WElizabeth Broun was the director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Renwick Gallery in Washington, D.C. for 27 years, from 1989 until December 2016. At the time of her retirement, she set the record as the second longest–serving Smithsonian museum director, after Spencer Fullerton Baird, and as the longest-serving female museum director in Smithsonian history.
WJustin Bua is an artist, author, speaker and entrepreneur. He currently lives in Los Angeles and is best known for his lyrical narrative paintings of musicians, DJs and similar characters who help define the urban landscape. As an artist "for the people, by the people, of the people," BUA's fan base is diverse and ranges from former presidents, actors, musicians, professional athletes, dancers, to street kids and art connoisseurs.
WSharon Butler is an American artist and arts writer. She is known for teasing out ideas about contemporary abstraction in her art and writing, particularly a style she called "new casualism" in a 2011 essay. Butler uses process as metaphor and has said in artist's talks that she is keenly interested in creating paintings as documentation of her life. In a 2014 review in the Washington Post, art critic Michael Sullivan wrote that Butler "creates sketchy, thinly painted washes that hover between representation and abstraction.Though boasting such mechanistic titles as 'Tower Vents' and 'Turbine Study,' Butler’s dreamlike renderings, which use tape to only suggest the roughest outlines of architectural forms, feel like bittersweet homages to urban decay." Critic Thomas Micchelli proposed that Butler's work shares "Rauschenberg’s dissolution of the barriers between painting and sculpture," particularly where the canvases are "stapled almost willy-nilly to the front of the stretcher bars, which are visible along the edges of some of the works." Since 2016, her canvases have been based on small daily drawings that she made each day (2016-2020) in a phone app and posted on Instagram. In a 2018 conversation about the process of making paintings from these diminutive digital images, she said that the sense of surface and touch are inherent to a painting must be invented in the digital space. The images are never what they seem, especially when viewed on the phone."
WLovell Birge Harrison was an American genre and landscape painter, teacher, and writer. He was a prominent practitioner and advocate of Tonalism.
WEleanor Jones Harvey is a senior curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
WEstelle May Hurll (1863–1924), a student of aesthetics, wrote a series of popular aesthetic analyses of art in the early twentieth century.
WWilliam Bryan "Bill" Jordan Jr. was an American art historian and one of the foremost experts on Spanish paintings. His work was focused primarily on bodegóns—a still life depicting pantry items—and paintings from the first half of the 17th century, especially by Juan van der Hamen. He organized exhibitions and catalogs at museums and art institutes worldwide. His research and books expanded upon the knowledge of the works and lives of many artists. Jordan worked as an art expert and helped individuals and institutions to acquire various paintings.
WMary Lawrence was an American actress, who had a lengthy career in film and television.
WShantrelle Patrice Lewis is a curator, scholar, critic and filmmaker. She is a 2012 Andy Warhol Curatorial Fellow and a 2014 United Nations Programme for People of African Descent Fellow.
WElizabeth McCausland (1899–1965) was an American art critic, historian and writer.
WJohn Montroll is an American origami artist, author, teacher, and mathematician. He has written many books on origami. Montroll has taught at St. Anselm's Abbey School in Washington, D.C. since 1990.
WJohn Neal was an American writer, critic, editor, lecturer, and activist. Considered both eccentric and influential, he delivered speeches and published essays, novels, poems, and short stories between the 1810s and 1870s in the United States and Great Britain, championing American literary nationalism and regionalism in their earliest stages. Neal advanced the development of American art, fought for women's rights, advocated the end of slavery and racial prejudice, and helped establish the American gymnastics movement.
WVincent Leonard Price Jr. was an American actor best known for his performances in horror films, although his career spanned other genres. He appeared on stage, television, and radio, and in more than 100 films. He has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, one for motion pictures and one for television.
WAlma Marie Sullivan Reed (1889–1966) was a US journalist. While working in Mexico in the 1920s, she fell in love with the governor of Yucatán, Felipe Carrillo Puerto; however, he was assassinated while she was home in San Francisco preparing for their wedding. Reed was a promoter of the career of Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco and wrote a biography of him as well as a work on Mexican muralists generally.
WElizabeth A. T. Smith is an American art historian, museum curator, writer, and presently the executive director of the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation. She has formerly held positions as a curator at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA), the chief curator and deputy director of programs at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the executive director, curatorial affairs, at the Art Gallery of Ontario. She is the author of numerous books on art and architecture, including Blueprints for Modern Living: History and Legacy of the Case Study Houses; Lee Bontecou: A Retrospective, Helen Frankenthaler: Composing with Color, 1962–63, and many others.