STEVE HELLER, Martha My Dear, 2013, Found metal, kitchen utensils, car parts, Collection of the artist, Photo by Dan Meyers.

ARTIST

BIOS

EXHIBITION MEDIA KIT: ARTIST BIOS

HUMAN, SOUL AND MACHINE:THE COMING SINGULARITY!

OCTOBER 5, 2013—AUGUST 31, 2014

AMERICAN VISIONARY ART MUSEUM

CHRIS ROBERTS-ANTIEAU(1950– )

Christine Lee Roberts was born in Brighton, Michigan, the daughter of Rosemary “Lee,” a fashion model, and Finch Lee Roberts, a homebuilder. Chris attended Michigan public schools and at age 10, she created a complete backyard circus, enlisting siblings and neighborhood kids to wear her hand-sewn monkey and horse costumes and directed them to act out skits. She made a tightrope strung between two bar stools, a refreshment stand, a high top tent, and a ticket booth, where real customers paid to enter—“but no clowns, I hate clowns.” Her handmade, backyard wonder circus earned her a feature article in the Plymouth Mail newspaper.

Roberts-Antieau later won 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th place the first time she entered the art competition at her high school. But due to her rebellious nature, school counselors did not recommend college—perhaps a blessing in hindsight. “I like being self-taught because I don’t ever want to have ideas of what not to do,” she explains. The only other art class she ever took, at a local college, led her teacher to dismiss her within the first few weeks with the diagnosis, “You’ll never be an artist.”

After seven years with her boyfriend, Darrell, Roberts-Antieau became pregnant with her son, Noah. “I just knew I had to prepare a path for my son and me.” Her first attempt to produce a sellable work of art was a 3-D, soft-stuffed, trapeze sculpture. It took her 18 hours to complete, and she was “absolutely thrilled” when she sold it at a Michigan Fair for $20. “I couldn’t believe someone would buy my work.” Then the reality of her new enterprise set in.

By 1987, Roberts-Antieau had worked long hours to create a wearable art sample clothing line to pitch at craft fairs. The line consisted of just three vests and two jackets, and during her debut at the American Craft Council (ACC) Fair in Baltimore, wholesale buyers lined up 50-deep at her booth, all waiting to place big orders. “I was scared to death,” she remembers. Today, Chris Roberts-Antieau has become one of the most successful visual artists in Michigan, often working from dreams as inspiration. Roberts-Antieau’s themes are always idealistic, playful, personal hero- and humor-laden. Her journals are full of hand-drawn, cartoon-like hieroglyphs, which she often later infuses into her sewn works and handmade wooden frames. She recently opened her own gallery in old New Orleans, where she was delighted to sell a work to fellow musician President Bill Clinton.

LINDSEY BESSANSON Lindsey Bessanson was not one to shy away from dissecting bugs in high school science class—in fact, she was happy to do other students' work too. A lasting fascination with the beauty and complexity of insect life continued into her adult life. In 2003, Bessanson found a new use for her dissection skills, when she started working bugs into her jewelry-making process. At first, she bought freeze-dried specimens from specialist entomologist websites and cast them in silver, but, “my first dung beetle made me want to start working with the actual insects as art instead of casting them—it was a brilliant purple color…sometimes the casting just isn't as beautiful as the original bug. They can be very jewel-like in themselves.” Bessanson either orders dried specimens to rehydrate or finds dead insects around her home in Arizona (she now has a strict 'no kill' policy), before meticulously arranging their bodies and augmenting them with tiny machine parts. Each sculpture takes two weeks to complete. She is currently developing ways of mechanizing her specimens, although a couple of delicate prototypes have been broken by overzealous fans of the work.

FRED J. CARTER(1911–1992)

Fred J. Carter was born on January 6, 1911 on the Cherokee and Daniel Boone Trail near Duffield, in southwest Virginia. His ancestors on both sides came to the lush wooded mountain area with legendary pioneer woodsman Daniel Boone. Fred’s father, James David Carter, practiced law for more than fifty years in the county seat in Gate City, Virginia. His mother, Viola Fraley Carter, was accomplished in soap and rug making, embroidery and child rearing. Their home was filled with music, books, Native American artifacts and fossils found and collected by his father. His two sisters became teachers, two of his brothers became professors and linguists, another a war hero and author of a best-selling memoir. Carter's beloved uncle, Ed Fraley, was a United Mine Workers member and human rights activist who left for Russia after graduating college to better understand the ideals of the 1917 Revolution. All this made the Carter family unusual citizens in a county then dominated by poverty and lack of education.

