Hubert Massey

"History of Detroit" Linoleum Cut, Black Ink, African American, Mural Style

2004

SALE ONE WEEK ONLY Marc Chagall is clearly a Modernist. Though titled "Summer Night" it could just as easily be identified as a scene from Shakespeare...

“Woman on Arm of Sofa” is an extraordinary lithograph by Arnold Singer. You could say it is representative of his interests in several art styles that ar...

"Rise to Rewrite the Law" is a silkscreen offset on speckle tone paper that is the second in Shepard Fairey's crowdfunded WE THE FUTURE series. This work features Amanda Nguyen, the Vietnamese-American founder of the civil rights NGO Rise and drafter of the Sexual Assault Survivors' Rights Act. As part of the WE THE FUTURE campaign her portrait was sent to twenty thousand schools in the United States to teach students about activism. The work is signed and dated in the lower right corner, and is unnumbered open edition work. Shepard Fairey is one of America's most well-known living artists. Born Frank Shepard Fairey in Charleston in 1970, Fairey came into prominence as a street artist and graphic designer whose works such as "Andre the Giant Has a Posse" and the Barack Obama "Hope" poster have become iconic within contemporary culture. He began his art career with doing pieces for skateboards and T-shirts before getting an education at the Rhode Island School of Design where he earned his BA in Illustration. Fairey's work draws on influences as diverse as the films of John Carpenter and the philosophy of Marshall McLuhan and Martin Heidegger...

“A voice is heard in Ramah, mourning and great weeping, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.” This verse from Jeremiah 31:15 is the subject of this woodcut print by Jacob Steinhardt, depicting Rachel, who was the mother of the tribes of Joshua and Benjamin, and who was the wife of Jacob who was Israel, weeping for her children which is to be understood as after the destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem, the Israelites were clustered into Ramah, the home of the Benjaminites, before being taken into the Babylonian captivity; Rachel is weeping for the destruction and expulsion of her descendants. This work is exemplary of the Jewish themes of Jacob Steinhardt, a German Jew...

SALE ONE WEEK ONLY "Fragility Adored" a Fotocollage print on photographic paper by Axel Crieger (1955 - ) of an Audrey Hepburn publicity photo for "Sabrina" now placed in a cafe. I...

ONE WEEK ONLY SALE This woodcut print is an expressionist print on one of the poems from Max Weber's poetry collection "Primitives: Poems and Woodcuts". This work is signed in penci...

Elizabeth Catlett, 'Survivor', linocut, 1983, edition 1000. Signed, titled, dated, and numbered '914/1000' in pencil. A fine impression, on...

Elizabeth Catlett “Man” 1975 (The Print Club of Cleveland Publication Number 83, 2005) Woodcut and Color Linocut Printed in 2003 at JK Fine Art Editions Co., Union City, New Jersey Signed and Dated By The Artist Lower Right Titled Lower Left Ed. of 250 Image Size: approx 18 x 12 inches Elizabeth Catlett (1915-2012) is regarded as one of the most important women artists and African American artists of our time. She believed art could affect social change and that she should be an agent for that change: “I have always wanted my art to service black people—to reflect us, to relate to us, to stimulate us, to make us aware of our potential.” As an artist and an activist, Catlett highlighted the dignity and courage of motherhood, poverty, and the working class, returning again and again to the subject she understood best—African American women. The work below, entitled, “Man”, is "carved from a block of wood, chiseled like a relief. Catlett, a sculptor as well as a printmaker, carves figures out of wood, and so is extremely familiar with this material. For ‘Man’ she exploits the grain of the wood, allowing to to describe the texture of the skin and form vertical striations, almost scarring the image. Below this intense, three-dimensional visage parades seven boys, printed repetitively from a single linoleum block in a “rainbow roll” that changes from gold to brown. This row of brightly colored figures with bare feet, flat like a string of paper dolls, raise their arms toward the powerful depiction of the troubled man above.” Biography: Elizabeth Catlett (1915-2012) Known for abstract sculpture in bronze and marble as well as prints and paintings, particularly depicting the female figure, Elizabeth Catlett is unique for distilling African American, Native American, and Mexican art in her work. She is "considered by many to be the greatest American black sculptor". . .(Rubinstein 320) Catlett was born in Washington D.C. and later became a Mexican citizen, residing in Cuernavaca Morelos, Mexico. She spent the last 35 years of her life in Mexico. Her father, a math teacher at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, died before she was born, but the family, including her working mother, lived in the relatively commodious home of his family in DC. Catlett received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Howard University, where there was much discussion about whether or not black artists should depict their own heritage or embrace European modernism. She earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1940 from the University of Iowa, where she had gone to study with Grant Wood, Regionalist* painter. His teaching dictum was "paint what you know best," and this advice set her on the path of dealing with her own background. She credits Wood with excellent teaching and deep concern for his students, but she had a problem during that time of taking classes from him because black students were not allowed housing in the University's dormitories. Following graduation in 1940, she became Chair of the Art Department at Dillard University in New Orleans. There she successfully lobbied for life classes with nude models, and gained museum admission to black students at a local museum that to that point, had banned their entrance. That same year, her painting Mother and Child, depicting African-American figures won her much recognition. From 1944 to 1946, she taught at the George Washington Carver School, an alternative community school in Harlem that provided instruction for working men and women of the city. From her experiences with these people, she did a series of paintings, prints, and sculptures with the theme "I Am a Negro Woman." In 1946, she received a Rosenwald Fellowship*, and she and her artist husband, Charles White, traveled to Mexico where she became interested in the Mexican working classes. In 1947, she settled permanently in Mexico where she, divorced from White, married artist Francisco Mora...

George Josimovich, 'Commuters', linocut, 1922-23, edition 20. Signed, dated '22, titled, and annotated '9/20' in pencil. Initialed in the block 'G.J....

George Josimovich, Untitled (Harbor with Sailboats) ', linocut, 1923, edition 35. Signed, dated, and annotated '4/35' in pencil. Initialed 'G J' in ...

Statue-Fisherboy 1967. Linoleum cut. 9 1/2 x 7 5/8 (sheet 13 x 10 5/8). Edition 16, #16. A fine impression printed on Japanese mulberry paper. Signed, titled and numbered in pencil. ...

Harold E. Keeler worked in Hollywood as a set designer. That seems especially important here because the Water Fall looks a little as though it could be a woodland stage set -- to me...