he drew an array of subjects. Among them include T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, and Will Rogers. Another featured exhibition is “Assurity,” a series of paintings by Marcia Goldenstein that meditate on contrails and human interaction with the environment. Works by Banksy, Romare Bearden, George Bellows, Marc Chagall, and Jenny Kruger will also be on display.

The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, located in Bentonville, Arkansas, was opened in 2011 by Alice Walton, heir to the Walmart fortune. Despite its relative newness, the museum has amassed an impressive permanent collection of American masterworks including those by Georgia O’Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz, Andy Warhol, and many more. In 2013, Crystal Bridges acquired Frank Lloyd Wright’s Bachman-Wilson House and relocated it from New Jersey to its Arkansas campus, where it is open for tours. Among its 2022 exhibitions include “The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse,” organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, which explores “the relationship between music and visual art in Black southern expression from 1920–2020.” The works of Black musicians like James Brown and Sun Ra will be featured alongside visual media by Sanford Biggers, Kerry James Marshall, and many more. Admission to the museum is free.

The Hammer Museum near the University of California, Los Angeles, opened in 1990 and was originally founded as a separate institution by art connoisseur Armand Hammer, the former chairman of Occidental Petroleum Corporation. In an effort to engage the community with the arts, the museum offers a wide array of free programmings such as lectures, symposia, film series, readings, and musical performances. There is also a 5-acre sculpture garden featuring more than 70 works by artists such as Auguste Rodin, Deborah Butterfield, and Barbara Hepworth. On exhibit through mid-May 2022 is the first major retrospective of performance and video artist Ulysses Jenkins, whose work combines archival footage, photography, and sound to create an interrogation of mainstream history, as well as to probe constructed notions of race and gender. An upcoming “Andrea Bowers” retrospective will provide a look at more than two decades of the activist’s documentary work, drawings, sculptures, and videography.

Part of South Dakota State University since 1970, the South Dakota Art Museum prides itself on offering a diverse view of the state’s arts and artists. The museum holds a large collection of 20th-century Plains Indian art, primarily from the Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota tribes. Recently on view was “Compelling Visions: Selections From the Willem and Diane Volkersz Contemporary Folk Art Collection at the Missoula Art Museum,” which highlights “outsider artists” without formal training who used materials accessible to them to create often-political art. Previously on view was a Willem Volkersz retrospective, featuring the artist’s famous neon sculptures that employ the “language of commercial and pop cultural aesthetics.” The pieces draw on Volkersz’s experience as a child under Nazi occupation in the Netherlands, as well as his move to the United States and appreciation for nature.

Based in Los Angeles, The Mistake Room is a gallery and programming space housed in a renovated industrial warehouse. Predicated on the idea that mistakes in art and creation are actually generative and allow for radical, new possibilities, the gallery champions art thought to be unconventional or misunderstood. Through April 2022, the gallery is featuring an exhibition called “Aqux,” which brings together the work of 23 Latinx artists from across the United States to envision and reimagine the notion of “home” through five different lenses: home as city, home as land, home as self, home as labor, and home as intimacy. Also on view is a public exhibition called “Things With Feathers,” which features the multimedia works of artist Gisela McDaniel. The exhibition combines oral interviews with various community members with richly painted portraits and artifacts and uses storytelling as a means for community healing.

LVL3 is a Chicago-based, volunteer-run exhibition space dedicated to amplifying underrepresented artists and works from around the world. Showcasing both emerging and established artists, as well as hosting exhibitions and public programming, LVL3 seeks to engage Chicagoans with the arts. A recent exhibition, called “Sixth Planet from the Sun,” is a photography-based multimedia collaboration between Chicago-based artist Kioto Aoki and Los Angeles artist Pamela Ramos. A group show to be on display in 2022, titled “Linen, Silk, and Pearls…,” troubles the disconnect between luxury materials and their natural and craft origins.