Fred Carter's adopted son, Ross, died tragically during his first marriage, an event that would influence his thinking and artistic practice for the rest of his life. With his beautiful and young second wife, Vickie, Carter realized a miracle when he became a delighted father again at age 72 with the birth of their daughter, Holly, soon followed by the birth of their second daughter, Mary. Despite his age, Carter was an energetic, adoring father and husband. He and Vickie built their own home, incorporating an immense boulder, the subject of local Indian lore, into the structure of the house. Fred was always a hard worker. He helped run the family farm from boyhood, worked for various hardware and furniture stores, and was a very capable stonemason. He saved money, eventually owned and operated a successful hardware and furniture store, and founded The Carter Home Improvement Company. Business was always a necessary means for expressing his social conscience through art. Fearing young people would not appreciate the lessons of their independent pioneer forebearers, Carter took his collection of farming, mining, spinning and moonshining artifacts and founded The Cumberland Museum in 1970—for over a decade he and Vickie fought to keep the doors open despite lack of community support. But close friendships with artists Max Bernd-Cohen, Jack Wright, and D.R. Mullins brought him peace, direction and validation. He stayed abreast of world news to the end, always struggling to better understand humankind’s addiction to war, cruelty, destruction of nature, and the devastation of so many drug-addicted young people. “Man is becoming so dehumanized and desensitized," Carter said. "The Biblical people would call that Armageddon. It's just the destruction of man by himself."

ALLEN CHRISTIAN(1957– )

Allen Christian, a.k.a. “Mr. Lucky” or “The House of Balls Guy,” was born on September 16, 1957, in Minneapolis, the sixth of nine children. His father, Vernon Robert Christian, worked for the U.S. Postal Service and held additional part-time jobs, while his mother, Dorothy Agnes Christian, worked for “Ma Bell” (American Telephone & Telegraph). Christian's first artistic ‘aha’ moment came as a Catholic school first grader when he made a crucifixion scene. Later his fifth grade art teacher arranged Saturday drawing classes for him at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, but the young artist quit after several sessions.

As a teen, Christian tinkered for many long and happy hours in his father’s basement workshop making things. During four years of military service based mostly in Europe, Christian was inspired by cultures possessed of “a vast history, where art was valued as a social treasure.” Upon returning to the U.S., he attended art school for one semester and again quit, put off by its focus on concept.

Christian ultimately chose a practical livelihood as an electrician, but for more than two decades he has enchanted visitors to his Minneapolis-based “House of Balls”—an old warehouse and studio jam-packed with singular works of art fashioned out of everyday objects, from bowling balls to badminton birdies. Of his recycled art, Christian says he “discovered the essence of humanity through found objects, through inanimate objects that are cast-offs. I try and give these inanimate objects a new lease on life, to imbue them with emotion.”

CANDY CUMMINGS(1950– )

Candy Cummings was born Candace Carol Cummings on September 26, 1950, the youngest of two children. Her father was then stationed at the Patuxent River Naval Air Test Center. Her mother was a first generation Italian-American, the fourteenth child of two Neapolitan immigrants. When Cummings' mother and older brother, Wayne, struggled with elements of bipolar disorder, art became her escape from household chaos and unhappiness. She credits her mother with taking the family on frequent trips to see museums and monuments in Washington D.C.

Cummings' father retired after 13 years in the military to start his own business, which became one of the earliest television and appliance service shops. Many years later, the material legacy of his warehouse—filled with vacuum tubes, TV knobs, and all kinds of electrical spare parts—would find its way into his daughter's intricate sculptures.

Cummings attended a Catholic girls boarding school, then an art college in Philadelphia, where she dropped out after two years. She cites the sixties, the Age Of Aquarius, Bob Dylan, the Beatles and Vincent Van Gogh as major influences. As a young adult, she began a career as a caterer, surviving both a major hurricane and a ruptured appendix while working as the Catering Director of the largest resort on Saint Thomas, the U.S. Virgin Islands. Most recently, Candy “beat the Devil again” by surviving stage 3 lung cancer.

CHARLES ROY FENDER (1936– )

Charles Roy Fender was born Charles Roy Knoepfle on March 11, 1936, the youngest of two boys. With no extra money in the family for toys, the young artist was left to his own devices, developing his first inventions as a three year old at his grandmother’s house, including “Match Box Cars,” and a “Walnut Pig Head” (which employed a captured housefly as the motor for facial movements). After the family moved from Brooklyn to St. Louis, Fender was sent to Catholic boarding school, a time he describes as a “punishing experience.” By the time he was 12 and hanging out with a local street gang, his mother remarried to Owen D. Fender, and the family moved between Egypt and Greece, where Fender attended small private schools. After a varied series of careers including U.S. Army soldier, poultry company owner, and a fishing guide, Fender held professorships at Ohio State University and Western Maryland College. He currently pursues art and building projects on his Pennsylvania property and on a leased island in northern Saskatchewan, Canada during the summers. Fender has three children and lives in The Villages, Florida, with his wife Ann.

