J. A. Scott Kelso

J. A. Scott Kelso (born 1947 in Derry, Northern Ireland) is a neuroscientist, and Professor of Complex Systems and Brain Sciences, Professor of Psychology, Biological Sciences and Biomedical Science at Florida Atlantic University (FAU) in Boca Raton, Florida and The University of Ulster (Magee Campus) in Derry, N. Ireland.
Kelso has worked on coordination dynamics, the science of coordination and on fundamental mechanisms underlying voluntary movements and their relation to the large-scale coordination dynamics of the human brain.
His experimental research in the late 1970s and early 1980s led to the HKB model (Haken–Kelso–Bunz), a mathematical formulation that quantitatively describes and predicts how elementary forms of coordinated behavior arise and change adaptively as a result of nonlinear interactions among components.
Biography.
Kelso was born in the city of Derry, Northern Ireland. He attended Foyle College (1958–1965), receiving his undergraduate education at Stranmillis University College Belfast from 1965 to 1969, and the University of Calgary, Alberta from 1971 to 1972. He obtained his PhD from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1975.
From 1976 to 1978 Kelso was Assistant Professor and Director of The Motor Behavior Laboratory at the University of Iowa. Between 1978 and 1985 he was Senior Research Scientist at Yale University's Haskins Laboratories in New Haven, Connecticut and Professor of Psychology and Biobehavioral Sciences (Unit of Behavioral Genetics) at the University of Connecticut.
In 1985 he founded the Center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences at Florida Atlantic University, an interdisciplinary research center that includes neuroscientists, applied mathematicians, physicists, psychologists and computer scientists housed in the same physical facility, working together on common problems of complex, biological systems ranging from molecules to minds. Kelso leads a team of researchers in the Center's Human Brain and Behavior Laboratory.
Since 1985, Kelso has held the Glenwood and Martha Creech Eminent Scholar Chair in Science at Florida Atlantic University, where he is also Professor of Psychology, Biological Sciences, and Biomedical Sciences. Kelso was Program Director of the NIMH’s National Training Program in Complex Systems and Brain Sciences at Florida Atlantic University between 1987 and 2005. Working with the FAU Administration and the Chancellor's office of the State University System, Kelso helped establish the Center's PhD Degree in Complex Systems and Brain Sciences.
In 1995, Kelso co-directed the Summer School in Complex Systems at the Santa Fe Institute. He served as President of the South Florida chapter of Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society, from 1995 to 1999. He is a Member of the Scientific Board of the Plexus Institute, the World Council of the Einstein Institutes and the Advisory Board of the Intelligent Systems Research Center at the University of Ulster Magee Campus.
Kelso has held visiting professorships in France, Germany, Russia and (currently) Ireland. He has also lectured extensively in the U.S.A. and abroad. He has received many honors and awards for his scientific research. In 2007, he was named Pierre de Fermat Laureate.
Work.
The objective of Kelso's research is to understand how human beings (and human brains — singly and together) coordinate behavior. Kelso and his research team currently use non-invasive neuroimaging techniques (EEG, MEG, fMRI, PET, etc.) and statistical tools to gather information about the structure and function of the brain during real-time behavior.
Over the last 30 years or so, along with colleagues working in laboratories around the world, he has participated in an interdisciplinary science called coordination dynamics. Coordination dynamics is an empirical and conceptual framework that tries to explain how patterns of coordination form, persist, adapt and change. The insights of coordination dynamics have been applied to predict behavior in different kinds of systems at different levels of analysis.
Coordination dynamics is grounded in the concepts of synergetics and the mathematical tools of dynamical systems (see nonlinear dynamic systems theory and synergetics). But coordination dynamics seeks to model specific properties of human cognition, neurophysiology, and social function – such as anticipation, intention, attention, decision-making and learning. The principal claim of coordination dynamics is that the coordination of neurons in the brain and the coordinated actions of people and animals are linked by virtue of sharing a common mathematical or dynamical structure.
Kelso has worked on metastability in neuroscience. This concept has seen a growing interest among theoretical and computational neuroscientists, since it provides a mathematical formalization for the idea that the individual parts of the brain can on the one hand be specialized and segregated yet on the other hand function as an integrated whole.
Early work.
Kelso's early work used nerve block techniques to cut off sensory input from the limbs in humans. His experiments showed that even without conscious awareness of limb position, humans could move accurately to desired locations in space. Along with work conducted by Polit and Bizzi on monkeys at MIT Kelso's research was a key to helping establish the equilibrium point theory of motor control originally postulated by Anatol Feldman. Then, working with his students David Goodman and Dan Southard he demonstrated—using a pulsed light emitting diode technique long before the age of sophisticated computer assisted motion analysis—that the brain controls the complex, coordinated movements of the upper limbs by exploiting functional synergies, a notion originally put forth by the Russian physiologist and cybernetician Nicolai Bernstein. Further work at Haskins Labs using a combination of novel perturbation techniques, kinematic and intramuscular recordings discovered that the control and coordination of complex speech gestures was also based on functional synergies or coordination structures. In asking how synergies might be formed in motor systems Kelso turned from Sherringtonian neurophysiology to theories of self-organization in particular the fledgling interdisciplinary field of synergetics founded by Hermann Haken. At that time, the dominant understanding of animated movement was that behavior is determined by a "central program", a prearranged set of instructions that prescribe how a set of biomechanical components should behave. In contrast, Kelso showed experimentally that behavior can also emerge in a self-organizing way, as a result of highly nonlinear interactions among many interconnected elements. His experiments were the first to demonstrate the existence of phase transitions—sudden and spontaneous shifts from one coordinated state to another as a parameter is continuously varied. Phase transitions are a basic mechanism of self-organization in nature and Kelso's experiments, which have been replicated many times, were the first to show them in the coordinated movements of human beings.
HKB model.
Kelso and his colleagues later demonstrated that many of the complexities of coordinated motor behavior in complex, multi-degree-of-freedom systems can be derived from relatively simple, but nonlinear mathematical laws. For a review of this work see Kelso et al. (1987) and Schöner and Kelso (1988) In particular, Kelso developed a mathematical model in collaboration with the eminent theoretical physicist Hermann Haken, the father of laser theory and synergetics. This "HKB model" was able to derive basic forms of coordination observed in Kelso's experiments using a system of nonlinear relations between individual coordinating elements The HKB model explained and predicted experimental observations such as "critical slowing down", and "enhanced fluctuations" associated with instability and dramatic changes in coordination. Later extensions of HKB accommodated the effects of noise, broken symmetry, multiple interacting heterogeneous components, recruitment-annihilation processes, parametric stabilization, and the role of changing environments on coordination
Brain imaging work.
Subsequently, Kelso and his colleagues moved from the hand to the brain, using large arrays of SQUID magnetometers to record the neuromagnetic activity of the brain and Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging to record BOLD (Blood Oxygen Level Dependent) activation in brain regions. This work showed that mathematical forms observable in the coordinated movement of the hands (such as phase transitions), were also observable in images of brain activity. Or as Kelso puts it, "the same coordination dynamics governs brain activity and human behavior." For example, on the basis of recordings and analysis of human brain activity Viktor Jirsa and Armin Fuchs along with Kelso were able to derive the HKB equations of coordination at the behavioral level from a more realistic anatomical and physiological model of the underlying neural substrate
Current research.
Kelso's current work focuses on whether the same principles and mechanisms of coordination dynamics apply also to human brains working together in social settings. Using large electrode arrays now available in the field of electroencephalography (EEG), he and his co-workers have been imaging the brains of pairs of humans, as they perform coordinated hand movements. Remarkably, Kelso's team has identified signatures in the brain that correspond to whether humans coordinate together or act independently. In another line of research, Kelso and colleagues have created a novel way to understand the real time interaction between a human and a machine, called Virtual Partner Interaction (VPI). In VPI, humans coordinate with a virtual partner whose behavior is driven by a computerized version of the HKB equations, known to govern basic forms of human coordination. VPI is a principled approach to human-machine interaction and may open up new ways to understand how humans interact with human-like machines.
Books.
Kelso's first full-length book, "Dynamic Patterns : The Self-Organization of Brain and Behavior" (MIT Press, 1995) summarizes the first 20 years of his theoretical and experimental work on coordination, and argues that the creation and evolution of patterned behavior at all levels—from neurons to mind—is governed by the dynamical processes of self-organization. The book is written for the general reader, and uses simple experimental examples and illustrations to convey essential concepts, strategies, and methods, with a minimum of mathematics.
With Viktor Jirsa, Kelso edited the book "Coordination Dynamics: Issues and Trends " (Springer, 2004). Kelso is also the Founding Editor for the Springer series on "Understanding Complex Systems" and has served on the Editorial Boards of 10 scientific journals/periodicals in various disciplines.
Kelso's second full-length book, written with his former postdoc David A. Engstrøm, is "The Complementary Nature" (MIT Press, 2006). This book attempts to reconcile what it calls "the philosophy of complementary pairs" with the science of coordination dynamics. Pairs of opposites are found everywhere in nature and in science (e.g. cooperation and competition, integration and segregation, individual and collective, self and other, body and mind, nature and nurture, etc. etc.). Kelso and Engstrøm argue that these pairs are not mutually exclusive, but complementary. They propose a comprehensive, empirically-based scientific theory of how contraries can be reconciled based on Kelso's theory of metastable coordination dynamics. The essence of the theory is that the human brain is capable of displaying two apparently contradictory, mutually exclusive behaviors – integration and segregation – at the same time. Kelso and Engstrøm use the tilde, or squiggle (~), as the symbol for reconciled complementary pairs (e.g. body~mind, nature~nurture). The squiggle exposes a basic truth: both complementary aspects and their dynamics are needed for an exhaustive description and understanding of the complex phenomena and systems in life, mind, society and nature.
Publications.
Scott Kelso has published numerous articles and books. A selection:


Academic ranks in the Netherlands

Academic ranks in the Netherlands are the titles, relative importance and power of professors, researchers, and administrative personnel held in academia. These ranks are mostly limited to scholars holding a position at the Dutch research universities with the position of Lector being the exception at the vocational universities.
Professor ranks.
Most academic staff will have both research and teaching duties.
The ranking system of faculty with combined teaching and research tasks in Dutch universities is as follows:
In daily practice no distinction is made between rank 1 and 2 in the Dutch ranking system. Each rank increase come with a shift in pay grade. Promotion from rank 2 to rank 1 within the same function is usually easier than moving to a differently named function.
University of applied sciences appoint "lector"s to coordinate their (applied) research. Like a full professor, a lector coordinates a research group. In contrast to full professors, lectors are not allowed to be principal supervisor of PhD students and are not allowed to use the formal title "professor".
Full professors.
A (full) professor should have substantial research achievements and international reputation. The title professor is not protected by Dutch law.
The head of a department or of a "chair-group" within a department is a full professor. After a "chaired" professor leaves university, an open application is usually announced to replace the chair holder.
Personal chairs, are full professors created based on personal achievement but have no formal administrative function in leading a department. Personal chair are becoming increasingly familiar; and are generally promoted from the assistant or associate professor ranks in a department. If a personal chair leaves the chair ceases to exist.
Dutch universities also appoint "professors occupying an endowed chair" (Dutch: "bijzonder hoogleraar", literally "special professor"), often on a part-time basis. Special professors usually have their main employment somewhere else, often in industry or at a research institute or University elsewhere, although some foundations sponsor a special professor for one of the sitting associate professors. The special professor ("bijzonder hoogleraar") does not get paid by the university, but receives a salary from an external organization, such as a company, an organization or a fund. Special (endowed) professors sometimes provide lectures or do research on special topics associated with their main employment. They also often supervise graduate students who may do their research at the place of the professor's main employment.
Some Dutch universities have also instituted "University Professorships" appointing scientific ambassadors by the university, rather than representing a department. The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences can sponsor an established professor to be an "Academy Professor". In addition, members of the Royal Academy are selected full professor. Being elected to member of the academy is a high honor for a sitting professor.
When a full professor retires in good standing, the professor becomes professor emeritus. This allows the retired professor to keep the title professor for life. A professor emeritus is allowed to supervise doctorate theses until five years after retirement, but the use of the honorific professor is for life. Professors emeriti have no formal teaching or administrative duties and are paid no salaries (instead they receive pension payment). They are often provided with a desk and will have access to university resources for as long as the person so requests. In any event, professors who move out of the academy or retire in good standing retain the "ius promovendi". (see below) for five years thereafter.
Due to the system of part-time special professors and personal chair-holders promoted from sitting staff within a department, many university research groups will have several professors.
In the Netherlands a special right of a full professor has always been the "ius promovendi". This means that by Dutch law, any doctoral dissertation must always be supported by a full professor; or in other words the principal supervisor of any PhD project is always a full professor. From 2018 onwards, the law has changed and holder of a position with a research university appointment (effectively an experienced UD or UHD or a (senior) researcher who has a doctorate) is eligible to be main supervisor of a PhD. student. Universities have agreed that only such colleagues with proven capacity to supervise PhD projects will be granted this right (this means in practice that such colleagues have to have research-led profiles and considerable experience in co-supervising research students). Increasingly, Ph.Ds are co-supervised by a UD or UHD, and they are often the regular point of contact for the Ph.D student, particularly in large research groups.
International comparison.
Although the ranks are often translated as if they were aligned with the American system (i.e. assistant, associate, and full professor), this not as clear-cut. Traditionally a lecturer could only become associate or full professor by applying for such a position if there was a vacancy. However, Dutch universities are moving towards a system closer to the US tenure track system to have more flexibility in rewarding merits of individuals. In Dutch universities, permanent positions must be offered upon the third extension of fixed-term position or after 6 years of continuous contracts (whichever comes first), a rule which was instigated to avoid permatemp situation; permanent positions may, of course, be offered sooner. Unlike in the US, the terms Assistant Professor and Associate Professor are not as such indicative of tenure status.
In 1986 there was a reform of the system. Junior professors and professors of the agricultural and technology universities, until then labelled as "Lector" were transformed into full Professors, but as a new Professor A rank at a lower salary scale than the existing professors (who were designated Professor B) on the older, and more favourable, salary scale. The present salary scales refer to Professor 1 or Professor 2 (the former is the higher in standing, as the Universities adopted the Hay criteria for function-ranking). The former title "buitengewoon hoogleraar" ("professor by special appointment", literally "extraordinary professor") for a part-time professor is no longer used (since the 1986 reforms); all the then holders of such positions became part-time full professors '(gewoon hoogleraren).
In the early 2000s the lector position (Readership in traditional UK terms) was introduced at universities of applied sciences for research group leaders dealing with applied research. Until that moment universities of applied sciences had no research tasks. Based on salary pay grade, lectors would rank between associate and full professor in the research university system.


Ayano Hori

 is a Japanese women's professional shogi player ranked 1-kyū. She is a member of the .
Promotion history.
Hori has been promoted as follows:
Note: All ranks are women's professional ranks.


Neil Williams (artist)

Neil Williams (1934 – March 28, 1988) was an American painter. Williams was an abstract painter primarily known for his pioneering work with shaped canvases in the early 1960s. His paintings of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s are associated with geometric abstraction, hard-edge painting, color field, and lyrical abstraction, although he did not readily subscribe to any category for his work. He taught Fine Arts at the School of Visual Arts from the late 1970s until the early 1980s.
Biography.
Williams was born in Bluff, Utah. He was in the process of moving to Brazil when he died in New York City at the age of 53.
Williams graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1959; showed his work in 1959 at the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco and moved to New York City that same year. He began exhibiting his paintings in New York in 1960. He was a regular patron of Max's Kansas City throughout the period of the mid-1960s and early 1970s when it belonged to his friend Mickey Ruskin.
His paintings were exhibited at important art galleries in New York including solo exhibitions at the Green Gallery (1964), and the André Emmerich Gallery (1966 and 1968) both on 57th Street in Manhattan and at the Dwan Gallery in Los Angeles (1966). His work was included in several important group exhibitions during the 1960s including in 1966 the influential "Systemic Painting" exhibition that showcased Geometric abstraction in the American art world via Minimal art, Shaped canvas, and Hard-edge painting curated by Lawrence Alloway at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City. He also participated in several group exhibitions at museums including 2 Whitney Museum of American Art annuals in 1967 and 1973; the Park Place Gallery and galleries and museums elsewhere. In 1968 he was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. Williams had four more solo exhibitions in New York during the 1970s. By 1982 he had a solo exhibition in Brazil and decided to move there permanently. In 1986 he had a career retrospective in the historic Clocktower Gallery in New York City, (currently directed by Alanna Heiss, founder and former Director of P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City, Queens).


