Christo (Javacheff), born in 1935 in Gabrovo, Bulgaria. Between 1953 and 1956 he studied painting, sculpture and stage design at the Academy of Fine Arts, Sofia. In 1956 he lived briefly in Prague, Czechoslovakia. In 1957 he studied sculpture for one term under Fritz Wotruba at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. In 1958 he settled in Paris. He became temporarily associated with the Nouveau R ‚ alistes. In 1958 he began to package objects. His assemblages of oil drums were shown in Cologne in 1961. He exhibited in 1963 at the Galerie Schmela, Düsseldorf. In 1964 he moved to New York where he made his first "store fronts". In 1966 his "store fronts" were shown at the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, and at the Leo Castelli Gallery, New York. In 1968 he packaged the Berner Kunsthalle - his first pacakaged building. He was represented at the documenta exhibitions "4", "5" and "6" in Kassel in 1968, 1972 and 1974, and in 1972 and 1976 at the Venice Biennale. He produced overdimensional packaging projects for buildings, skyscrapers and landscapes. His especially well-known largescale projects were Valley Curtain, Rifle, Colorado in 1972 and Running Fence , California, in 1976. In 1977 his exhibition Christo - The Running Fence toured Rotterdam, Bonn, Hanover, Humblebaek, Hövikoden, Zurich, Brussels and Grenoble. In 1971 he began the project Wrapped Reichstag with his artistic partner Jeanne-Claude, which was completed in 1995. In 1980 he took part in the exhibition Mein Kölner Dom for the 100th anniversary of the cathedral. In 1983 Christo and Jeanne-Claude produced the project Surrounded Islands : eleven islands in Biscayne Bay near Miami, Florida, were surrounded by wide collars of floating pink polypropylene fabric. The documentation of all Christo and Jeanne-Claude projects went on tour. A complete catalogue of their work is on line at the links below.
24 and a half miles California highways
Maya Lin Born in 1959 in Athens, Ohio, Maya Lin catapulted into the public eye when, as a senior at Yale University, she submitted the winning design in a national competition for a Vietnam Veterans Memorial to be built in Washington, D.C. She was trained as an artist and architect, and her sculptures, parks, monuments, and architectural projects are linked by her ideal of making a place for individuals within the landscape. Lin, a Chinese-American, came from a cultivated and artistic home. Her father was the dean of fine arts at Ohio University; her mother is a professor of literature at Ohio University. “As the child of immigrants you have that sense of, Where are you? Where’s home? And trying to make a home,” remarks Lin. She draws inspiration for her sculpture and architecture from culturally diverse sources, including Japanese gardens, Hopewell Indian earthen mounds, and works by American earthworks artists of the 1960s and 1970s. Her most recognizable work, the "Vietnam Veterans Memorial," allows the names of those lost in combat to speak for themselves, connecting a tragedy that happened on foreign soil with the soil of America’s capital city, where it stands. Lin lives in New York and Colorado MONDAY, APRIL 14 Over a million people each year make the pilgrimage to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., the most visited piece of contemporary public art in our country. The creator: Maya Lin, who won the 1981 commission as a 21-year-old undergraduate student of architecture at Yale. Lin is an artist of strong, powerful vision. The Civil Rights Memorial at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama (dedicated in 1989), is a compelling commemoration of the movement. With "TOPO" (1991), a median strip on the approach to the Coliseum in Charlotte, N.C. became a whimsical topiary garden. "Eclipsed Time," a 38-foot long elliptical clock, hangs above commuters' heads at the Long Island Railroad's ticketing area in Penn Station. Her architectural projects include the renovation of a SoHo loft for the Museum of African Art. "Sculpture to me is like poetry, architecture is like prose," remarks Lin, who also quips that architects call her a sculptor and sculptors call her an architect. Indeed, her architectural designs have a hand-formed sense of composition, while many of her site-specific sculptural installations carve out space to be experienced. Says Art in America , "In all her work, there is a consistent visual intelligence that transcends categorization.“ Maya Lin Artist & Architect BIOGRAPHY Maya Lin is the world-renowned architect of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, and one of the most important public artists of this century. Her parents fled China just before the Communist takeover in 1949, eventually settling in Athens, Ohio, where both became professors at Ohio University. Her mother wrote poetry and taught literature; her father, a ceramic artist, became the Dean of Fine Arts. As a 21-year-old architecture student at Yale, Lin designed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial as a class project, then entered it in the largest design competition in American history. Her striking proposal, a V-shaped wall of black stone, etched with the names of 58,000 dead soldiers, beat out the submissions of 1,420 other entrants. She encountered ferocious criticism when her unconventional design was selected. Feelings were running so high that her name was not even mentioned at the dedication of the memorial in 1982. She coped with the painful controversy by returning to Yale as a graduate student. Her inspiring vision has since become the most-visited memorial in the nation's capital. The families of the fallen leave mementos at the wall, and veterans maintain a constant vigil there. Since leaving Yale, Lin has created a dozen other major works across the nation, including the Peace Chapel at Pennsylvania's Juniata College, the "Women's Table," at Yale University and the Langston Hughes Library in Clinton, Tennessee. Her Civil Rights memorial in Montgomery, Alabama displays inscriptions on a disc of black stone beneath a thin layer of moving water. "The Wave Field," at the University of Michigan College of Engineering, is a pure earth sculpture, made entirely of soil covered with grass, undulating in waves six feet high. Maya Lin has also executed architectural projects for the Rockefeller Foundation and the new Federal Courthouse in Manhattan. Her life and work were detailed in the Academy Award-winning documentary film of 1995, Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision. As both artist and architect, her work reflects a strong interest in the environment, a commitment she has also served as an advisor on sustainable energy use, and as a Board Member of the National Resources Defense Council. In 2000 she published her first book, Boundaries. She describes it as a "visual and verbal sketchbook, where image can bee seen as text and text is sometimes used as image."
During the Mermnad dynasty (ca. 680-547 B.C.), the empire reached its greatest geographical extent, stretching from the Aegean Sea to central Anatolia. Herodotus credits the Lydian kings with the invention of coinage and the construction of the great royal burial mounds at Bin Tepe , some 6 miles to the northwest of the acropolis. Kings Gyges and Croesus were particularly renowned for lavish gifts dedicated in Greek sanctuaries. In 547 B.C., Sardis was sacked by Cyrus the Great and remained under Persian control until 334 B.C., when it was captured by Alexander the Great. The city continued to flourish during Hellenistic and Roman times, when ambitious construction projects were initiated, including the temple of Artemis and bath-gymnasium complex . A section of the bath-gymnasium complex was later remodeled to accommodate a synagogue. This synagogue, now partially restored by the Harvard-Cornell Expedition, is the largest early synagogue yet excavated in the Mediterranean world.
http://www.robertsmithson.com/photoworks/pw.htm Born:1938, Born in Passaic, New Jersey Died:1973