DALTON M. GHETTI (1961– )

Dalton Ghetti was born on February 28, 1961, in the busy city of São Paulo, Brazil. He is the eldest of three children and the only boy. His mother was a seamstress, his father a butcher and strict disciplinarian. A kind uncle who worked as a truck driver would bring young Dalton pets, like a monkey he picked up driving through the rainforest. Most young students carried a small pocket knife to school to sharpen their pencils, but eight-year-old Dalton used his to cut intricate patterns into the pencil wood, as well as in soap and chalk.

When he was 10, Ghetti’s family moved to the country to the small village of Poços de Caldas, where life and his engagement with nature became much freer. In addition to his monkey, Mico, young Ghetti adopted a pet tarantula, a pet anteater, and other assorted animals that necessitated a daily hunt for termites. Over the next year, Ghetti constructed his own glider, a 30-foot long, 8-foot wide bamboo frame with hand-stitched plastic—the beginning of what would become a life-long commitment to paragliding.

Despite his preoccupations, tensions within the home caused Ghetti to leave and join the army at the age of 16. From there he went to university to study biology, became fascinated by DNA, and hoped to pursue a career as a genetic engineer. At 24, he followed a friend to the U.S., studying English and working in home renovation in New Rochelle, NY, and Bridgeport, CT. He earned an associate’s degree in architecture, married and divorced, and continued to work in renovation. “I live simply” says Ghetti. “I camp out on the floor of an unheated attic in Bridgeport. I have only one small table, a bicycle, and one hot plate. My most precious possession is a sewing needle and a razor blade, both fit in my pocket. I like to make things simple.” He has been paragliding every weekend for the past 10 years. “It requires no motor, no plane, you just ride the thermals like birds...my most beautiful experience is in seeing vultures and eagles sailing behind me.”

He likes carving in pencil graphite, because “it’s homogenous, cuts in the same direction [not like wood which has a grain] and is both hard and soft.” Dalton uses no magnifier, only patience, and some of his pieces take years to complete. He sells colored postcards of his micro carvings, signing them only in pencil.

TEMPLE GRANDIN (1947– )

Described as “The Woman Who Thinks Like a Cow,” Temple Grandin is an author, activist, and professor who has developed profound insights into the welfare and needs of animals through her own autistic condition. Born in Boston on August 29, 1947, Grandin was diagnosed with brain damage and autism at an early age, preventing her from communicating through words until she was three-years-old. She credits the early mentoring and attention of her private school teachers with the development of her visual thought process. She explains, “Visual thinking has enabled me to build entire systems in my imagination.” Grandin obtained a bachelor’s degree in psychology in 1970 and later completed a PhD in animal science, intensifying her focus toward one of her principal inspirations, livestock.

An early involvement in her aunt’s livestock business in Arizona led Grandin to design a machine known as the Hug Box. Observing how cattle responded calmly to being branded after being placed in a squeeze chute, Grandin recognized her own impulse to envelop herself in blankets or burrow in spaces with deep pressure. In college she designed and built a Hug Box for human use, in which two padded boards exert an even amount of pressure along the sides of the body, alleviating stress and hyper-stimulated nerves. Today, the invention's role in autism therapy has been nationally recognized; several centers employing Grandin’s invention have reported its calming effects, especially in children. Grandin later dedicated herself to the reformation of animal slaughter plants and livestock farms by designing alternative facilities. Currently an associate professor at Colorado State University, Grandin continues her work in humane animal handling methods both in practice and theory, outlined in the 2002 essay, “Animals are Not Things: A View on Animal Welfare Based on Neurological Complexity.”

ALEX GREY(1953– )

Alex Grey grew up in a Methodist household until the age of nine, when his parents became disenchanted with religion, due to apparent hypocrisy and racism in their church during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. When Grey was 21, his first LSD trip and introduction to his wife Allyson occurred in a single night, transforming his agnostic existentialism into radical transcendentalism. Investigations into the nature of consciousness though shamanic performances in the 70s and 80s led Grey to Tibetan Buddhism and study of the physical body. Grey continued his psychedelic voyages with Allyson while employed at a medical school morgue, preparing cadavers. These sacramental sojourns led to a unique series of artworks entitled The Sacred Mirrors, and other paintings that "x-ray" multiple dimensions of reality, interweaving physical and biological anatomy with psychic and spiritual energies. The artist applies this multidimensional perspective to crucial moments of human experiences such as praying, kissing, copulating, pregnancy, birth and death, providing a glimpse into the luminous vibratory and archetypal domains of awareness described by healers, clairvoyants, and saints.