Toxic (graffiti artist)

Torrick Ablack, also known as Toxic (born January 16, 1965) is an American artist who was part of the Graffiti movement of the early 1980s in New York City. He transitioned from street art to exhibiting his paintings in galleries and museums internationally.
Life and career.
Ablack was born in Bronx, New York on January 16, 1965. His mother was Puerto Rican and his father's family came from Trinidad. In his youth he was given the nickname Toxic Battery, which became his graffiti tag. He began painting graffiti at the age of 13 with A-One and Kool Koor. They joined Rammellzee's graffiti crew Tag Master Killers, which also consisted of Delta2. Each member designed their own style for arming letters based on Rammellzee's theory of Gothic Futurism, which describes graffiti as the weaponization of letters in a battle to reclaim language from a "diseased culture" of social control. In the early 1980s, they were among the graffiti artists bringing original art and music from the Bronx and Queens to the downtown art scene. In 1982, Toxic, A-One, and Kool Koor participated in the group show "Camouflaged Panzerism" at Fashion Moda in South Bronx.
Toxic met artist Jean-Michel Basquiat soon after Basquiat's exhibit at Annina Nosei Gallery in 1982. Basquiat became his mentor and hired him as an occasional studio assistant. In late 1982, Toxic and Rammellzee accompanied Basquiat to Los Angeles while he prepared for his show at the Gagosian Gallery. While in Los Angeles, where they were struck by how the film industry portrayed African Americans, especially during the Golden Age of Hollywood. In response, they dubbed themselves the Hollywood Africans as a social and political statement to counter the stereotypical portrayals of African Americans in Hollywood. The trio are depicted in Basquiat's paintings "Hollywood Africans in front of the Chinese Theater with Footprints of Movie Stars" (1983) and "Hollywood Africans" (1983).
Toxic stayed true to the graffiti spraying technique and worked on canvases pinned to the wall. His work became more abstract that the tags he wrote on subway cars. Toxic was part of the exhibit "Rapid Enamel" at the University of Chicago in 2014, which was the first showcasing of graffiti in an American institution. His artwork has since appeared in the collections of major museums, including the Brooklyn Museum, the Groninger Museum and the Museum of the City of New York. In 2013, he was featured in the exhibit "Last of the Hollywood Africans: Toxic, Rammellzee and Jean-Michel Basquiat" at Londonewcastle Project Space in London. In 2015, he was featured in the group exhibit "Le Pressionnisme" at Pinacothèque de Paris. That year, he participated in the exhibi"t Graffiti, New York meets the Dam" at the Amsterdam Museum. In 2020, his painting, "Ransom Note: CEE" (1984), was included in the exhibit "Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation" at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Toxic designed a wallpaper, a printed linen, and a wall panel in collaboration with French textile house Pierre Frey.
He is based in France, but spends his time between Paris, Florence, and New York.


Henry Haig

Henry Haig (19306 December 2007) was an English abstract artist, painter and sculptor but notable predominantly for his stained glass work.
Early life and education.
Born in Hampstead in 1930, Henry's talent was recognised and encouraged by Jack Fairhurst, his art teacher at Richmond and East Sheen County School for Boys. A visit to Wimbledon School of Art at the age of fifteen led to an immediate offer of a place. Haig studied painting and sculpture there for five years until called for national service in 1949. He refused an officer's commission on completion, preferring to return to his art studies. He applied for a place in the painting school of the Royal College of Art but accepted an invitation to the stained glass department, led by Lawrence Lee. Haig was at RCA between 1952 and 1955, and, having met fellow student Joan Salmon during this time, they were married on New Year's Day, 1956. The couple went on to have five children.
Career and works.
One of Haig's earliest public works is the concrete, glass and granite chip frieze in the booking hall of South Ruislip station. Thought by some to date from the 1948 construction of the station, others date it at 1961.
Both Joan and Henry went into teaching. Henry taught at Kingston College of Art and, whilst there, received a commission for St Richard's Church in Ham, London, under construction in 1964–65. Henry created fourteen dalle de verre windows inspired by the life of St Richard. He also painted the sacristy door panels which are faced with enamels, gold and silver fused onto sheet steel, the left door depicting the Bishop's chalice and the right evoking the "shimmer at the entrance to Paradise". The sculpted wood, copper and gilt processional cross and candlesticks are also Haig's work.
Haig's commissions gradually allowed him to give up teaching and concentrate full-time on his art, based in his home studio, a converted racquets court, in Fifehead Magdalen, Dorset where the family lived from 1969.
Haig received a commission for Clifton Cathedral, Bristol, the project dating from 1965 and completed in 1972–73. Like St Richard's, Clifton has a six-pointed star plan with a hexagonal interior space. Haig's window contains 8,000 pieces of glass set in epoxy resin. The larger of the narthex windows depicts "Pentecost" and the smaller one "Jubilation".
Two windows symbolic of previous churches were made for Christ Church (Methodist/URC) Chichester and installed in 1982. Family associations were the theme for 1984 windows in the church of St. Mary, Donhead St Mary, Wiltshire. In 1985, Haig's two windows were installed in the church of Christ the King, Amesbury depicting 'Jesus Christ the Apple Tree' to the left and 'The Firmament' to the right of the altar. St Theresa's Convent Chapel, Effingham, Surrey has two of Haig's works, a four panel window and a single one on the theme of "light" dated 1987. A year later, in 1988, Haig created two windows each comprising three panels and a triangle for St Peter's Convent, Woking.
One of Haig's best-known works is the memorial window for WPC Yvonne Fletcher, who was shot and killed while on duty during the Libyan Embassy siege on 17 April 1984. The window, in the lady chapel of St Leonard's Church in Yvonne Fletcher's home town of Semley, Wiltshire, was dedicated by the Bishop of Salisbury on 17 April 1988. At the bottom of the centre light is the badge of the Metropolitan Police, and Yvonne's name is along the base of the three lights.
Haig was commissioned to produce a window to commemorate the 50th anniversary of RAF Lyneham, paid for with funds raised from air personnel contributions. The official launch of the work, in St Michael's and All Saints, Lyneham, Wiltshire, was celebrated at a service for the anniversary by the Queen on 17 May 1990.
Most, but not all of Haig's work is installed in religious buildings. In February 1991, Haig's "Minerva" comprising six windows was installed in a surgery in Bath, Somerset.
On 22 November 1992, the Michael James memorial window was installed in the archway of the west door in Wimborne Minster. Haig took inspiration from the phrase "praise to the Holiest in the height and in depth be praise" from Elgar's 'Dream of Gerontius' which Michael James, the church's assistant organist, had been studying prior to his death in 1981.
"The Creed" and "Garden of Eden" windows in St Leonard's parish church, Priors Marston, Warwickshire were installed in 1993.
The north rose window in St Mary's Church, Swanage, installed in 1994, depicts The Creation. Haig's other works in Dorset also include the golden oculus for St Mark's Church in Highcliffe, which represents Alpha and Omega and fills a space in the gallery wall originally occupied by the organ. Other Dorset works include the 'Journey from Stourhead' screen and chapel windows in Shaftesbury Hospital, and a glass dome, cross and the cabinet for the chapel of the Joseph Weld Hospice in Dorchester.
In 1994 Haig provided the east window for St Stephen's York, replacing a window destroyed by arson in 1992. The design was inspired by the writing of Alcuin of York "In word and in example let thy light shine in the black dark like the morning star". The centre panel shows Saint Stephen's arms raised looking up to heaven and seeing the vision of Christ. In the top right of the window, three hunched figures represent the martyrs of every age.
In 1995 the south aisle of St. Michael Shalbourne, Wiltshire, gained a two light window depicting St. Luke and the Blessed Virgin Mary. Atypical for Haig, the non-abstract, figurative, design was by another, respected, stained-glass artist, Karl Parsons, who had lived locally.
In 1997 two lights depicting rural scenes were added to the church of St Edith, Baverstock, Wiltshire. Also that year Haig's arched window was installed at All Saints, Newland, 'The Cathedral of the Forest', and dedicated, in 2000, to the memory of its donor, Joan and her husband, Henry Ludlam.
In 1998 Haig's windows were installed in the church of the Most Holy Name and St. Edward, Shaftesbury. Haig started work on this in 1996, working with the congregation to refine the design, drawing on the colours of the windows in Nantes Cathedral. He used traditional construction with lead came and French, English and German mouth-blown glass. Fired iron oxides and silver stain were used to produce the desired colours and effects.
Haig's twelve windows in the church of Douai Abbey, Thatcham were blessed by Abbot Geoffrey Scott OSB on 20 November 1999.
Haig was commissioned to create a stained glass window to celebrate the millennium for St Michael & All Angels' church, Alsop-en-le-Dale, Derbyshire. Its theme; "I saw a new heaven and a new earth" is from Revelation 21:1. The Bishop of Derby dedicated the window on 30 September 2001. Haig also created a window for the south aisle of St Mary's Church, Fordingbridge in 2000.
Henry Wylie Haig died in Yeovil on 6 December 2007, aged 77.


Selfie Type

Selfie Type is a keyboard technology for mobile phones made by Samsung Electronics. It uses the front-facing camera (the selfie camera) to track the user's fingers, enabling the user to type on an "invisible keyboard" on a table or another surface in front of the phone.
It was introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show 2020 and is expected to be launched in 2020.