This French Quarter-adjacent gallery in New Orleans was founded in 1996 by Dr. Stella Jones, whose mission was to make art of the African diaspora accessible to everyone. Through lectures, panel discussions, and exhibitions with artists in attendance, the gallery seeks to educate and engage community members and visitors alike about the rich cultural and artistic history of Black Americans and New Orleanians. A group exhibition held in March 2022 included works by the painter Richard W. Dempsey, who is known for his portraits of Black public figures and artists such as Ethel Waters, Duke Ellington, Thurgood Marshall, and Adam Clayton Powell. The exhibit features Dempsey’s abstract expressionist works, as well as pieces by Ron Bechet, Morris Taft Thomas, and Ella Marie Ray.

Combining “Night at the Museum” energy with contemporary art and a luxurious hotel experience, 21c Museum Hotels lets visitors sleep at a modern art museum. With locations in Louisville and Lexington, Kentucky; Cincinnati; Bentonville, Arkansas; Durham, North Carolina; Oklahoma City; Nashville, Tennessee; Kansas City, Missouri; and Chicago, the museum hotel combines a boutique hotel experience with art of the 21st century, as well as high-end restaurants. In 2017, its locations were ranked among Condé Nast Traveler’s Top Hotels in the World. 21c was founded by Laura Lee Brown and Steve Wilson, contemporary art collectors and preservationists who wanted to create an immersive art experience in Louisville, the location of the original hotel.

With locations in the Wynwood district of Miami and Caracas, Venezuela, Ascaso Gallery primarily showcases the works of both new and established Venezuelan and Latin American artists. Over its 30 years in operation, the gallery has shown the works of Jesús Rafael Soto, Carlos Cruz-Diez, and Julio Larraz, as well as Salvador Dalí, Jeff Koons, and Henry Moore, among others. On view at the gallery through April 2022 is a group show titled “Cute Tunes for Serious Sapiens,” featuring Javier Martin, Masako Miki, Noritoshi Mitsuuchi, and Takeru Amano. The exhibition playfully evokes the inner child using pop- and manga-inspired visuals and includes a variety of paintings, sculptures, and multimedia pieces.

This story originally appeared on Giggster and was produced and distributed in partnership with Stacker Studio.

Ask anyone to name a famous artist and you’ll probably hear the same names repeated over and over again: Da Vinci, Picasso, Monet, Degas … the list goes on and on. What you’re not likely to hear? A woman’s name.

This is despite the fact that women make up more than 50% of currently working visual artists. Like every other field, there’s a gender gap—and certainly a pay gap—in the world of fine arts. Women aren’t given the recognition their work commands and often find their work relegated to backrooms and secondary galleries rather than hung alongside the art of their male counterparts. Art museums and galleries have begun to realize the problem, and many are actively working to correct it, but change doesn’t happen overnight. Many female artists are still unknown despite creating literal industry-changing masterpieces.

Stacker has compiled a list of 25 female artists from the 20th century you should know. Using art encyclopedias and museum websites, it has curated a list of women who have influenced the art world in a number of ways. From creating new styles, like abstract art, to inspiring political movements, like the Black Women’s Movement, these powerful ladies are every bit as talented and important as the men with whom they share gallery space.

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One of the most important painters of her generation, Agnes Martin was an abstract artist who created minimalistic paintings driven by her transcendentalist and Buddhist beliefs. Moving to the United States from Canada at a young age, she spent the rest of her life flitting between New Mexico and New York, occasionally disappearing completely from the art scene before returning with a slightly shifted style. In 2004, she died in New Mexico.

[Pictured: Agnes Martin's ‘Friendship’ is on display during a press preview of MoMA’s first ever Fall Reveal at Museum of Modern Art on Nov. 13, 2020 in New York City.]

Through her sculptures, Augusta Savage transformed everyday moments in the lives of Black Americans into high art. A key figure of the Harlem Renaissance, Savage trained in Paris before returning to New York City, where she transformed her studio into a community art center; gave free lessons—other notable artists like Jacob Lawrence were students; and created commissioned projects like “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” which was made for the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Savage died in New York in 1962. She said that she preferred her legacy to be the artwork of the children she taught rather than anything she made with her own hands.