By referencing multiple wisdom traditions in his artwork, Grey's paintings indicate an inclusive vision, a universal sacredness. In 2004, the Greys founded the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors in New York City, a cultural center and refuge for contemplation that celebrates a new alliance between divinity and creativity. The Chapel moved to its permanent home in Wappingers Falls, New York in February 2009. With a cult following ranging from rock stars to scientists, Alex Grey's works have become icons of the contemporary spiritual movement by virtue of their power to inspire, inform and illuminate the inexplicable.

NEIL HARBISSON (1982– )

Neil Harbisson is a Catalan contemporary artist, composer and cyborg activist best known for his ability to hear colors and to perceive colors outside the ability of human vision. Harbisson was born with achromatopsia, a condition that allowed him to see only in grayscale. In 2003, he took part in the development of the 'Eyeborg,' a cybernetic eye permanently attached to his head that allows him to hear the frequencies of colors through bone conduction (including infrareds and ultraviolets). Harbisson started to feel like a cyborg, a union between his organism and cybernetics, when he started to hear colors in his dreams. Since then, he has created sonochromatic art works and performances that explore the relationship between color and sound, and the relationship between bodies and cybernetics. In 2010, he co-founded the Cyborg Foundation with Moon Ribas, an international organization that aims to help people become cyborgs, defend cyborg rights and promote cyborgism as an artistic and social movement.

JULIAN HARR(1941– )

Julian Harr was born on April 10, 1941, on an 80-acre farm near the Umpqua River, in the foothills of Oregon’s Cascade Mountains. The eldest of six children, Harr was so naturally gifted at math that he not only became the first person in his family to attend college, but was given full scholarship by the University of Oregon in Eugene. Although physics and chemistry came easily to him, Harr found he “liked pottery throwing better...not to the liking of my family who considered art making pretty useless.” In Harr’s third year at college he had a nervous breakdown—an experience he now thinks providential, as it afforded him the opportunity to hit the road. After hitchhiking to San Francisco, Harr met with a like-minded friend, and together they traveled to Chicago to cash in on the spoils of the first urban renewal wave there, where whole neighborhoods of old Victorian houses were being leveled. One step in front of the wrecking ball, they took mantels, chandeliers, stained glass panels, and copper and brass fittings, reselling them to antiques dealers.

It was around this time that Harr started to make things from the wooden bits he salvaged. He discovered a bohemian artists’ colony on Chicago’s North Side, and became a woodworking apprentice there. But his creations remained a true reflection of his fierce independent thinking, incorporating a lifelong passion for science, philosophy, and a natural dark wit. After three decades of marriage, Harr cites his conversations with his wife Paula, as well as his continued reading in physics and philosophy, as inspirations. “I love how when mathematicians see a complex equation that works, they don’t say it ‘succeeds’, they say ‘it has beauty’—they use the language of art.” Julian and Paula live in the woods in the Poconos of Pennsylvania.

STEVE HELLER (1945– )

Steve Heller was born on March 6, 1945, and grew up in Brooklyn and Queens, NY, with one younger brother. His mother Marty was an inspector for the Department of Labor, nicknamed “Spitfire.” Hal, his father, was a schoolteacher and a tinkerer, always down in the basement fixing the neighbor's lamps and toasters, “but he was always an artist at heart.” It was Heller's father who introduced him to Picasso, and in particular to Baboon with Young, a bronze-cast sculpture in which the figure’s head is rendered with toy cars. “That was it,” said Heller, “cars and art have been my life since.” As a youth the artist combined parts from model car and airplane sets to create composite machine models. As a teenager, he began making wood sculptures from scraps he found near the park. Heller spent his college years studying “Something I have never understood…The one thing I never studied was art. For that I am very very grateful.” He has been a full-time artist since the age of 25, and has never lost a passion for his childhood interests: “Cars, robots, rocket ships and dinosaurs are still my obsessions.” Heller's creations have been featured in publications and exhibitions nationwide. His custom car, the Marquis de Soto, recently won The New York Times Collectible Car of the Year Award, and first in class at both the 2010 Grand National Roadster Show and the Sacramento AutoRama. Heller lives in upstate New York and has been happily married to the author Martha Frankel for 40 years.

