Nicholas Knight

John Coleman

Hans Makart

Gustav Klimt

M.C. Escher

Salvador Dali

David Opdyke

Eero Saarinen

Jeff Soto

Dale Chihuly

Tim Hawkinson

Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama. I call her the crazy dot lady. She is an 80 year old Japanese female artist that has struggled with mental illness. In her dreams she sees circles, dots, blobs that she calls an "infinity net". She has had installations where the entire room is covered in dots. She paints dots. I got to see her work in the Kennedy Center in DC and in the Phoenix Art Museum. She set up mirrors and LEDs in a dark room to create an illusionary depth of starry space. It made me dizzy. She was quoted as saying, "If it weren't for art, I would have killed myself long ago."

Tara Donovan

Hieronymus Bosch

William Blake

Emperor Norton I

The self-proclaimed Emperor of the United States of America and Protector of Mexico was Norton's official title.

Walton Ford

Do Hoh Suh

Takashi Murakami

Folkert de Jong

Jonathon Keats

Executive director of the International Association for Divine Taxonomy. Yep, this guy is a conceptual artist. He created the first pornographic theater for plants showing videos of pollen. He copyrighted his mind in 2003, claiming that the statement, "Je pense, donc je suis." is proven in that he owns the right to his mind 70 years after he dies. Oh, it gets better! He erected a temple for the religion of science called the Atheon. He re-calibrated time from the Metric System to a human's heartbeat. He created new universes through a process that made use of readily-available equipment including uranium-doped glass and scintillating crystal, all acquired on eBay. After building several prototypes, Keats manufactured a simple do-it-yourself kit that purported to let anyone create new universes with a mason jar, a drinking straw, and a piece of chewing gum. He choreographed a ballet for bumble bees by selectively planting flowers. Keats is most famous for attempting to genetically engineer God in a laboratory, a 2004 collaboration with geneticists at UC Berkeley. He did so in order to determine scientifically where to place God as a species on the phylogenetic tree. In interviews with journalists, he indicated that his initial results showed a close taxonomic relationship to cyanobacteria. Radical: I'm voting yes.

Martin Puryear

Martin Puryear creates unusually shaped forms with near perfect craftsmanship primarily using wood and metal screening. He plays with perspective and scale, adding to the allure of his solid works. Geometric and organic shapes are bound together in rigid obedience. Timid trees lose their pith. I'm at a loss for words. Time stops.

Asher B. Durand

Asher Durand was trained as an engraver and gained notoriety for his engraving of John Trumbull's "Signing of the Declaration of Independence". After going on a trip with Thomas Cole to the White Mountains, Cole convinced Durand to switch to oil painting. Durand became the leader of the Hudson River School of Transcendentalist painters after Cole died. "Kindred Spirits" was painted for a friend of Cole's and features the two of them in altered landscape with features from the Catskill mountains. Durand's landscapes glorified the relationship between nature and God. He even when on backpacking trips with an easel and painted outside, which was a feat in the mid-1800s. The detail in his paintings is meticulously rendered to create a wonderful likeness of foliage.

Sigalit Landau

Sigalit Landau is an Israeli sculptor and performance artist. She effectively shows the gruesome horrors of punishment and torture of the Jewish people through her work. There is a video of her naked in which she is hula-hooping with a circle of barbed wire that maims her skin. She sculpts skinless people of twisted muscle and bone who seek suicide. And yet, she amazes with the simple beauty of her other works. A photo of her swimming naked in a spiral of watermelons. Barbed wire and a whole motorcycle covered in salt crystals. Sweet or bitter, they are powerful images nonetheless.

Matthew Barney

Matthew Barney is a sculptor who has created several video series of his work. The Cremaster Cycle is his most famous series, consisting of five parts that are all based on the idea of the ascension and descent of the cremaster muscle that holds the testes. He plays the main character known as The Apprentice. In the part that I watched, called The Order, The Apprentice seeks to climb the floors of the Guggenheim museum and encounters the following: sheep doing the can-can, two bands moshing, a woman that turns into a cat, and Richard Serra slopping hot petroleum jelly onto a metal plate. The heated jelly slowly flows down the spiraling walkway of the museum.

Barney has also been interested in baking large volumes of petroleum jelly.

He is married to Bjork, the Icelandic avant-garde singer. They worked together on a project called Drawing Restraint. The idea was to overcome an obstacle in order to complete a drawing, becoming stronger in the process. This was supposed to mirror how a muscle is torn under strain and then heals back stronger than before. They have a child named Isadora.