Grazia Varisco

Grazia Varisco (born 1937 in Milan) is an Italian visual artist and designer.
Varisco attended the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan from 1956 to 1960, where she was a student of Achille Funi. In 1960 she joined Giovanni Anceschi, Davide Boriani, Gianni Colombo and Gabriele De Vecchi's kinetic art and op art Gruppo T, with whom she participated in exhibitions such as 'Arte Programmata' (Milan, 1962), 'Nouvelle tendance' (Zagreb, 1963) and the 'Miriorama' series (Milan, Genoa, Tokyo, Rome, Padua and Venice, 1960–63). Between 1961 and 1967 she worked as a graphic designer for the multinational retailer La Rinascente, the architecture and design magazine Abitare, the design company Kartell, and the Milan City Council.
Varisco is considered one of the few female artists involved in the op art movement together with Edna Andrade, Bridget Riley and Vera Molnár. Her work has been featured in many international exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale (1964 and 1986), the Rome Quadriennale (1973), the Toyama Triennale (1990); 'Force Fields: Phases of the Kinetic’ (Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona and Hayward Gallery, London, 2000); 'Beyond Geometry' (Los Angeles County Museum of Art and at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, 2004) and 'Op Art' (Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 2007).
From 1981 to 2007 she was Professor of Theory of Perception at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts.
In 2007 the President of Italy Giorgio Napolitano awarded her the 'Presidente della Repubblica Prize for Sculpture' in Rome.


Hideyuki Takano

 is a Japanese professional shogi player ranked 6-dan.
Early life.
Takano was born in Yokohama, Kanagawa Prefecture on June 15, 1972. He entered the Japan Shogi Association's apprentice school in December 1984 at the rank 6-kyū under the tutelage of shogi professional Makoto Nakahara. He was promoted to 1-dan in March 1991 and was awarded full professional status and the rank of 4-dan in April 1998 after winning the 22nd 3-dan League (October 1997March 1998) with a record of 13 wins and 5 losses.
Promotion history.
Takano's promotion history is as follows:


Thomas Darnell (artist)

Thomas Darnell (February 2, 1958) is an American artist known for his oil paintings of figurative landscapes and flowers, and abstracts.
French newspaper "L'Indépendant" describes his work as being influenced by modern painters Gerhard Richter and Ross Bleckner, but also by Caravaggio and Rembrandt.
Life and work.
Darnell and his second wife live in France, Darnell himself having initially moved to Paris in 1991 and subsequently to the South of France, however he exhibits internationally. His work has been featured in multiple international publications, including Taiwanese design magazine "ppapaer", Australian journal "The Cool Hunter", "Moco Loco", American design and lifestyle magazine "Atlanta Homes" "Brigitte" (Germany's largest women's magazine), "Artful Living Magazine", Spanish design magazine "El Mueble" and monthly British fashion magazine "Tatler".
Darnell was initially drawn to paint seriously after the death of his first wife. Throughout the 1990s, Darnell exhibited in New York City in SoHo and Tribeca He has also exhibited in Hong Kong, Singapore, Korea, Argentina, and Europe. He exhibited in Barcelona in 2016.
During a 1995 exhibition at the Fernando Alcolea Gallery in Barcelona, a writeup in "El País" described his work as being "painted with an extreme manual dexterity, something, on the one hand, typical of North American painters, based in the Leonardesque principle suggesting innumerable images starting with stains and in this case, effects of luminosity." The article went on to state "Occasionally, it reflects a mystic atmosphere by means of diffused forms which resemble clouds, other times, suggesting hollow waves, or on the contrary, lights more recognizable closer to candles." Like "L'independant", it compared his technique with that of Richter, and his preoccupation with light to that of Bleckner, but also referred to him as an echo of German Romantic landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich.


Dona Nelson

Dona Nelson (born 1947) is an American painter, best known for immersive, gestural, primarily abstract works employing unorthodox materials, processes and formats to disrupt conventional notions of painting and viewership. A 2014 "New Yorker" review observed, "Nelson gives notice that she will do anything, short of burning down her house to bully painting into freshly spluttering eloquence." Since 2002, long before it became a more common practice, Nelson has produced free-standing, double-sided paintings that create a more complex, conscious viewing experience. According to "New York Times" critic Roberta Smith, Nelson has dodged the burden of a "superficially consistent style," sustained by "an adventuresome emphasis on materials" and an athletic approach to process that builds on the work of Jackson Pollock. Writers in "Art in America" and "Artforum" credit her experimentation with influencing a younger generation of painters exploring unconventional techniques with renewed interest. Discussing one of Nelson's visceral, process-driven works, curator Klaus Kertess wrote, the paint-soaked "muslin is at once the tool, the medium, and the made."
Nelson has exhibited nationally and internationally, including solo shows at the Weatherspoon Art Museum and Tang Museum (survey, 2018), and group exhibitions at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Rose Art Museum, Mary Boone Gallery and Marlborough Fine Art. Her two-sided paintings featured in the 2014 Whitney Biennial were widely recognized and deemed some of the show's "most swooned-over works" by "Art in America". Nelson has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship (1994) and her work sits in numerous public collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Boston Museum of Fine Arts. She lives in Lansdale, Pennsylvania, and is a professor of painting and drawing at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University, where she has taught since 1991.
Life and career.
Nelson was born in 1947 in Grand Island, Nebraska and attended Ohio State University. In the fall of 1967, she moved to New York City to participate in the newly-formed Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. After returning to Ohio to complete her BFA in 1968, she moved to Lower Manhattan, renting a loft in what is now SoHo; five years later, she would move to another in the future Tribeca neighborhood. By 1971, she was featured in prominent shows such as "Twenty‐Six Contemporary Women Artists," curated by Lucy Lippard at the Aldrich Museum, and "Ten Young Artists" at the Guggenheim Museum. Critics Grace Glueck and Hilton Kramer noted her work in "New York Times" reviews of the two shows, respectively. In 1974, the Whitney Museum included her in its "Continuing Abstraction in American Art" exhibition; her first solo show followed at the Rosa Esman Gallery on 57th Street, in 1975.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Nelson exhibited at museums, universities, and the Hamilton and Michael Klein galleries in New York. She moved to Philadelphia in 1996, to continue teaching at the Tyler School of Art. Nelson has continued to show actively in New York, at Cheim and Read and the Thomas Erben Gallery, which has represented her since 2006.
Work.
Although Nelson has created representational images, she has primarily worked in a fluid, abstract vein that writers suggest confront the traditions of Abstract Expressionism head-on and build on Joan Miró's anti-paintings, which used nontraditional materials and processes to disrupt painting conventions. "Artforum" likened her "exhilarating" willingness to take risks to that of Sigmar Polke. Critics especially note her "adventurously tough-minded approach to process," which "flirts with painting’s destruction" by rejecting the "conventionally ingratiating" in favor of dissonant techniques, surfaces, and colors. Noting Nelson's anarchic refusal to adhere to an easily identifiable style, writers have observed that her exhibitions can appear like compendiums of modern and contemporary painting thought.
Nelson regards herself as a process artist rather than an expressionist, emphasizing the primacy of chance, improvisation, and touch in her process. She employs diverse methods—pouring, staining, splattering, stitching, and more—working on unprimed canvas with a variety of paints, nontraditional materials, and at times, a painting's stretchers to create unexpected surfaces, textures, reliefs, and patterns (sometimes referencing the Modernist grid).
Early work: 1968–1990.
Nelson's early art explored geometric, grid-based abstraction through intuitive and systematic modes of pictorial construction; reviewers noted it for its grasp of style, subtle color, and affinities with art by Agnes Martin and Ellsworth Kelly. Considering this work developmental, she eventually destroyed it. In the 1980s, Nelson shifted to painterly representational work (e.g., "Daily News", 1983) featuring ordinary interiors, landscapes and cityscapes, portrayed with an emotional realism and unfussy physicality. Figurative paintings, such as "Summer Man" (1983), offered centralized, life-size everyday subjects that "The New York Times" wrote, display a plain-spoken, "satisfying solidity" like those of Philip Guston; later works, such as "California Landscape or the Man Who Needs Everything" (1988), presaged future directions with glued, clothing-like pieces of muslin, saturated color, and increasing abstraction.
Mature work (1990–2002).
Many critics (and Nelson herself) consider her mature work to have begun after a long period of development, when she returned to abstraction in the 1990s. In this period, she regularly incorporated unconventional materials such as cheesecloth, muslin, gels, and modeling paste. She also began employing unorthodox techniques that combined control and accident to "disrupt" her paintings, such as pouring latex enamel paint over gridded fields (the "12 Stations of the Subway" series, 1997–8), making charcoal rubbings of highly textured, existing paintings (her ghostly "Rubbings," 2002), or adhering wadded, paint-soaked muslin to canvasses. Reviewers commented on the new work's collision of "formal order and procedural chaos," and raw and finished, which they found both dislocating and inviting, its power deriving from a "freeze-framing" of the painting process that revealed a series of discrete, nonlinear acts and decisions. Describing this passage in Nelson's work through the painting "Octopus Blue" (1990), Klaus Kertess wrote, "We are confronted by an organism wrestling with its self-formation—complex, mysterious, fierce, playful, sensual."
Two-sided paintings and "Box" constructions (2002– ).
In 2002, Nelson began creating two-sided works one writer called a "nervy push" of "painterly painting into the realm of sculpture." Critics noted works like "Gaucho Groucho" (2005), "String Turn" (2015) and "Coins in a Fountain" (2015) for their increasing inventiveness and sense of performance, "adamant, difficult beauty" and "elaborate narratives of process," which included punching holes through the canvas and working back and forth between sides, staining through sides, removing and re-stretching canvasses, and more. David Pagel argues that this work "builds memory into the process, creating experiences that are greater than the sum of their parts – and far more mysterious." "The New York Times" wrote, "The paintings... demand that you deal with how they came to be that way… mysteries mount, resolve and mount again." Nelson explains that her exhibition constructions—using steel stands, platforms, bricks and cable—seek a more conscious, intimate viewing process countering the artificiality of typical, "big white box-style" contemporary art spaces, which privilege the reification of art over engagement and the complexity of surface.
In 2016, Nelson returned to the figure in her two-sided, variously constructed "Box" works—free-standing, door-sized painted panels that verge on architecture and continue to employ unconventional materials and processes. Critics describe installations of the work, such as her 2017 show "Models Stand Close to the Paintings," as a "loose, kaleidoscopic maze of contrasting viewpoints" and interacting works—a sense furthered by the central, abstracted figures Nelson portrays in them. Critics such as Dan Cameron noted Nelson's disruption of the frontality of conventional painting, as well as the evolution of the physical presence of her two-sided works into a new, metaphorical level.
Awards and collections.
Nelson has been recognized with awards and grants from Anonymous Was a Woman (2015), Artist Legacy Foundation (2013), Foundation for Contemporary Arts (2011), Tesuque Foundation (peer nominated, 2000), and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship (1994). Her work resides in many public collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Albright–Knox Art Gallery, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Weatherspoon Art Museum, Rose Museum, among others, and several corporate collections.