KENNY IRWIN, JR.(1974– )

Kenny Irwin, Jr. was born on May 6, 1974, in Palm Springs, California, where his father owns a spa and resort. He was his parents' first boy after eight daughters, later joined by a younger brother. Since birth, Irwin has been dreaming “lucid dream immersion experiences of our Galactic realm in perfect memorable detail.” His dreams have provided explanations for events from long ago and those yet to come in the distant future, “spanning a timeline untold billions of years into the future, documenting alien civilizations primitive, advanced and epically diverse in infinite forms.” Eventually he discovered that much of the language appearing in his dreams was written in Farsi, Pastu, Urdu, and Arabic letters, which, he explains, are “apparently most comparable to otherworldly advanced languages.” Irwin converted to Sufism at an early age. His dreams are always about other forms of life, ultra-advanced technology, and tell a coherent story from a specific beginning to an end. “It is memory of everyday life that is not as clear as my memory of dreams. I remember every dream I have ever had—numbering over 60,000 dream memories that drive the very foundation of my artwork as well as my expression.”

At 13, the artist began his ornate and imaginative RoboLights installation, a gigantic, public art experience. In its first year, the installation featured around 15,000 lights attached to Irwin’s huge recycled art robots, which he assembles by hand. By 2007, RoboLights included 6.2 million lights, and was drawing visitors and admirers from all over the world. Irwin has built over 200 robots at his family home, some as large as 68 feet tall and weighing up to 54 tons.

“Diversity, and creative expression of that diversity, can be our greatest strength, not a global quest for uniformity between all cultures. I am blessed to be in this beautiful world in an infinite realm of the unknown yet to be explored and knowledge gained through the very innocence of our curiosity that makes us simply the kind caring humans we have the capacity to be. Duas salaams.”

DAVID KNOPP(1950– )

During the mid-seventies David Knopp started working with plywood as his medium. It was an accessible and inexpensive material to use in the learning process of stack lamination. Chair was one of his early sculptures and was a critical step in his self-training.

As his work progressed, he discovered the linear strata inherent in the medium. The concept of expressing gesture and movement with the strata became his aim. Knopp creates flowing liquid lines that engage the senses as the eye travels over the contours of his objects. The artist prefers an intuitive process, viewing the collaboration between ideas and materials as central to his creative output. His pieces are functional, but he tends to focus on the aesthetic qualities rather than design principles. His creations start with a vision and a rudimentary sketch. There are no defined templates, 3-D models or software used. Every finished piece is one-of-a-kind. The constant changes that occur as he creates keeps the work alive as it morphs into his interpretation.

A Baltimore resident for his entire life, Knopp attended both Essex Community College and Towson University. Recently he was awarded one of the Mary Sawyer Baker Artist Awards, which included the opportunity to exhibit a selection of his sculptures at the Baltimore Museum of Art in September 2012. In the same year, he was selected as a recipient of the Maryland State Art Council's Individual Artist Award.

ADAM KURTZMAN(1957– )

Adam Kurtzman was born on January 19, 1957 in Brooklyn, and raised in Long Island and New Jersey. His father was an electrical engineer and brother of renowned MAD magazine cartoonist Harvey Kurtzman. His mother was a housewife and substitute teacher. He recalls, “Back then, I had the luxury of lots of unsupervised play and pretend time, something sorely lacking for kids today.” Kurtzman had an imaginary playmate that was “tall, blue, with wings and blonde hair that was superior to human beings. I was obsessed with his planet, Kafadious.” At five, he pounded hundreds of nails into a wooden board, drew crayon circuits, and wrapped the nails with string and copper wire. Convinced it would light a bulb, he asked his teacher to light a match that would then create electricity. She complied, but his first experiment failed. “I liked sci-fi, not so much the reading, because I was dyslexic, but the pictures that promised no confinement to this planet.” He spent a lot of time exploring nearby suburban construction lots, building clubhouses, and drawing with his two best friends. When he was 18, Kurtzman took three weeks to assemble 1,000 wooden matches into a roller coaster form, “just to light them and watch the fire spread at various speeds.” He later designed and built windows for fashionable stores in New York, and made costumes and props for theater.

Adam Kurtzman lives on the top of Mount Washington in Los Angeles with his partner, who is an actor.

RAY KURZWEIL (1948– )

Born February 12, 1948 in Queens, NY, Ray Kurzweil is an author, inventor, and noted futurist thinker. He has been described as “the restless genius” by The Wall Street Journal, and “the ultimate thinking machine” by Forbes. Inc. magazine ranked him #8 among entrepreneurs in the United States, calling him the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison.” Kurzweil was the principal inventor of the first CCD flatbed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition.

