Bob Ross

Ross was the host of the public television series The Joy of Painting, which ran from 1983 to 1994 and still[update] appears in reruns in many broadcast areas. During each half-hour segment, Ross would instruct viewers in the art of oil painting using a quick-study technique that kept colors to a minimum and broke paintings down into simple steps that virtually anyone could follow.[4] Art critic Mira Schor compared him to another PBS television host, noting that the softness of Ross's voice and the slow pace of his speech was similar to Mr. Rogers.
Ross later founded his own successful line of art supplies and how-to books, and also offered painting classes taught by instructors trained in the 'Bob Ross method.' In a 1990 interview, Ross mentioned that all his programs were donated free of charge to PBS stations and that his earnings came instead from sales of his 20 books and 100 videotapes (the total to that date), as well as profits from some 150 Bob Ross-trained teachers and a line of art materials sold through a national supplier. Ross also mentioned on the show 'Towering Glacier' (#2341) that he donated all the paintings made on the show to PBS stations around the country to 'help them out.'
Ross also filmed wildlife footage, squirrels in particular, usually from his own garden. Small animals often appeared on his show, even during some of his trickier works, as he would often take in injured or abandoned squirrels and other assorted wildlife and look after them.
The show can be seen on the PBS oriented Create."

http://www.bobross.com/news.cfm

Body Worlds 2

Body Worlds 2 BEYONDbones: "Dr. Gunther von Hagens invented Plastination—the groundbreaking method of preserving anatomical specimens for study. His BODY WORLDS exhibits are a museum sensation that has brought the post-mortal body to the attention of more than 25 million people worldwide. Beginning Sept. 12, visitors to the Houston Museum of Natural Science have the chance to see his newest exhibit: Gunther von Hagens’ BODY WORLDS 2 & The BRAIN – Our Three Pound Gem: The Original Exhibition of Real Human Bodies.

The Body: Visual AIDS Day With(out) Art 2006

The Body: Visual AIDS Day With(out) Art 2006: "Visual AIDS Day With(out) Art
Day Without Art (DWA) began on December 1st 1989 as the national day of action and mourning in response to the AIDS crisis. To make the public aware that AIDS can touch everyone, and inspire positive action, some 800 U.S. art and AIDS groups participated in the first Day Without Art, shutting down museums, sending staff to volunteer at AIDS services, or sponsoring special exhibitions of work about AIDS. Since then, Day With(out) Art has grown into a collaborative project in which an estimated 8,000 national and international museums, galleries, art centers, AIDS Service Organizations, libraries, high schools and colleges take part.
In the past, Visual AIDS initiated public actions and programs, published an annual poster and copyright-free broadsides, and acted as press coordinator and clearing house for projects for Day Without Art/World AIDS Day. In 1997 we suggested Day Without Art become a Day WITH Art, to recognize and promote increased programming of cultural events that draw attention to the continuing pandemic. Though 'the name was retained as a metaphor for the chilling possibility of a future day without art or artists', we added parentheses to the program title, Day With(out) Art, to highlight the proactive programming of art projects by artists living with HIV/AIDS, and art about AIDS, that were taking place around the world. It had become clear that active interventions within the annual program were far more effective than actions to negate or reduce the programs of cultural centers."

Leon McManus, my cousin

He was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana on August 22, 1986. He is an alumni of Southern Univeristy A&M College in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He majored in Visual Arts. He calls himself LoveNeatness. Love is for his love of art and neatness goes with his composition.

This is a picture he drew for our Grandma's 80th birthday.

This is a picture of my Grandson and my cousin campaigning for the release of the Jena 6.

This is a picture of his sister looking back to the past and forward to the future.

Kerry James Washington

Kerry James Washington was born October 17, 1955, in Birmingham, Alabama, Kerry James Marshall realized he wanted to be an artist at a very early age. Inspired by pictures in a book, Marshall decided he wanted to be a visual artist.

Themes and ideas present in Marshall's work reflect the complex web of personal and social issues that have been instrumental in molding his life. When Marshall was eight, his family moved to the Watts community in Los Angeles. As the epicenter of intense struggle for civil rights, including a riot in 1969 and a confrontation between city police officers and the Black Panthers, Watts and its imagery have dramatically influenced the form and content of Marshall's work. His celebrated series, 'The Garden Project', critiqued low-income housing projects whose names denoted an idyllic Eden-like world, camouflaging the poverty and violence within.

Marshall received his training from the incomparable Charles White while enrolled at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. Best known for his stylized, large-scale paintings depicting the beauty and complexity of African American life, Marshall also designs sculpture and has served as a production designer for such films as Daughters of the Dust (1989) and the Hendrix Project (1991).

With groundbreaking shows at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Berlinische Galerie in Berlin and the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York City, Marshall's childhood dreams have been realized. He recently was named the recipient of the prestigious MacArthur 'Genius Award' and his work has been incorporated into the permanent collections of many museums across the nation. Marshall is currently an art professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago."

Surrealism

"Surrealism was developed by the 20th-century literary and artistic movement. The surrealist movement of visual art and literature, flourished in Europe between World Wars I and II. Surrealism grew principally out of the earlier Dada movement, which before World War I produced works of anti-art that deliberately defied reason; but Surrealism emphasis was not on negation but on positive expression. The movement represented a reaction against what its members saw as the destruction wrought by the 'rationalism' that had guided European culture and politics in the past and had culminated in the horrors of World War I. According to the major spokesman of the movement, the poet and critic André Breton, who published 'The Surrealist Manifesto' in 1924, Surrealism was a means of reuniting conscious and unconscious realms of experience so completely, that the world of dream and fantasy would be joined to the everyday rational world in 'an absolute reality, a surreality.' Drawing heavily on theories adapted from Sigmund Freud, Breton saw the unconscious as the wellspring of the imagination. He defined genius in terms of accessibility to this normally untapped realm, which, he believed, could be attained by poets and painters alike. This movement continues to flourish at all ends of the earth. Continued thought processes and investigations into the mind produce today some of the best art ever seen."