[Pictured: Augusta Savage viewing two of her sculptures in 1937.]

Collagist Barbara Kruger got her start working in the design department at Condé Nast’s Mademoiselle magazine. In the mid-1970s, she began producing large-scale pieces that mixed found photographs with pithy sayings written in Futura Bold typeface, criticizing several cultural constructs like power, identity, gender, and sexuality. The artist splits her time between New York City and Los Angeles, and while she still occasionally produces new work, these days much of her energy is focused on teaching and writing.

[Pictured: A photographic silkscreen print by Barbara Kruger titled ‘I Shop Therefore I Am’ at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden on the National Mall in Washington D.C. in 2018.]

Political activist Angela Davis once credited Betye Saar’s work with launching the Black Women’s Movement. Saar primarily works in assemblage—though she’s an accomplished printmaker as well—challenging the stereotypes that exist around the intersection of race and femininity. Her most famous piece is titled “The Liberation of Aunt Jemima.” She currently lives in Los Angeles, and, despite her advanced age of 95, says she’s not yet done working.

[Pictured: Art work by Betye Saar is displayed at the Take A Stand Center at the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center on Oct. 26, 2017, in Skokie, Illinois.]

A figurehead of the Op Art movement, Bridget Riley has made some of the best-known optical illusion paintings in existence today. Her work combines clean lines, geometric precision, and color theory to create canvases and murals that attract, soothe, and confuse the viewer’s eye. Now in her 90s, Riley resides in London, where she enjoys semi-retirement.

[Pictured: Artist Bridget Riley in 1963.]

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Documentary photography as we know it today wouldn’t exist without the work and influence of Dorothea Lange, a Depression-era photojournalist who is best known for her piercing and emotional photographs of migrant workers and families. Her photographs, while incredibly intimate, manage to tell universal stories of struggle and pain, which imbibe them with a timeless quality. Lange died of esophageal cancer in 1965, months before a retrospective of her work debuted at the Museum of Modern Art.

[Pictured: Dorothea Lange in 1936 in California.]

Finding her footing in the art world at the close of the 20th century, Ellen Gallagher comments on issues of race and gender through her multimedia work. In particular, she points out how these two issues have long been suppressed and invalidated by the media, and how this has shaped American history. Only in her mid-50s, Gallagher works and lives in both New York City and Rotterdam, Netherlands.

[Pictured: Works by Ellen Gallagher at the Kunstforum Palais Populaire in Berlin, Germany on Sept. 27, 2018.]

Although her career only lasted for a decade, sculptor Eva Hesse certainly made her mark on the art world, ushering in the post-minimal art movement in the ’60s. Her pieces are typically made of found materials like latex, fiberglass, plastic, and string, and often address women’s issues, albeit in an apolitical way. The Jewish artist fled Germany as a child during the rise of Nazism and died in 1970 in her adopted hometown of New York City at age 34 of a brain tumor.

[Pictured: Sculptures by German-born artist Eva Hesse at the exhibition "Arrows and Boxes, Repeated" at the Craig F. Starr Gallery in New York in 2018.]

Surrealist painter Frida Kahlo is one of the few female artists to be known worldwide. Of the 200 works she produced, many are self-portraits, or are at least autobiographical, and explore questions of gender, identity, class, and race. In 1954—after suffering from ill-health for years following a bus accident in 1925—Kahlo died either from a pulmonary embolism, as was publicly reported, or from suicide, which has long been believed to be her real cause of death.

[Pictured: Frida Kahlo with self portrait entitled “Me Twice” on Oct. 24, 1939.]

What do flowers, New York City skyscrapers, and New Mexico landscapes all have in common? They’re the most common subjects of Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings. Often called “the mother of American modernism,” O’Keeffe literally changed the landscape of American art over the course of her 80-year career. In 1986, at the age of 98, she died in Sante Fe, New Mexico.