Kurzweil is the recipient of the $500,000 MIT-Lemelson Prize, the world’s largest award for innovation. In 1999, he received the National Medal of Technology, the nation’s highest honor in technology, from President Clinton in a White House ceremony. And in 2002, he was inducted into the National Inventor’s Hall of Fame, established by the U.S. Patent Office. He has received nineteen honorary doctorates, and honors from three U.S. Presidents. Kurzweil has authored seven books, five of which have been national bestsellers. He was recently appointed Director of Engineering at Google.

The film, The Singularity Is Near: A True Story about the Future is based on Kurzweil's 2006 New York Times bestselling book, in which he presents his personal story and vision for the ultimate destiny of humankind. Kurzweil's latest book is How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed.

PATTY KUZBIDA (1948– )

Born Patricia Dobson, Patty was the middle child of three 'army brats' born in Frankfurt, Germany, where her father was stationed as a U.S. Army Veterinarian. Patty recalls that her childhood was scarred by her dad’s alcoholism and rage. “My parents would fight and break stuff. I guess mosaics are now my way of putting it all back together.” To escape the drama at home, Patty became an avid reader at a very young age. When her parents divorced, she moved to her mother’s hometown of Baltimore, Maryland.

A free spirit, Patty attended the University of Maryland for two weeks before quitting to work as a waitress. She later earned an associate's degree from community college, allowing her to work as a lab technician most of her life—first at a VA hospital and then in private medicine. “I love science,” she says, “especially microscope work, and just how colorful the human body is inside.” Her first marriage produced two children, and in 2002 she married her great love, Gregory Kuzbida.

Patty first began making art as personal gifts to people, “just to please, not to show off.” While working as a volunteer at a hospital fundraising sale, she developed an eagle eye for materials, especially china. “I like breaking once-expensive china sets I pick up for nothing secondhand. You can tell that they were thought ‘too good to use,’ so I give them new life outside the cabinet.” While semi-retired, Patty came to work at the admissions desk of the American Visionary Art Museum, where she was happily “surrounded by creative people and art.” Patty now resides in a retirement community in Florida. "I still follow the news in physics, love seeing the latest pictures from outer space, helping others wherever I can, eating dark chocolate, and playing pickle-ball."

STEPHANIE LUCAS (1975– )

Stephanie Lucas was born on November 19, 1975 in Picardy, France. She worked as a sales shop girl for 15 years and was very unhappy. One day, she heard a clear, strong voice say, “You must paint.” Although she liked to draw when she was little, “It was very hard for me to begin painting. At first I just didn’t understand why I was painting at all. But then began a great flow that runs and runs and never stops. I now understand the work that comes through me as an expression of some innate knowledge, linked to the heart of the creation of life itself.” Lucas’ complex paintings have been likened to those of the American outsider artist Joe Coleman for their precise detail, wrought with a delicate sensibility of color, symbolism and dimensionality. Lucas lives with her husband, also a visionary painter, in a small stone house in the province of Berry in central France, an area renowned for its rich variety of indigenous healing herbs, mystics and witches.

CHRISTOPHER MOSES (1950– )

Christopher Moses was born on February 8, 1950 in Los Angeles. As a child, Moses had corrective eye surgery to correct a vision disorder, and wore a patch over one eye for several years. Despite the surgery, he has seen double throughout his life. At age 10, his sight was further damaged when a baseball drove his glasses into the bridge of his nose. One day he was sitting on the steps of a house, bored, when he saw a bird fly quickly past. “In that instant I saw trails of energy follow the flight of the bird, and I realized that things, molecules and energy, are always zipping around—a high speed symphony of energy always going on. I have never been bored since.”

Moses eventually earned a degree in psychology with a special interest in the Jungian approach from the University of Oregon in Eugene. He has worked in canneries, termite and dry rot repair, and owned both a chocolate company and a lumber business. In 1987, he moved to Yelapa, a remote fishing village on Mexico’s Northern Pacific Coast, and soon after married fellow artist and art dealer Anton Haardt. Although he has always painted for pleasure, Moses is now interested in exploring images and ideas that flash through his mind. “I am just trying to see life clearly, whether my eyes are open or shut.”

His most recent work has focused on the human-machine singularity. He asks, “How must the human and the machine modify or compromise as they merge with the other in order to forge a lasting relationship? Must the machine become a little more human-like, the human more machine? We already have merged human and machine intelligence, but there are those among us who wish to combine them in a literal way in one housing in hopes of outwitting the reaper."

DEAN MILLIEN(1975– )

Growing up without store-bought games and toys, Dean “The Tin Man” Millien began making his own miniature sculptures and animal creations, called “tin things,” at an early age. Each sculpture is unique aluminum foil origami homage to wild and domesticated creatures. Starting with miniature sculptures rendered out of aluminum foil or sponge, Millien has only recently begun to create life-size figures.

