Indiana, Robert (13 Sept. 1928–19 May 2018), painter, sculptor, and poet, was born in New Castle, Indiana, and adopted in infancy as Robert Clark, the only child of middle-class parents Earl Clark and Carmen Watters. Earl was a petroleum industry manager but during the Depression took whatever jobs he could, even pumping gas, as the family moved from house to house (twenty-one in all, the artist later recorded). Robert’s parents divorced when he was ten and, being intellectually ambitious, he eventually went to live with his father in Indianapolis so that he could attend the highly rated Arsenal Technical High School. After graduating as valedictorian in ...
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Indiana, Robert (13 Sept. 1928–19 May 2018), painter, sculptor, and poet
Susan Elizabeth Ryan
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Liberman, Alexander (1912-1999), sculptor and painter
Daniel Grant
Liberman, Alexander (04 September 1912–19 November 1999), sculptor and painter, was born Alexander Semeonovitch Liberman in Kiev, Russia, the son of Semeon Liberman, a well-regarded timber industry analyst for both the czarist and Bolshevik governments, and Henriette Pascar, a half-gypsy who directed the first state-run children's theater in Moscow. During the early years of the Russian Revolution, chaotic conditions in St. Petersburg and Moscow, where Liberman spent his early childhood, were reflected in an unruly temperament, which forced his parents to school him at home. In 1921 Semeon Liberman received permission from Lenin to take his son abroad, where Alexander was sent to boarding schools in England and France. His mother accompanied him to England, while his father continued to work in Moscow before finally and permanently leaving for France, where the family was reunited in 1926....
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Read, Thomas Buchanan (1822-1872), poet, painter, and sculptor
Katherine M. Krile
Read, Thomas Buchanan (22 March 1822–11 May 1872), poet, painter, and sculptor, was born in Corner Ketch, Chester County, Pennsylvania. Very little is known about his parents. The death of Read’s father in about 1832 propelled the breakup of the family. Thomas was apprenticed to a tailor whose reputedly cruel treatment of the boy prompted him to run away to Philadelphia. He worked for a cigar maker and a grocer before moving, at about age fifteen, to Cincinnati, the home of a married sister. He evidently received little formal education. In Cincinnati he found employment as a sign painter and a cigar maker, and he also worked as an apprentice tombstone carver for the sculptor ...
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Story, William Wetmore (1819-1895), sculptor and writer
Jan Seidler Ramirez
Story, William Wetmore (12 February 1819–07 October 1895), sculptor and writer, was born in Salem, Massachusetts, the son of Joseph Story, a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and Harvard law professor, and Sarah Waldo Wetmore, the daughter of a prominent Boston judge. During his formative years spent in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Story was exposed to the vibrant intellectual communities of Harvard College (now University) and antebellum Boston, and he pursued a variety of creative pastimes while simultaneously preparing to enter the family profession of law. Upon graduating from Harvard in 1838 and Harvard Law School in 1840, he was admitted to the bar and proceeded to distinguish himself as a Boston attorney. He also served as a reporter to the U.S. Circuit Court and published important treatises on the laws of contracts (1844) and personal property sales (1847). In 1843 he married Emelyn Eldredge of Boston, a childhood acquaintance. Artistic ambitions earlier awakened continued to occupy Story, however, and despite the pressures of his legal practice he managed to participate in local artist associations, contribute verse and criticism to some of the day’s bolder opinion journals, and develop a modest reputation as an amateur painter and clay modeler....
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Whitney, Anne (1821-1915), sculptor and poet
Charlene G. Garfinkle
Whitney, Anne (02 September 1821–23 January 1915), sculptor and poet, was born in Watertown, Massachusetts, to Nathaniel Ruggles Whitney, Jr., a justice of the peace, and Sally Stone. Whitney’s parents belonged to a liberal sect of the Unitarian church. Its doctrine professed the belief that men and women were created equal. Whitney was educated as a liberal thinker, believing in the equality of the sexes and the races and deploring oppression and injustice of any kind....
