S. Patricia Benson is Maine-based printmaker that has work included in several private and public collections throughout the United States, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She uses American symbols to portray the discrimination that Native Americans face. The oppression and experiences of Native Americans are displayed as somber portraits in much of her work.
Janice Hartwell was raised in the northeast of the United States, where she received her BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and her MFA from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She taught at Florida State University from 1969-2007 and became Professor Emerita. She works mainly in two-dimensional art and printmaking focusing on women’s issues.
Käthe Kollwitz was a German artist born in 1867 that has achieved international success. Her work comments on the representation of women and the working class. She worked in many mediums such as painting and sculpture, but she is most well known for her lithographs and woodcuts. These center on themes of mourning, loss, and death, which stems from losing her son in World War I and her experiences living through both world wars. She explored these realities of life in her self-portraits and portraits of women, particularly mothers.
Sheila Metzner attended the Pratt Institute where she studied as an Visual Communications student and began her artistic career as the first female art director at Doyle Dane Bernbach advertising agency. Her work as a photographer lead her to be exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art’s Mirrors and Windows: American Photography which brought large commercial clients such as Valentino and Ralph Lauren. She currently has fine art photographs in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Brooklyn Museum, and The Art Institute of Chicago.
Mary O. Scott is an American artist who has a number of works within Florida State University’s Museum of Fine Arts permanent collection and has an artistic practice that stretches to the 60’s. The subject matter of her works typically surrounds themes of nature combined with the female form, creating works that exhibit ideas of mother Earth. Her works Flower Children and Nymph by the Waterfall are great examples of Scott’s ability to reach these ideas in the soft medium of a drypoint etching.
Eva Sonneman works as a contemporary artist in areas of photography, paint, abstraction, and watercolor. She made her debut as an artist at the launch in the Young Photographers exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (1971). Since her debut, she has exhibited internationally, for instance in the 1977 Documenta and biennales of Venice, Paris, and several others. Sonneman is now represented in the permanent collections of multiple large institutions including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Adriene Veninger is inspired by themes of the natural world through the visual arts including photography and painting. Her works, which exhibit themes of flora and fauna, have been exhibited internationally including multiple solo exhibitions in Canada, Japan, and Slovakia.
Melanie Walker has an expertise in photographic processes, digital and mixed media, large scale photographic installations, and public art. She earned her BFA from San Francisco University, her MFA at Florida State University, and has been a practicing artist for more than 50 years. Over recent years, Walker’s work had involved public art and a mixed media approach to photography while collaborating with other artists on public art projects in Colorado, Arizona, London, Florida, Alaska, and California.
Ruth Weisberg works predominantly in painting, drawing, printmaking, and large scale installations. She is mostly known for her paintings reflecting upon the cycle of life as she engages in topics of generations, preservation, extinction, and survival. Her ambition as an artist shows through her large scale projects and is included in the permanent collections of over sixty museums nationally and internationally.