The artist, who has previously been diagnosed with Mixed Specific Developmental Disorder, came to the League Artist Natural Design (LAND) studio in late 2007 and has been a productive artist with a wonderful sense of humor and passion for art. When he first arrived at LAND, Dean participated in weaving projects and other group activities, until staff encouraged him to work on more ambitious projects and to experiment and refine his abilities with foil.

Millien constructs his miniature pieces in a rapid-fire series of movements, capturing mini portraits full of personality. He has become an excellent spokesman for his work and often creates a quick miniature sculpture, while discussing his artwork, as a gift to anyone who expresses interest. His creations have a wide following and can be found in such prominent collections as Citibank, J. Crew and Paper magazine.

P.NOSA (1971– )

Paul Douglas Niemic was born in Virginia on February 4, 1971. He was the youngest of three children. Niemic was the shortened name that had been assigned to his parents by Ellis Island authorities when they emigrated from the Ukraine; after being teased in school for how his last name rhymed with “anemic,” the artist further shortened his name to a signature, P.Nosa.

Nosa has been drawing since early childhood, filling over 60 notebooks with sketches. He is also a world traveler, backpacker, mountain climber, collector of stories, guitar player, and a philosophy lover. After a near-death experience in a bike accident in 1995, a drummer friend gave him a set of drumsticks to occupy him over his long bedridden recovery. The concentrated occupation with rhythm proved key to awakening a profound sense of underlying rhythm inherent in most everything. Now using a solar and bike-powered old sewing machine, Nosa embroiders “word pictures” in concert with the imaginations of passersby, who supply him with five-word descriptions of images or mini-stories as he tours local fairs, street festivals, and museums all over the world. The resulting sewn pictures playfully narrate the viewer’s tale in a language that transcends words. “It is my firm belief,” writes Nosa, “that all of life's questions can be answered with a sewing machine.”

BARRY PTOLEMY (1969– )

Robert Barry Ptolemy was born in Los Angeles on January 24, 1969. Observing the early computer models his father brought home in the 1970s fueled Ptolemy's fascination with exponential technical progress and the possibility of life extension through computer technology. At age 12, Ptolemy had his first experience with filmmaking on the set of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, where he studied with Steven Spielberg during production. The next year he made his first short film, The Holograph, which won first prize at a local arts festival. After graduating from the School of Cinematic Arts at USC, Ptolemy went on to direct many award-winning films and commercials. In 2006, he read Ray Kurzweil's best-selling book, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, and began production on Transcendent Man, a documentary that follows Kurzweil on the lecture circuit across five countries as he spreads his controversial vision for a post-biological future in which the boundary between human and machine becomes increasingly blurred.

RIGO 23 (1966– )

Rigo 23 was born Ricardo Gouveia on April 20, 1966 in Funchal city, on the island of Madeira, Portugal. While their father worked in the postal office, Rigo and his brother would spend the day playing outside the building, picking wild berries, hunting lizards, and drawing on discarded postal envelopes. Back home, the boys' mother judged which of the day's drawing were the best (diplomatically selecting one from each son). Luckily, salesmen convinced Rigo's father to purchase two art encyclopedias during this time, which arrived in the mail each month, “so art books and comic books, Goya and Donald Duck's nephews, co-existed in a curious child's hierarchy free world.” Activism in Rigo's work can be traced to an early age—he won his first bicycle through a newspaper competition for “Tree Day,” entering a drawing of a tree attached to oxygen tanks to protest air pollution. During high school he collaborated with his ecology teacher, illustrating a “green page” in the local newspaper. As a young man in Lisbon, Rigo found a job working for a man who made window displays for travel agencies, using adhesive colored paper that had to be cut in reverse for mounting to the inside of a window. This technique inspired his first work to be shown in a museum.

From the artist: “War is inscribed so deeply into the effort towards "technological development" that it is very difficult to imagine technological development divorced from an uninterrupted, blind trust in the merits of war to improve our lives, starting with the genocide of America's original inhabitants—humans and otherwise—to make way for this "technological progress."

Rigo 23 lives and works in San Francisco, where he has maintained his childhood dedication to ecological and political activism, often using the forum of public art to voice his concerns.

O.L. SAMUELS (1931– )

Ossie Lee Samuels was born in Wilcox County, Georgia, on November 18, 1931. The artist left home when he was eight and found various odd jobs around the country, including working as a farmer, professional boxer, and tree surgeon. While working as a tree surgeon in 1982, Samuels was seriously injured and had to spend a lengthy recovery in a wheelchair. The accident sent him into a deep depression, until he remembered his grandmother’s advice to carve wood whenever he was down. This was the beginning of Samuels' artistic career.

