Paul Zweig

A poet, critic and memoirist, Zweig was admired by his friends and the literary circles around him, but remains in wider obscurity to this day. Zweig was an obsessive study of culture, peoples and moods. Cross pollination is clear in Zweig’s work, his techniques as a memoirist clear across his poetry. A careful and astute eye, self-possessed and self-aware, he wrote as if with a magnifying glass, looking at the offhand nature of the world and reading the truth from it. While he looked outwards, he found himself everywhere. He journeyed deeper into the self with each evocative work.

Jack Spicer

Spicer saw the poet as a radio, intercepting transmissions from outer space. Language was furniture, through which information navigated. He was a radical, both in his literary style and in his life, defying every convention at every turn. Refusing to allow his work to be copyrighted, Spicer ran a workshop called ‘Poetry as Magic’, and for him the statement was true. Poetry was a means to experience and translate the unexplainable, and had to be freely available for those who searched for truth. Spicer died penniless and with only small acclaim, like so many poets before and after him, but the ideas he laid out in his work have gone on to influence thousands of poets after him.

Amiri Baraka

Amiri Baraka was many things, and many things to many people. The most significant black poet of his generation, Baraka also is considered the founder of the Black Arts Movement and the Second Harlem Renaissance. Baraka wanted poetry, literature and art to be a legitimate product of experience. In doing so, he could hold a mirror up to a world in desperate need of self reflection. He was as fearless in his writing as he was in his activism, and he had a clear vision. The BAM became an aesthetic and spiritual sister of Black Power and Baraka’s voice was the most poignant, cutting and profound.

EDGAR DEGAS

Combining fragility with experimentation, Degas tried to match the mediums of depiction with the subjects themselves. From the view of the orchestra pit, our sightline obscured by the curving, almost sensual necks of the double basses, we see dancers in rehearsal. They lean and whisper, observing the prima ballerina as she stand en pointe, and we become voyeurs to unfinished artistry, and the process of alchemy through which movements of bodies becomes transformative art. To capture this, Degas used a most unusual technique. First, he created a monotype print - painting directly onto a smooth plate of glass and then transferring the image to paper through a press, creating an unrepeatable printed image. Atop the monotype, he used a fine pastel to add color, detail, and texture, the powdery medium resting atop the printed image to create a sense of ethereality that matches the dancers. The technique is wildly experimental, matching the traditional material of pastel with the rarely used, more modern monotype print to create a work that is, at every level of its creation, about the strange, magical alchemy that can happen on stage, or on paper, to produce art.

HAROLD EDGERTON

Solid lead is heated until molten, poured through a copper sieve and allowed to fall down the length of a tower. The surface tension experienced in its decline forces the fragments into perfect spheres which are caught and called by a pool of water, and the lead shots go on to be used as projectiles for shotguns, ballasts, and shields for radiation. The process is beautiful in its simplicity, rigorously scientific in development and yet wildly raw, almost naive in its process yet to watch it with the human eye would be to see little but a wall of falling heat. It took Harold Edgerton, the man who stopped time as he became known, to demystify the process and turn it into aesthetic beauty. Edgerton developed stroboscope, and with it the entire field of high-speed photography. Where the camera had long been used as a way to capture the world around us, Edgerton used it as a scientific instrument to reveal the unseeable. Edgerton, using strobe lights and high sensitive film, turns a process that harnesses nature for violent ends into something ethereal, sublime, and deeply human.

FEDERICO CASTELLÓN

A self-taught artist and young prodigy, Castellón moved from his native Spain to Brooklyn, New York with his family at the age of seven. He was, even at this age, a gifted draughtsman and sketched relentlessly, and he spent his childhood taking advantage of the new city he lived in by visiting museums and exhibitions constantly. By the time he was a teenager, Castellón’s inspirations ranged from the Old Masters at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the burgeoning, contemporary Surrealist scene he had witnessed at small galleries. Before he had even graduated high school, he had caught the attention of Diego Rivera, who by this point was internationally acclaimed with public murals across the country. It was with Rivera’s help that Castellón travelled across Europe in his early twenties, taking in the emerging avant-garde and, on his return to New York, laid his claim as the very first American Surrealist. His etchings and sketches circulated the country and contributed to the rise of one of the most consequential movements of the century.