Playwright, professor, and Performance artist Anna Deveare Smith grounds her avant-garde theater in the infinitely strange world of reality. "I look for the poem that the person is," Smith says of the real-people inspirations for her dramatic characters. Instead of creating intricate backgrounds for
The father of Impressionism was introduced by his first instructor, Eugene Boudin, a local Normandy artist, to the unusual practice of carrying paints and canvas into the open air. This experience of working directly from the observation of nature set the young Monet on a course he followed for th
Man Ray was born Emmanuel Radnitsky, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants who had settled in Philadelphia. In his early twenties he changed his name -- after years of being taunted because of its foreign sound. Ray's talents were obvious even in childhood. He was skilled at building, repairing, in
"I divide my work into two categories, B.C. and A.D., before computers, after digital." So states Lynn Hershman, one of the most celebrated artists working in interactive media technologies; her digital art is so interactive that it requires participants, not viewers. Hershman explores the invasion