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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

Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902) was a German-American artist who specialized in romanticized landscapes of the American West. When he was just two years old, his family emigrated from his birthplace of Solingen, Germany to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he spent the majority of his formative years. At the age of twenty-three, Bierstadt traveled to Düsseldorf, Germany and then to Switzerland and Italy where he studied art informally for about four years. Read More

Mariana Monteagudo, born in 1976 in Venezuela, is a Miami-based artist best known for her mixed media sculptures. Monteagudo explores thrift stores and even her neighbors’ trash to find used and discarded materials, which she transforms into figural sculptures. She describes herself as living “in a constant process of upcycling and reuse… continuously seeking, always resuscitating, permanently combining and thinking ahead of time, and placing her faith into the most unimagined creations.” Read More

Leza McVey (1907-1984) was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio. She attended the Cleveland Institute of Art from 1927 to 1932, where McVey experimented with sculpture and ultimately graduated with a degree in crafts. She met her husband and fellow artist William McVey at the Cleveland Institute; they married in 1932 and moved to a farm just outside of Cleveland. At the farm, McVey accidentally drank unpasteurized goat’s milk and contracted brucellosis. Read More