David Sherrington (physicist)

David Sherrington is a British theoretical physicist and Wykeham Professor of Physics Emeritus at the University of Oxford. He is known for his work in condensed matter and statistical physics, and particularly for the invention of the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick model, an exactly solvable mean-field model of a spin glass.
Career.
David Sherrington was born in Blackpool, UK in 1941 and grew up in Yorkshire. He received an undergraduate degree in physics in 1962 and a PhD in theoretical physics in 1966, both from the University of Manchester. After a brief period as a lecturer at Manchester, he took a position at Imperial College London as a lecturer in physics, rising subsequently to the rank of reader and later professor. In 1989 he moved to Oxford University as a Fellow of New College and to Oxford's Department of Theoretical Physics (now the Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics) as the sixth Wykeham Professor of Physics and head of the department. He retired as head of the department in 2004 and from the professorship in 2008. Sherrington has been Editor-in-Chief of the review journal Advances in Physics since 1984, and was a founding editor of Communications on Physics as well as editor of the Oxford Monographs in Physics book series starting in 1995.
Among other honours, Sherrington is a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Fellow of the Institute of Physics, the American Physical Society, and the European Academy of Sciences. He was recipient of the Bakerian Medal of the Royal Society in 2001, the Dirac Medal and Prize from the Institute of Physics in 2007 and the Blaise Pascal Medal from the European Academy in 2010.
Research.
Sherrington's contributions to theoretical physics are in the areas of condensed matter physics, statistical physics and complex systems, particularly focusing on glassy systems, neural networks and optimization problems. Perhaps his best known contribution is the 1975 invention, with Scott Kirkpatrick, of the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick model of a spin glass. The Sherrington-Kirkpatrick model is an Ising spin glass model in which every spin interacts with every other, with interaction strengths having signs that are chosen independently at random. The importance of the model stems from the fact that it was subsequently shown, in work by Giorgio Parisi, to be exactly solvable for its thermal equilibrium properties. The solution, which was based on the replica method, reveals a phase transition in the model to a glassy phase that displays a loss of ergodicity. Sherrington has made numerous subsequent contributions to replica theory and the theory of spin glasses, and is also notable for his work on complex systems including the minority game (a model of market competition) and early work on the application of statistical mechanics to network theory.


Nicholas Peroff

Nicholas C. Peroff (born May 19, 1944) is an American political scientist, public administrator and professor in Native American studies and Complexity Theory at the Henry W. Bloch School of Management at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, he formerly held teaching positions in Taiwan, South Korea and South Africa.
The Secretary of International Relations Council, he was the former President of the Western Social Science Association (2002-2003). A veteran of the Vietnam War, he was named Public Administrator of the Year, Kansas City by the American Society for Public Administration in 2009.
Background.
Born and raised in Wisconsin, U.S. he received a B.A., M.A. and Ph.D in political science (on a Ford Fellowship) from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His doctoral study was interrupted with the onset of the Vietnam War to which he was drafted as a member of the U.S. Navy serving on USS Forrestal (CV-59) during the fire (1967-1968) as Division Officer. In 1986 he was an Instructor at the Chinese Ministry of Economic Affairs.
His book "Menominee Drums, Tribal Termination and Restoration, 1954-1974" (University of Oklahoma Press), was a study of the termination and subsequent restoration of federal recognition of the Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin. His work with the Menominee Nation has continued, off and on, for over 30 years which led him to research Indian gaming and other areas of interest within American Indian Studies. He also researched and taught public management and administration, public policy analysis, and engaged in the development and application of complexity theory in the study of American Indian policy.


Ayandeh (polling organisation)

Ayandeh (in Persian:آینده) is an opinion poll organisation in Iran that was closed down in 2002.
One of Ayandeh's directors, Abbas Abdi, was arrested in at his home on 4 November 2002, accused of "having received money from either the US polling firm Gallup or a foreign embassy". Abdi spent several years in prison as a result. The BBC claimed that this was part of "a crackdown by the hard-line judiciary on organisations conducting public opinion polls" at the time.


