american folk art
Ammi Phillips was a prolific American itinerant portrait painter active from the mid 1810s to the early 1860s in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York. His artwork is identified as folk art, primitive art, provincial art, and itinerant art without consensus among scholars, pointing to the enigmatic nature of his work and life. He is attributed to over eight hundred paintings, although only eleven are signed. While his paintings are formulaic in nature, Phillips paintings were under constant construction, evolving as he added or discarded what he found successful, while taking care to add personal details that spoke to the identity of those who hired him. He is most famous for his portraits of children in red, although children only account for ten percent of his entire body of work. The most well known of this series, Girl in Red Dress with Cat and Dog, would be sold for one million dollars, a first for folk art. His paintings hung mostly unidentified, spare for some recognition in the collections like those of Edward Duff Balken, for decades until his oeuvre was reconstructed by Barbara Holdridge and Larry Holdridge, collectors and students of American folk art, with the support of the art historian Mary Black. Ammi Phillip's body of work was expanded upon their discovery that the mysterious paintings of a "Kent Limner" and "Border Limner" were indeed his.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was an American politician and statesman, the 32nd President of the United States (1932-1945).
Franklin was educated at Harvard University and Columbia Law School. His cousin was President Theodore Roosevelt, and Franklin also went into public service, but as a Democrat. He was elected to the New York Senate in 1910, President Wilson appointed him Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and Roosevelt became Governor of New York in 1928.
In November 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected president of the United States. Taking office in the midst of the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt, with his "Hundred Days" and "New Deal" programs, helped the American people regain faith in themselves. In 1936, he was re-elected by a large margin. During this difficult political period, he sought through neutrality legislation to keep the U.S. out of the war in Europe, but at the same time to strengthen countries that were threatened or attacked. Japan's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, drew the country into the war.
In 1944, as Hitler's Germany was nearing its collapse, an ailing Roosevelt managed to win the presidency again. The following February, he met with Churchill and Stalin at the famous Yalta Conference. His health was deteriorating, and on April 12, 1945, Franklin Roosevelt died of a cerebral hemorrhage. He was the only U.S. president to be elected to office four times. Roosevelt successfully led the United States through two of the greatest crises of the 20th century: the Great Depression and World War II.
Clementine Hunter was a self-taught Black folk artist from the Cane River region of Louisiana, who lived and worked on Melrose Plantation.
James Peale was an American painter, best known for his miniature and still life paintings.
Sister Gertrude Morgan was a self-taught African-American artist, musician, poet and preacher. Sister Morgan achieved critical acclaim during her lifetime for her folk art paintings. Her work has been included in many groundbreaking exhibitions of visionary and folk art from the 1970s onwards.
Similar to other self-taught artists, Sister Morgan used simple forms to depict the human figure. Her works are characterized by their lack of the use of formal techniques such as perspective and definition of light and shadow, giving them a flat, two dimensional quality. She painted and drew using acrylics, tempera, ballpoint pen, watercolors, crayon, colored and lead pencils and felt tip markers. Using inexpensive materials she had at hand, Sister Morgan painted on paper, toilet rolls, plastic pitchers, paper megaphones, scrap wood, lampshades, paper fans and styrofoam trays. The fact that she was self-taught, coupled with her choice of materials as well as her style and subject matter have led her to be characterized as a naive, folk, visionary, vernacular and outsider artist.