Samuels works mainly with found wood such as tree trunks, roots, and old wood furniture, which he will carve for months at a time. Although color blind, Samuels paints several layers of wild, expressive colors, “using every color so he doesn’t leave any out.” He is known for his imaginative images, featuring dreamlike figures, and mythical creatures, each with a story about its existence. Samuels’ preference is to carve images of horses, which he says are “the most prideful of all the animals.” His work often has a spiritual message, as Samuels became a lay minister later in life.

O.L. Samuels lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with his wife and uses his living room as a workshop. He is considered one of the most talented self-taught artists in America by museums across the country. Samuels’ work is part of several permanent collections, including the Arkansas Arts Center, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Gadsden Art Center.

REVEREND ALBERT WAGNER (1924–2006)

Born in 1924 in Bassett, Arkansas, Albert Wagner went to work in the cotton fields as a water carrier for the pickers when he was ten years old. In 1941 at the age of 17, he moved with his family to Cleveland, Ohio, where he worked as a dishwasher before starting his own furniture moving company. Years later, while cleaning his basement in preparation for his fiftieth birthday celebration, he noticed some paint spatters on a piece of wood and was suddenly overwhelmed with memories of his childhood and with inspiration for works of art. In the years that followed he made hundreds of paintings and sculptures to "get the word out."

Turning his house on Cleveland's east side into an environment he called "The People Love People House of God," the Reverend Albert Wagner decorated the outside of the building with found objects. He crammed the interior with enormous sculptures around which he counseled members of his small, informal congregation, which met regularly at a nearby storefront church. Wagner worked in his home studio creating over 3,000 paintings and sculptures for 32 years, until his death on September 1, 2006 at age 82.

FRANK WARREN(1964– )

In 2004, Frank Warren started the PostSecret project and invited people to share their secrets on a postcard, posted to him anonymously. He set just two criteria for these submissions: 1. The secret must be true, 2. It must also be something never revealed to anyone else before. Since then, Warren has received more than 700,000 postcards. The cards artistically express some personal desire, hope, fear, humor, humiliation, confession, and much more. Surprisingly, the single most common secret people send in is some variation on the personal revelation, “I pee in the shower.” The first four compilations of Warren’s chosen best secrets each made The New York Times Best Sellers list. His fifth book, PostSecrets: Confessions on Life, Death, and God, resulted from a collaboration with the American Visionary Art Museum on their exhibition, All Faiths Beautiful. PostSecret is an ongoing community art project with a huge web-based readership (over 600 million hits since it went live). Warren has been awarded the Mental Health Advisory Lifetime Achievement Award, and raised more than $1,000,000 for suicide prevention with the help of the PostSecret Community.

Frank Warren, his wife Jan, and daughter Haley all share an excellent sense of humor—and with hundreds of secrets arriving at their door every week in Germantown, Maryland, that’s a very good thing!

SALLY WILLOWBEE (1946– )

Born December 6, 1946, Sara Joan Willoughby became Sally Lilychild Willowbee over the course of her life. Sally replaced Sara because Sara was considered too serious a name for a child at the time; Willowbee replaced Willoughby during the feminist movement of the 1970s, as theorists challenged the dominance of patronymic surname, the artist conceived her own version; Joan turned into Lilychild in remembrance of her mother, Lillian, who died a few years ago.

Lillian and George Willoughby raised their children in Des Moines, IA, and then in the South Jersey countryside, where the family took care of the farm animals, gardens, and repairs together. The second of four children, Willowbee learned to build structures and make her own clothes at an early age. Her parents were Quakers and committed peace activists who became increasingly radical and were often arrested for their participation in protests. Their beliefs had a huge impact on Willowbee, who twice walked from Philadelphia to Washington for peace marches as a child. After graduating from Kalamazoo College in 1968, Willowbee dedicated herself to the peace movement full-time, working and living communally with other activists to conserve resources. Despite her commitment to the cause, Willowbee never stopped “making things.” She explains, “Meetings were all based on consensus and I usually had some art project to take to those long long meetings, to keep my fingers busy. I got a lot done.” Later, when she became more involved in the feminist movement, Willowbee came to appreciate the quilts, bedspreads, and paper beads she was making as true art forms using the materials of the home, in contrast to the traditional view that they are second class women's crafts. She went on to teach herself plumbing, electric and woodworking, bringing many of her skills to the women's communes she lived on after coming out in the 1970s. Willowbee continues to create and travel in her VW bus. She writes, “In other countries, machines are considered to have souls and there are special days to celebrate this. I have always named my cars and often talk to machinery.”