Portraying the blacks in calm, friendly and dignified images of non-threatening African-American and struggling for their civil rights through her art, the African-American painter and educator, Laura Wheeler Waring, is best remembered for her educational work and the portraits which displayed the achievement and dignity of her people.

Celebrated as an artist of consummate skill and imagination, Wheeler was born in Hartford, Connecticut, on May 16, 1887 in a prominent family of New England.

Synthesizing Surrealism and the sensuous color and painterliness of the School of Paris with his own highly personal abstract vocabulary, the Armenian-American painter, Arshile Gorky, is celebrated as the last of the great Surrealist painters and one of the first Abstract Expressionists.

Famous for creating beauty out of personal tragedy, Gorky was born Vosdanig Adoian, on April 15, 1904, in the village of Khorkom, near lake Van, in an Armenian province on the eastern border of Ottoman Turkey.