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Frederick Usher DeVoll (1873-1941) was born in Providence, Rhode Island. He graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1896 at the age of twenty-three and left Providence for New York City, where he studied with some of the most important American artists of his time, including William Merritt Chase [LINK], Charles Hawthorne, and Robert Henri. Chase and Hawthorne were accomplished portrait painters, both influenced by Impressionism. Henri was also influenced by Impressionism, but in the 1890s and early 1900s, when DeVoll likely was his student, Henri began exploring a new style that eventually became known as the Ashcan School. Read More

Arthur Van Wagenen Eltinge (1872-1931) was born in Kingston, New York. He showed an early interest in music and began teaching music and playing the organ in his local church at age fourteen. He enrolled at Syracuse University in 1890 to study piano and organ and received his bachelor’s degree in music in 1894. Upon graduating, Eltinge began teaching music at the University and giving private lessons to students living in the Syracuse area. He left his teaching position at Syracuse University after eight years to focus on private lessons and composing his own music. Eltinge became known as a skilled “teacher of teachers,” specializing in how to train music teachers to become better teachers themselves. Read More

From January 18 through 23, 1972, cellist Charlotte Moorman and artist Nam June Paik performed Concerto for TV Cello and Videotape and TV Bed at the Everson Museum of Art. For Concerto, Moorman played the video cello, an instrument designed by Paik and constructed out of television monitors, and for TV Bed she played a traditional cello while lying atop an installation of monitors resembling a bed. Paik was on hand to explain his Paik-Abe Video Synthesizer, the first machine designed to purposefully distort video feeds across multiple television screens. Read More

Syracuse-based artist Juan Alberto Cruz (b. 1941, Puerto Rico) combines rich symbolism with a bold and colorful abstract style to create work infused with his Caribbean heritage. Moving from Puerto Rico to Manhattan’s Lower East Side and subsequent travels to Spain, Mexico, Cuba, and Central America have had a major impact on Cruz’s work, which reflects a mixture of his cultural heritage and life experiences. From his earliest portrait paintings to recent abstract collages, Cruz uses the emotional realities of his past to articulate his feelings about economic inequality and systematic injustice. Read More

George Inness (1825-1894) is often considered the premier landscape painter of the nineteenth century. He suffered from epilepsy as a young boy, causing him to struggle in school and eventually drop out at a young age to apprentice at his father’s grocery store in Newburgh, New York. Working for his father was a short-lived pursuit; Inness had always been far more interested in following his passion for art. Though mildly disappointed in his son’s choice to pursue art instead of the family’s grocery business, Inness’s father supported his studying with local painters, who quickly found that the boy’s skills were already beyond their teachings. Read More