[Pictured: Georgia O’Keefe stands at an easel outdoors, adjusting a canvas from her 'Pelvis Series- Red With Yellow,' Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1960.]

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When she died in 2011, Helen Frankenthaler’s obituary read that she had helped shape a movement. It wasn’t an exaggeration. An abstract expressionist, Frankenthaler produced consistently evolving works for over six decades, though her most notable works are in the color field style, which she essentially invented.

[Pictured: Abstract expressionist artist Helen Frankenthaler at work on a large piece, 1969.]

Considered an originator of abstract art, Hilma af Klint was painting in the nonrepresentative manner years before her male counterparts, like Piet Mondarin and Wassily Kandinsky, made it universally known. Born in Sweden in 1862, af Klint was obsessed with spiritism, and, for at least 10 years, regularly led a group of female artists in seances attempting to contact “the High Masters.” Her work can best be understood through this lens—as a way to explore and represent complex spiritual ideas. In 1944, she died as a result of a traffic accident, having only exhibited her work a handful of times.

[Pictured: Hilma Af Klint Exhibition At Serpentine Gallery on March 2, 2016 in London, England.]

Best categorized as a neo-conceptual artist, Jenny Holzer makes large text-based works such as posters, electronic signs, and engraved marble benches. A part of the feminist art movement and a member of the artists’ group Collaborative Projects, Holzer has participated in a number of renegade art shows, like the famous Times Square Show, that aim to democratize art. She currently lives and works in New York, though her output has slowed dramatically in recent years.

[Pictured: Artist Jenny Holzer standing in front of her installation at the Guggenheim Museum in New York January 1990.]

In the latter half of the 20th century, the New York School of artists turned out a number of important and influential visual creators. Among them was Joan Mitchell. An abstract expressionist, Mitchell once said that her colorful work, “My paintings repeat a feeling about Lake Michigan, or water, or fields … It’s more like a poem … and that’s what I want to paint.” One of the few famous female artists of her era and in her genre, Mitchell died of lung cancer in Paris in 1992.

[Pictured: The painting 'Edrita Fried 1981' by Joan Mitchell hangs in the exhibition 'Joan Mitchell. Retrospective. Her Life and Paintings.' in the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany, November 2015.]

Founder of the first feminist art program in the United States, Judy Chicago uses her large installations to spark conversations about gender politics and women’s place in society. Her multimedia works are often collaborative—her most famous piece, “The Dinner Party,” was made with the help of 100 volunteers—and are typically images of birth or creation. She currently resides in New Mexico and continues to work alongside her husband Donald Woodman.

[Pictured: Detail of "The Dinner Party" (1979) by American artist Judy Chicago, in 2007, in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum in New York.]

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Family, childhood, and true love are the major themes that inspire June Leaf’s drawings, paintings, and sculptures. An abstract artist, her works are often allegorical in nature and feature a recurring cast of characters that have been in development since the 1950s. Leaf was a member of the Monster Roster, a group of 1940s Chicago artists. She also spent years working and studying in Paris, before settling in New York City and then Nova Scotia, where she remains today.

[Pictured: Sculptor June Leaf and photographer Robert Frank attend an opening at The Tisch Galleries on Jan. 28, 2016 in New York City.]

Surreal is the best word to describe Leonora Carrington’s work. One of the last members of the surrealist movement, and one of the few women ever seriously involved in it, the Mexican-British artist primarily painted narrative landscapes. In 2011, she died of complications from pneumonia in Mexico.

[Pictured: "El gato" by Leonora Carrington is on display during a preview of Christie's Latin American Art auctions, May 24, 2010 in New York. ]

French-American artist Louise Bourgeois doesn’t fit cleanly into any specific category. Best known for her oversized sculptures and installations—like the 8-meter spider “Maman”—she also produced paintings and prints that encompass the genres of abstract expressionism, surrealism, and feminist art. In 2010, she died of heart failure in New York City.

