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Artists

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35 Who Made a Difference: Steven Spielberg

A renowned director contemplates the lessons of history

35 Who Made a Difference: Andy Goldsworthy

Using nature as his canvas, the artist creates works of transcendent beauty

Central Park

Christo Does Central Park

After a quarter century’s effort, the wrap artist and his wife, Jeanne-Claude, blaze a saffron trail in New York City

Trumpeter Swan, John James Audubon, 1838.

John James Audubon: America’s Rare Bird

The foreign-born frontiersman became one of the 19th century’s greatest wildlife artists and a hero of the ecology movement

For the 2005 Festival of China, artist Cai Guo-Qiang created a fireworks display over the Potomac River in Washington, D.C.

Art That Goes Boom

The works of Cai Guo-Qiang, director of visual effects for the opening ceremonies at the Beijing Olympic Games, truly sizzle

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Lee Bontecou’s Brave New World

A star of the 1960s art scene returns with a triumphant exhibition of futuristic works

Back to Nature

Artist Steve Tobin turns organic forms into sculpture

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The Mad Potter of Biloxi

George E. Ohr’s wild, wonderful pots gathered dust in a garage for half a century. Now architect Frank Gehry is designing a museum dedicated to the artist

Photo of James Rosenquist

Big!

Pop artist James Rosenquist returns to the limelight with a dazzling retrospective of his larger-than-life works

"Olmec butterfly" rug by Isaac Vasquez of Oaxaca

Dream Weavers

In the Mexican village of Teotitlán, gifted artisans create a future from bright hand-loomed rugs

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Matisse & Picasso

As a new exhibition makes clear, these friends and rivals spurred each other to change the course of 20th-century art

A New York residence designed by Lin is adaptable, "like origami or a transformer toy," says the architect in her studio with Ranch the cat.

Monumental Achievement

Our 2002 profile of architect Maya Lin that marked the 20th year of the Vietnam Memorial

American Will Thompson (with his take on Goya's Young Woman with a Fan) has been copying at the Louvre since 1994.

Master Class

Like generations of painters before them, artists from around the globe go to Paris to copy the masterpieces at the Louvre

Edgar Degas rarely painted a pure still life, but he often included still lifes in the backgrounds or corners of his compositions. In The Millinery Shop (1882-86), the hats—their shapes, textures and colors—take center stage; the figure is merely an accessory.

Still Delightful

A sumptuous show documents how the Impressionists breathed new life into the staid tradition of still life painting

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Turning Point

New Yorkers didn’t much care for the twin towers until a nimble Frenchman named Philippe Petit danced across a wire between them

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Minding the “Milkstone”

When works of art are pollen and rice, and even milk, the Hirshhorn Museum gives them extra-special care

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Imagining the Orient

A new exhibition explores the potent mystique of the Near East and its sway on American Art and Culture

“The Stormy Petrel of American Art”

Rockwell Kent was a master of bucolic landscapes, but his contentious politics earned him the nickname

The Ferengi (left) and Borg (right) designs, both developed by Westmore for Star Trek: The Next Generation

Beauty and the Beasts

Coming from a long line of tortured but brilliant makeup artists, Michael Westmore has put the past behind him, boldly going where no one has gone before

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Hawaii’s Vanished Birds

For the National Zoological Park, an artist depicts the diversity of the islands’ extinct avian species

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