A-Z: Wangechi Mutu

Wangechi Mutu (born 22 June 1972 in Nairobi, Kenya) is an artist and sculptor who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Mutu is considered by many to be one of the most important contemporary African artists of recent years, and her work has achieved much global acclaim.^[1]While Mutu employs a variety of mediums including video, installation, and sculpture, she is best known for her large-scale collages on pieces of Mylar.^[7] Mutu's works often make the female body central, and confront the viewer with "plant-like or animal-like elements and intertwined abstract patterns"^[8] that merge the organic and the surreal with human forms. These hybrid creatures have bodies made of a combination of machine, animal, human and monster parts. Mutu constructs these warrior-like females out of magazine cutouts, sculpted and painted surfaces, and found materials.The sources her collage images range from a variety of media, including commercial fashion and lifestyle pornography, and automobile and motorcycle magazines.

A-Z: Vivienne Westwood

Dame Vivienne Westwood, DBE, RDI (born Vivienne Isabel Swire on 8 April 1941) is an English fashion designer and businesswoman, largely responsible for bringing modern punk and new wave fashions into the mainstream.^[1]
Westwood came to public notice when she made clothes for Malcolm McLaren's boutique in the King's Road, which became famous as "SEX". It was their ability to synthesise clothing and music that shaped the 1970s UK punk scene, dominated by McLaren's band, the Sex Pistols. She was deeply inspired by the shock-value of punk - "seeing if one could put a spoke in the system".Westwood was one of the architects of the punk fashion phenomenon of the 1970s, saying "I was messianic about punk, seeing if one could put a spoke in the system in some way".^[6] The "punk style" included BDSM fashion, bondage gear, safety pins, razor blades, bicycle or lavatory chains on clothing and spiked dog collars for jewellery, as well as outrageous make-up and hair. Essential design elements include the adoption of traditional elements of Scottish design such as tartan fabric. Among the more unusual elements of her style is the use of historical 17th- and 18th-century cloth-cutting principles, and reinterpreting these in, for instance, radical cutting lines to men's trousers. Use of these traditional elements make the overall effect of her designs more "shocking".

A-Z: Tacita Dean

Tacita Charlotte Dean OBE (born 1965) is an English visual artist who works primarily in film. She is one of the Young British Artists, and was a nominee for the Turner Prize in 1998.^[1] She lives and works in Berlin.^[2]In 2001 Dean published Floh, a book in two parts that featured found photographs from the flea markets of Europe and America.^[25] Dean said of Floh: "I do not want to give these images explanations: descriptions by the finder about how and where they were found, or guesses as to what stories they might or might not tell. I want them to keep the silence of the fleamarket; the silence they had when I found them; the silence of the lost object."^[25] Similarly, in 2002 Dean created Czech Photos (1991-2002), a series of over 326 unedited photographs presented in a box for intimate engagement. The black and white photographs show a city in the moments before radical change, already somehow out of date the second they were taken.^[26] Washington Cathedral (2002) is a series of more than 130 found postcards from the first half of the last century showing various imagined versions of the cathedral in Washington, DC before it was completed. Palindrome is a newspaper project celebrating the palindromic date 20.02 2002, which was inspired by numbers painted by Marcel Broodthaers's on a beam in his studio. In 2005, Dean began work on a series of found postcards featuring trees, which she transformed by painting out all the background detail with white gouache.

A-Z: Susan Hiller

Susan Hiller (born 1940) is an American-born artist who lives in London, UK. Her art practice includes installation, video, photography, performance and writing.Beginning her artistic practice in the early 1970s, Hiller was influenced by the visual language of Minimalism and Conceptual art^[4] and now cites Minimalism, Fluxus, Surrealism and her study of anthropology as major influences on her work.^[5]

A-Z: Miss Van

1. Miss Van also known as Vanessa Castex was born in 1973 in Toulouse, France. She is considered to be one of the most renound people in the graffiti art scene. Miss Van started out by painting on the streets of her home town of toulouse when she was just 18 years old. One of her most famous graffiti pieces is the Sloe-eyed women who is covering a varriety of female form expressing numberours emotions. Miss Vans art work has provoked a widley negative reaction from some feminist groups due to how she has portrayed the women in her art work. Miss Van has recieved a lot of back lask over the years for her painting of the Sloe-Eyed Women even though the reasoning behind these paintings are much more personal than people understand and relise. Miss Van is one of the pioneers of the original Graffiti forms within France that was born in 1993. Although Miss Van has gained the most notority for her work worldwide she is just once facet of a thriving ever growing graffiti scene in her home town Toulouse. Miss Vans work has been displayed in numerous gallaries across the world including gallaries across Europe and America. Miss van has recentlety relocated to Barcelona in Spain where she has started work on designing prints for the new Fornarina collection and started to work on her first book.

I really admire admire her work because of the quirkyness of it. also i really like the colours she used, theyre dull but colourfull at the sametime time becuase of the way she uses brown and vibrant colours at the same time.

A-Z: Lisa Milroy

Lisa Milroy RA (born 19 January 1959 in Vancouver, British Columbia)^[1] is an Anglo-Canadian artist known for her still life paintings of everyday objects placed in lines or patterns. She has also produced a number of different series including landscapes, buildings, portraits and geishas in incongruous settings.^[1]
In 1977, aged 18, she went to Paris to study at the Paris-Sorbonne University.^[2] In 1978 she moved to London to study at Saint Martin's School of Art. However, in early 1979, she transferred to Goldsmiths College, then transferring again, later in the year, to the University of London, staying there until 1982.^[2] Her first solo exhibition was in 1984 which was mostly based on still life. In 1989 she won the John Moores Painting Prize.^[3] Milroy is currently Head of Graduate Painting at the Slade School of Fine Art, London.^[4] She gained election to membership of the Royal Academy of Arts in 2005 and was appointed a Trustee of the Tate Gallery in 2013.<sup>[5]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Milroy</sup>

A-Z: Kiki Smith

  Kiki Smith is a German American artist. Her work includes themes of birth and regeneration. Her figurative work of the late 1980s and early 1990s didn’t work with the cultural opinion on bodily functions. Early on in her career, her pieces looked at subjects such as AIDS, gender and race, while recent works have depicted the human condition in relationship to nature. Smith was an active member of the artists' group Colab in the late 1970s and early 1980s. She works in media including sculpture, printmaking, drawing and jewellery. She has developed a unique lineage of mythological imagery over her 40 years as an artist.

A-Z: Jenny Holzer

Jenny Holzer is well known for her large-scale displays in public places such as billboards and projections on buildings and other structures. She mainly use text to show ideas in public places. Originally utilizing street posters, LED signs became her most visible medium, though her diverse practice incorporates a wide array of media including bronze plaques, painted signs, stone benches and footstools, stickers, T-shirts, paintings, photographs, sound, video, light projection, the Internet, and a Le Mans race car.v