Rodney Carswell

Rodney Carswell (born 1946) is an American abstract artist. He first gained recognition for human-scaled, geometric paintings that feature exposed, projected support structures, creating interplay between sculptural presence and richly painted pictorial surfaces. His recent paintings eschew the superstructures and evoke a greater sense of immediacy, playfulness, and narrative. Critics often describe Carswell's work as uncanny, elusive or quirky, for its tendency to negotiate "in-between" spaces and embrace contradictions such as order and instability, intention and accident, or back and front. Employing irregularly shaped canvasses, thick supports, and openings or holes that reveal the stretcher construction and walls behind them, works like "3 (In 4)" (1994) often occupy a place between painting and sculpture. In a similar way, Carswell uses the modernist languages of Minimalism, Suprematism and Constructivism, yet eludes those categories with postmodern allusions to architecture, the body and spiritual iconography, and with his process-oriented, "hand-made" surfaces. In his essay for Carswell's mid-career retrospective at Chicago's Renaissance Society, "Los Angeles Times" critic David Pagel suggested that his understated paintings worked their way into the one's consciousness in a "supple, somewhat unsettling manner" that achieves a subtle, but lingering shift in perception.
Carswell has been featured in additional solo exhibitions at the University of Oklahoma Museum of Art and Miami University Museum of Art, as well as in key surveys at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Corcoran Gallery of Art, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (MCA). His work has been widely covered in art magazines such as "Artforum", "Art in America", "ARTnews", and the "New Art Examiner", and major publications including the "New York Times" and "Chicago Tribune". He has been recognized with fellowships from the John S. Guggenheim and Louis Comfort Tiffany foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts. In addition to his art practice, Carswell has taught and lectured on art and opened and operated a successful restaurant in Chicago.
Life and career.
Rodney Carswell was born in Carmel, California in 1946 and raised in Santa Fe, New Mexico. After completing high school at the New Mexico Military Institute in Roswell, he studied art at the University of New Mexico (UNM) with professors John Pearson, Van Deren Coke and Garo Antresian, earning a BFA in 1968. After graduating, Carswell married Renee Dubois, traveled in Europe, and then enrolled in the MFA program at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he worked with professors George Woodman and Roland Reiss, and received an MFA in 1972.
Following graduate study, Carswell began teaching at Illinois State University (1972–1980) and exhibiting throughout the Midwest. He was selected for the Art Institute of Chicago's prestigious "Chicago and Vicinity" show in 1973 and later picked up by Roy Boyd Gallery. In 1980, the Carswells moved to New York City, where they worked various blue-collar jobs and Renee gave birth to their daughter, Calida, in 1983. Later that year, they returned to the Midwest when he secured a position at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he would teach art and serve in several administrative capacities, until retiring in 2007.
Throughout this period, Carswell showed regularly, at galleries including Roy Boyd (Chicago and Los Angeles), Linda Durham (New Mexico), Feigen, Thomas McCormick, and Devening Projects (all three Chicago). His work was featured in museums throughout the United States, including these major shows: Corcoran Gallery 44th Biennial, "Painting Outside of Painting" (1995); MCA Chicago, "Art in Chicago 1945-95" (1996); and Terra Museum, "Surfaces: Two Decades of Chicago Painting" (1987).
In 1998, the Carswells opened a Latino-flavored restaurant in his former studio space, called Flo, that they operated until late 2011, when Carswell returned to his roots in New Mexico. He was a resident at the Roswell Artist in Residence Program (2011–12), before moving back to Santa Fe, where he currently lives and works.
Work.
Largely emerging in a period in which it was commonly held that "painting was dead," Carswell's body of work has been deemed noteworthy for his "unwavering belief in art as an act of individual scrutiny and contemplation," "remarkable consistency of purpose," and "relentless pursuit of subtle variation."
Carswell has said that "reductive abstraction" has been integral to his work dating back to his art education in the late 1960s, when iconic minimalists such as Frank Stella, Donald Judd and Robert Ryman were at their most influential. Ultimately, he felt a greater kinship with artists identified as post-minimalists, such as Eva Hesse, Jackie Winsor, Nancy Graves and Joel Shapiro, preferring their idiosyncratic styles of abstraction and engagement with the body, the hand-crafted and process over minimalism's embrace of non-referentiality and the mechanical. In interviews, Carswell has said he was "trying to get the human element more in evidence" and making "visible the way an artist—myself, in this case—has behaved toward the object. The idea is to have the nature of the material and the act performed on the material both be evident in the object that results."
In his early work, this often took the form of what some critics called "irreverent constructions," such as "Martha" (1977): painted fields of unstretched canvas that Carswell cut into geometric sail-like forms and attached directly to walls. Although abstract, these works were intended in their scale and positioning close to the floor to suggest a figural presence or "echo" of the viewer. Carswell also engaged the paintings as objects, in terms of their unconventional shapes and thin, minimal presence without stretcher bars. By the late 1970s, influenced by the work of Ron Gorchov, he decided to explore this issue in a more robust way, leading to a breakthrough in his work.
Mature work.
Carswell began constructing visible support armatures that jutted into three-dimensional space, giving paintings like "St. Tropez" (1978) a commanding sculptural presence. In New York, he continued to develop these structures while also shifting to a thicker, built-up and scraped-down surface application of oil paint and wax (encaustic). By the late-1980s, he achieved his mature style in works like "Black and White Cross Encircled by Red" (1988), employing a spare lexicon of emblematic forms (crosses, semicircles, squares, rectangles), thick exposed supports, interlocking planes and shaped or assembled canvasses, that he painted in vivid, unmodulated colors with rich, layered surfaces. His formal experimentation would include geometric openings or holes that pierced the canvasses—"diagramming" paintings by revealing their construction and relationship with the walls behind them as he did in "Two Grays and Orange Around an Empty Rectangle" (1988)—or displaying both backs and fronts of painted panels, as in "3 (5) Panels, Presented and Reversed" (1993). Carswell described these works as "integrated pictorial objects [...] at once physical and logical, ephemeral and phenomenal."
Critics, such as Judith Russi Kirshner, have frequently commented on this sense of in-between spaces and paradoxes in Carswell's work of this period, for example, calling it "an ambiguous balance of object and image," or in curator Terrie Sultan's case, identifying a "call-and-response" between accidental painted effects and deliberate, geometric compositional strategies. Others noted the push-and-pull between the arresting, unitary gestalt of iconic geometry and the seductive, almost decorative surfaces. "Artforum's" James Yood suggested that Carswell's "wry sequences of subtle dislocation" skewed his geometric abstract language just enough to keep his compositions "tense and expectant." David Pagel concluded that Carswell's "randomly off-balanced and rigorously geometric" configurations were profoundly resistant to rational explanation, calling them "tight organizations that defy logic yet make sense."
Critic Craig Adcock attributed a sense of "contingency and irresolution" in Carswell's work in his postmodernist recombining of Suprematist and Constructivist vocabularies, which allowed for complex allusions to familiar corporeal and architectural issues, as well as to art historical references, such as da Vinci's Vitruvian Man. He identified in the work "a search for essences" he found as much mathematical as allegorical. Buzz Spector noted allusions to "the spiritual geometries" of icons or the "retablos" of Carswell's native American Southwest, creating a "dialogue between spirituality and pragmatism" that seemed to quest for meaning while also demonstrating a formal—but not ironic—skepticism of modernist utopias and traditional spirituality.
In his post-2002 paintings, Carswell has sought a greater sense of immediacy, leaving behind the superstructures and scale of past works and taking a speculative and exploratory approach to "incorporate more surprise and imaginative play." Although still abstract, image and representation have become more apparent, and works like "Jan 19 (09)" (2009) have become less geometric and more expressive in terms of gesture, modulation, and color. Compositional elements and surface details—pencil lines beneath transparent layers of paint, abandoned stray marks, or edges of color planes peeking out—work like terms in language, cohering with a unique syntax to suggest problems, subjective and idiosyncratic solutions, or narratives that reveal Carswell's hand and mind at work. More recently, Carswell has been creating lithographs and larger gouache and india ink works on paper in a similar vein.
Teaching.
Carswell taught for over thirty years, beginning in 1972 as an assistant professor at Illinois State University (ISU) in Normal, Illinois. He worked there alongside colleagues such as Ken Holder, Harold Gregor and Ron Jackson, earning tenure in 1979, before leaving the next year for New York City. After the birth of his daughter Calida, in 1983, Carswell returned to teaching at the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). At UIC, he joined an ambitious studio arts faculty that included Martin Puryear, Charles Wilson, Julia Fish, Tony Tasset, and Phyllis Bramson. In addition to serving as Assistant Professor (1983–90), Associate Professor (1990–6), and Professor (1996–2007), he was the school's Director of Graduate Studies (1994–6) and Acting Director (1996, 1997–9). Carswell retired as Professor Emeritus from UIC in 2007.
Flo.
Carswell comes from the family that opened the well-known Santa Fe restaurant, The Shed, in 1953. In 1998, he and his wife Renee opened a Latino-flavored restaurant in his former studio space on West Chicago Avenue called Flo, pioneering the underserved, pre-development Noble Square neighborhood just northwest of Chicago's downtown. The restaurant was known for its eclectic menu, diverse intellectual community, and notable art. They operated the restaurant—which has remained in business since—until late 2011, when Carswell moved back to his native New Mexico.
Recognition and collections.
Carswell has been recognized with fellowships from the John S. Guggenheim Foundation (1989), Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation (1993), National Endowment for the Arts (1991), Arts Midwest/National Endowment for the Arts (1998), and Illinois Arts Council (1985), as well as with awards from the Art Institute of Chicago (Viehler Award, 1973; and Pauline Palmer Prize, 1990) and a Roswell Artist-in-Residence Grant.
His work has been purchased by numerous private art collections and public collections including those of the: Art Institute of Chicago, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Roswell Museum and Art Center, Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art (University of Oklahoma), Allen Memorial Art Museum (Oberlin College), Illinois State Museum, University of New Mexico Art Museum, Miami University Art Museum, Evansville Museum of Arts, History and Science, Arkansas Art Center, Art Museum of West Virginia University, Mulvane Art Museum, and DePaul Art Museum.


Hirotaka Nozuki

Hirotaka Nozuki (野月 浩貴 "Nozuki "["Nodzuki"]" Hirotaka," born July 4, 1973) is a Japanese professional shogi player, ranked 8-dan.
Early life.
Hirotaka Nozuki was born in Kita-ku, Sapporo on July 4, 1973. He won the 10th tournament in 1985, and the same year entered the Japan Shogi Association's apprentice school at the rank of 6-kyū as a student of shogi professional . He was promoted to the rank of 1-dan in 1991 and obtained full professional status and the rank of 4-dan in October 1996.
Promotion history.
The promotion history for Nozuki is as follows:
Titles and other championships.
Nozuki has never appeared in a major title match, but he has won two non-major shogi championships during his career: the 17th (1998) and the 19th (199899).