[Pictured: "Maman" pictured in Hamburg, Germany in March 2012.]

When Marlene Dumas sold her painting “The Visitor” for $4.2 million in 2015 she broke the record for most expensive work sold by a living artist. Her work, which consists primarily of portraits, is a study in duality—an extension of her own reality of being a South African artist living in the Netherlands—and of what it means to live in our physical bodies. Still active, Dumas lives in Amsterdam.

[Pictured: On display at the Institute Of Contemporary Art in Boston, “One Hundred Models” by Marlene Dumas, 1994. ]

An integral part of the avant-garde movement, Natalia Goncharova developed a new form of abstract painting called rayonism in 1912. The following year, she became the first woman in her native country of Russia to have a full-scale retrospective, which featured more than 700 works of art in styles ranging from cubism to abstract to folk art. A truly radical artist—her shows were frequently raided by police for so-called pornographic images and anti-religious works— she died in Paris in 1962, suffering from severe arthritis and completely impoverished.

[Pictured: Natalia Goncharova (1881-1962), Russian painter, sculptor and decorator, in her Parisian studio circa 1920.]

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For the past seven decades, Paula Rego, an often underrated British-Portuguese artist, has created a body of work based on fairy tales and folk stories. Despite their seemingly sweet subject matter, the paintings carry some serious weight, relaying timely political messages and conveying heavier emotions like rage and pain. Now in her mid-80s, Rego lives in London, and though she is too frail to paint, she was able to enjoy a retrospective of her work that went up at the Tate Museum in early 2021.

[Pictured: The U.K.'s largest ever retrospective dedicated to Portuguese visual artist Paula Rego at the Tate Britain opens on July 5, 2021 in London, England.]

The “baroness with a paintbrush,” Tamara de Lempicka was a Polish artist who is known for her portraits of the era’s elite. Her pictures, which are done in a blend of cubism and neoclassical styles, ooze with sensuality and are, to this day, incredibly chic. Over the years, many of them have been reproduced in fashion magazines such as Harper’s Bazaar. She fled Europe for the United States just before the start of World War II. In 1980, de Lempicka died in Mexico.

[Pictured: Tamara de Lempicka at her easel.]

The New York Times said it best when it called Vija Celmins’ work “precise, painstakingly wrought illusions of reality.” Her graphite and paper drawings of nature—including the ocean, the night sky, spiderwebs, and rocks—are highly detailed, photorealistic works that are almost overwhelming in scope, forcing the viewer to really slow down and patiently take them in. Born in Latvia, Celmins now resides in New York and remains active.

[Pictured: Artist Vija Celmins with her work in an exhibition at the Hammer Museum in West LA in January 2007.]

Once the center of New York City’s avant-garde and pop art scenes, Yayoi Kusama is best known for her use of polka dots and her intense, large-scale environments. Born in Japan, Kusama spent her most productive years in the United States, where she used everything from the naked human body to the inside of a room as canvases. In the early ’70s, Kusama returned to her home country, where she has voluntarily lived in a psychiatric hospital for the past four decades, withdrawing almost completely from society even as her installations and shows have become increasingly popular due to social media apps.

[Pictured: Yayoi Kusama beside her 2016 production titled "Flowers that Bloom Tomorrow" at her exhibition titled "My Eternal Soul" at the National Art Center in Tokyo on Feb. 21, 2017.]

Yoko Ono’s art, whether performance or visual, acts as a two-way mirror, throwing the viewers’ reactions back at them and revealing some deep inner truths about her audience. Involved in New York’s avant-garde scene, she both collaborated with other artists and created pieces of her own, like her famous 1964 “Cut Piece,” hoping to unsettle and inspire those who engaged with it. Now in her late 80s and in failing health, Ono still lives in New York City in the Dakota apartment she once famously shared with her husband John Lennon.

[Pictured: Artist and singer Yoko Ono photographed in London 1967.]

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