Boece (Chaucer)

Boece is Geoffrey Chaucer's translation into Middle English of "The Consolation of Philosophy" by Boethius. The original work, written in Latin, stresses the importance of philosophy to everyday life and was one of the major works of philosophy in the Middle Ages. As well as using philosophy to understand and deal with hardship, it is also an attempt by Boethius to improve the minds of the people in 6th century Rome by introducing them to Greek philosophy.
The translation.
Chaucer's own motive for his translation may have been that the "Consolation" was not fulfilling its purpose of educating the common people. "The Romance of the Rose", another literary work Chaucer translated, actively encourages translation of the "Consolation":
Chaucer worked, in part, from a translation of the "Consolation" into French by Jean de Meun but is clear he also worked from a Latin version, correcting some of the liberties de Meun takes with the text. The Latin source was probably a corrupt version of Boethius' original, which explains some of Chaucer's own misinterpretations of the work. Chaucer also on occasion dispenses with direct translation and uses his own interpretation, with the help of commentaries by Nicholas Trivet and Guillaume de Conches.
Influence on Chaucer.
The philosophical ideas of Boethius were important to many thinkers and writers of the Middle Ages, and Chaucer himself was not simply a translator but was also greatly influenced by his work. It adds a philosophical dimension to "The Knight's Tale" missing from the original source of the story (Boccaccio's "Teseida"), "The Tale of Melibee" uses Boethius' doctrine of "patience sufferance", and many of Chaucer's other works show a familiarity with Boethius' conception of love as expressed in the "Consolation". Works by later writers, such as Thomas Usk and John Walton, made use of Chaucer's translation.


Makoto Tobe

 is a Japanese professional shogi player ranked 7-dan.
Early life.
Makoto Tobe was born on August 5, 1986, in Yokohama. He entered the Japan Shogi Association's apprentice school as a student of shogi professional in October 1998 at the rank of 6-kyū. He was promoted to 1-dan in August 2001, and then obtained full professional status and the rank of 4-dan in October 2006 after winning the 39th 3-dan League (April 2006September 2006) with a record of 15 wins and 3 losses.
Promotion history.
The promotion history for Tobe is as follows:
Awards and honors.
Tobe received the Japan Shogi Association Annual Shogi Awards for "Best New Player" in 2009 and "Best Winning Percentage" (2007 and 2013).


Academic ranks in Thailand

Academic ranks are the titles, relative importance and power of professors, researchers and administrative personnel held in academia.
At higher education institutions in Thailand, teaching officers are generally called "lecturers" (อาจารย์ "achan") and are collectively called "teaching staff" (คณาจารย์ "khanachan"), whilst administrative officers are generally called "administrators" (ผู้บริหาร "phuborihan") and are collectively called "administrative staff" (คณะผู้บริหาร "khana phuborihan").
Careers of teaching staff at Thai universities generally start at the level of "lecturer". At this level, contracts may be permanent or temporary, or may impose a time-limit for progression to a higher rank (similarly to a US tenure-track position). In order to achieve higher academic ranks, staff must submit to evaluation both internally (at the level of their institution) and externally (by academics from other institutions). Criteria for promotion are regulated centrally by the body which regulates universities (Office of the Higher Education Commission), meaning that there is little variation in promotion standards across institutions, irrespective of their status or orientation (e.g. research-intensive international universities vs. teaching-oriented local universities).
Progression of staff through academic ranks follows a similar dynamic to that in Australia, with the highest rank of Professor awarded selectively to leading scholars. Thus, compared to higher education institutions in countries such as the US, where Associate Professor is regarded as a mid-career rank and an intermediate step before Professorship, holders of Associate Professorships are regarded as senior members of academic staff at Thai universities, comparable to Readers at many Commonwealth institutions.


Watching America

Watching America is a website that publishes translated foreign articles from foreign newspapers into English. It was launched in 2005 and founded by Robin Koerner. Watching America states its goal is "to reflect as accurately as possible how others perceive the richest and most powerful country in the world."
The site posts newly translated articles up on a daily basis, along with a link to the original article. The translations are done by native speakers of the relevant languages. It currently translates articles from Arabic, Armenian, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Hebrew, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Turkish, and Urdu.
The website has been linked by Foreign Policy, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, The Christian Science Monitor as well as cited in various published popular books and academic sources as a source.


Omweso

Omweso (sometimes shortened to Mweso) is the traditional mancala game of the Ugandan people. The game was supposedly introduced by the Bachwezi people of the ancient Bunyoro-kitara empire of Uganda. Nowadays the game is dominated by Ugandan villagers. It is a very hard and fast game said to keep one's mind high and ever excited, which can make it addictive. The equipment needed for the game is essentially the same as that of the Bao game (found in Tanzania and neighbouring countries). Omweso is strictly related to a wide family of mancalas found in eastern and southern Africa; these include Coro in the Lango region of Uganda, Aweet in Sudan, [] in Namibia, Kombe in Lamu (Kenya), Mongale in Mombasa (Kenya), Mongola in Congo, Igisoro in Rwanda, and Kiela in Angola.
The name "Omweso" is derived from Swahili word "michezo", which means "game".
Rules.
Equipment.
Omweso requires a board of 32 pits, arranged with eight pits lengthwise towards the players, and four pits deep. Each player's territory is the 16 pits on their side of the board. In addition, 64 undifferentiated seeds are needed. This equipment is the same used for many variants of Omweso as well as for the Bao game from Zanzibar and Tanzania. Unlike Bao boards, Omweso boards have no special pit ("nyumba").
Object.
The normal way to win the game is to be the last player to be able to make a legal move, possible by capturing all an opponent's stones or reducing the opponent to no more than one seed in each pit. Alternatively, a player can win by capturing on both ends of the board in one turn.
Setup.
Before the game, four (4) seeds are placed in each of the eight pits closest to a player to ensure that both players have exactly 32 seeds. The first player is chosen by lot. This player arranges all owned seeds on their side of the board according to preference (The arrangement should be strategic). Then, the second player also arranges their seeds. The first player then makes the first sowing move.
Sowing.
Example turn:
"Preparing to sow from the highlighted hole."
"Sowing captures 6 seeds."
"The 6 captured seeds are resown from the starting hole."
Play consists of turns, each move may involve several laps. A player moves by selecting a pit with at least two seeds, and "sowing" them one by one around their side of the board in a counter-clockwise direction from the starting pit. The player may only sow from one of the sixteen pits in their territory, and the sowing proceeds around this territory, not directly involving the opponent's side.
Although in the past it was common for players to spend much time in thought, in modern tournaments only three seconds of thought is allowed per turn. The referee counts "omu", "ebiri", and if the turn is not started the other player may steal it.
Relay sowing.
If the last sowed seed lands in an occupied pit (without resulting in a capture, see below), then all seeds in that pit, including the one just placed, are immediately sown, before the opponent's turn. This continues until the last sowing ends in an empty pit.
Capturing.
If the last seed sown lands in one of the player's eight inner pits, which is occupied, and furthermore both the opponent's pits in this same column are occupied, then all seeds from these two pits are captured and sown starting from the pit where this capturing lap began (i.e., from the last pit scooped, NOT from the original hole from the very beginning of the turn).
Reverse capturing.
Instead of sowing in a counter-clockwise direction, a player may sow clockwise from any of their four leftmost pits if this results in a capture. Upon re-entering these reverse-captured seeds, the player may sow them clockwise again, if and only if this play results in a direct capture. The player may also choose to sow reverse-captured seeds in the usual counter-clockwise manner, and there is no compulsion to play one direction or the other when the choice is available. During a relay-sowing move, one lap of which ends at one of the four leftmost pits, a player may also change direction and begin sowing the next leg of the move clockwise, if and only if this play results in a direct capture.
Alternate victory conditions.
The normal way to win the game is to be the last player left with a legal move. However, there are two additional victory conditions:
In addition, a special win called "akawumbi" occurs when a player captures seeds from each of an opponent's pits in one turn. In a tournament, this may be weighted several times a more mundane victory.
Never ending moves.
It is possible for a move to lead to a never-ending sowing sequence. In tournament play, a player is allowed up to three minutes to finish his move - if this cannot be done, the game is annulled.
Never ending omweso moves have been of some mathematical interest. The Mayer Test can be used to determine whether a position can lead to a never-ending sowing.


Michael Rey

Michael Rey (born in Sarasota, Florida 1979) is an American abstract painter. Rey lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
Education.
Rey received his BFA in 2002 from Ringling School of Art and Design, Sarasota, Florida, and his MFA in 2008 from the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA.
Work.
Rey is an American contemporary abstract painter. Rey’s wall-based artworks exist at the juncture between painting and sculpture, combining three-dimensional forms with painted surfaces. The works are built from oil plasticine using an experimental technique that produces a delicate, skin-like exterior. The holes in these otherwise seamless objects function as measures of space, reinforcing a sense of objectness by punctuating and piercing the artworks’ surfaces. Rey’s pieces exhibit a non-hierarchical relationship between color, shape, and surface in a manner similar to the minimalist art of Donald Judd and John McLaughlin. The wall works are born from Rey’s dreams and doodles; they begin as foreign shapes that evolve into signifiers of broader cultural contexts. Rey addresses the human tendency to seek meaning in everything, and calls attention to the mutability of images in a technological age. When choosing the titles of his works, Rey types nonsensical word jumbles into the Google Search Console to find combinations of letters which do not already exist.


Sayuri Takebe

 is a Japanese women's professional shogi player ranked 4-dan.
Promotion history.
Takebe's promotion history is as follows.
Note: All ranks are women's professional ranks.
Titles and other championships.
Takebe has appeared in one women's major title match. She was the challenger for the 6th title in 1996, but lost to Ichiyo Shimizu 2 games to none.


Nazi Germany paramilitary ranks

National Socialist paramilitary ranks were pseudo-military titles which were used by the Nazis, represented by the Nazi Party, the National Socialist German Workers' Party ("Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei"; NSDAP), between the years of 1920 and 1945. Since the Nazi Party was by its very nature a paramilitary organization, by the time of the Second World War, several systems of paramilitary ranks had come into existence for both the Nazi Party itself and the various Nazi paramilitary organizations.
The following articles provide information regarding the various paramilitary rank systems used by the Nazi Party:
After the Nazi Party came to power in Germany, a number of Nazi state controlled and/or sponsored organizations developed Nazi style ranks, insignia, and titles. Such various ranks and insignia were:
The Nazi use of paramilitary ranks even extended as far as inmates of concentration camps. By 1936, a system of Nazi concentration camp badges had been developed along paramilitary lines.


Polish

Polish may refer to:
Polish may refer to:


List of prime ministers of Canada by approval rating

The following is a list of prime ministers of Canada by their highest and lowest approval rating during their term. The approval rating system came into effect when John Diefenbaker was prime minister (1957–63).


Nathan Hylden

Nathan Hylden (born 1978 in Fergus Falls, Minnesota) is a contemporary American abstract painter based in Los Angeles, California. He is known for creating abstract paintings exploring philosophical relationships between cause and effect, absence and presence, and emptiness and meaning; as well as for process-oriented artworks that investigate dualities of existence.
Hylden earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts from Minnesota State University in 2001 and Master of Fine Arts from Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles in 2006. He later studied with abstract painter Michael Krebber in Frankfurt, photographer Christopher Williams, and multimedia artist Richard Hawkins in Los Angeles.
Painting style.
Hylden utilizes diverse media in his paintings, such as aluminum, pearlescent paint, spray paints, and even blank canvases. Hylden often questions the essence of painting in his artworks.
His pieces are often produced as a series and follow a very strict creative process which links all the works through common motifs. Even though the pieces in a series are linked to each other, each one tells a particular story and represents a particular point in time in the evolution of the sequence. For his 2010 series of nine paintings, Hylden devised a strict technical process of painting canvases with holographic gold, arranging them on the floor, spray painting the overlapping sections in yellow, and finally stenciling black stripes onto each piece. As such, he created unique but interconnected pieces.
Hylden likes to hint at the source of his abstract paintings. His studio is a source of his inspiration and he has incorporated images of simple objects or groupings of objects from his studio into his paintings. His solo exhibition "So There’s That" at Richard Telles Fine Art displays two paintings which depict a vastly magnified portion of the wall in his studio. The art critic Alicia Eler described this as ability to re-contextualize the mundane in the context of art.
Exhibitions.
Hylden's works have been exhibited internationally.
Solo exhibitions.
Some of his selected solo exhibitions include:


Luciano Micallef

Luciano Micallef is a Maltese born abstract artist.
Early life.
He was born in Birkirkara, Malta on 1st November 1954. At age 10, he started studying art privately under Maltese artist Guzeppi Briffa, He later attended the Malta School of Art. He was awarded a scholarship by the Italian government to study art at the Accademia di Belli Arti di Firenze. He is considered a prominent Maltese artist of the 20th Century through his abstract art.
Works.
Art.
In 1991 he exhibited his first selection of abstract paintings in the Contemporary Hall, National Museum of Fine Arts, Malta whilst also exhibiting as part of a collective within the same Museum but in two other locations, those of the Salon, Auberge de Provence and Ex Preti Rooms, Auberge de Provence, Malta.
In 2010 he was commissioned to execute three large works in fused glass for the Church of Divine Mercy in San Pawl tat-targa, Malta.
Micallef has exhibited both in Malta and Overseas on numerous occasions. His exhibition space, Gallery 5 in 1996 is where he holds regular exhibitions of his works.
Micallef is known for his portrayals of leading personalities through his portraiture. He has portrayed Architect Renzo Piano, Roberto Benigni, Luciano Benetton and Gilberto Benetton, Ornella Muti, and Maltese politicians such as Eddie Fenech Adami and Ugo Mifsud Bonnici.
Stamp design.
Between 1984 and 1996 he was commissioned by the Government of Malta to create designs for Maltese stamps. In 1984 he created designs to commemorate the 1984 Olympic Games held in the US, a set of Christmas stamps and designs to commemorate the 10th Anniversity of the Republic of Malta. In 1985 he designed collections to commemorate Europa - European Music Year and The 76th Anniversary of the Uprising 7th of July 1919. In 1986, he designed a range of stamps in honour of Malta's leading philanthropists and the 1986 Traditional collection of Christmas Stamps. Every year from 1986 to 1991 he designed a set of stamps featuring historic Maltese Uniforms. In 1993 saw the launch of a set of stamps depicting Scouts. He designed a set of stamps to commemorate The 100th Anniversary of the Modern Olympic Games that took place in 1996.
Graphic design and printmaking.
In the early years of his career he was involved in printmaking, mainly etching and screen printing. He studied engraving at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Perugia.
Micallef has created packaging designs, book covers and event posters for Unesco and other organisations. His paintings have been featured on phone cards and credit cards of banks and telecommunication companies.
Publications.
The University of Malta published a book about his works in 1993 edited by Maltese philosopher Kenneth Wain entitled "'Luciano Micallef - A Study"'.
Another book about Micallef's art entitled "Abstracts" was launched in 2006.
Over a long span of years he has collaborated with Poet Victor Fenech to create illustrations for poem/prose publications such as "F'Altamira" and "Sangraal" with its critical studies by Oliver Friggieri and "Lovesongfifty."
In 2006 the Bank of Valletta presented a retrospective exhibition featuring 65 works of art from over thirty years of his career. A book entitled "Luciano Micallef" was published in conjunction with the event.
In 2019, an illustrated book by Luciano entitled "Journey" was published with past poems by Victor Fenech.
External links.
www.lucianomicallef.com


Preston Eugene Jackson

Preston Eugene Jackson is an American painter, sculptor and educator who has created many public art sculptures in the Central Illinois area. He works in metal, both steel and foundry cast metals, and also paints. His paintings and sculptures cover many styles, from abstract to "emotionally charged realism." In 1998 he was named the Laureate of the Lincoln Academy of Illinois and received the Order of Lincoln Medallion. He owns The Raven Gallery, home of the Contemporary Art Center in Peoria, Illinois.
His traveling sculpture exhibit "Fresh from Julieanne’s Garden" features more than 100 unique bronze castings of people of color telling fictionalized stories of their lives from the 17th through 20th centuries. Jackson received a Regional Emmy for hosting "Legacy in Bronze" a television show featuring these sculptures. In 2018 he was voted one of the best Illinois artists of all time as part of The Illinois Top 200 project.
Jackson began his career as a professor of art at Western Illinois University from 1972 to 1989. He later moved to the Art Institute of Chicago in 1989 as a professor of sculpture. He was appointed chair of the Sculpture Department from 1994 through 1996 and is currently a professor emeritus.
Education.
Jackson received his BFA from Southern Illinois University and his MFA degree from the University of Illinois in 1972.
Personal life.
Jackson was born on March 1, 1944 in Decatur, Illinois. The son of Shirley and T.J.Jackson, he grew up one of ten children in Decatur Illinois. He and his wife Melba have two daughters.


Pat Steir

Pat Steir (born 1940) is an American painter and printmaker. Her early work was loosely associated with conceptual art and minimalism, however, she is best known for her abstract dripped, splashed and poured "Waterfall" paintings, which she started in the 1980s, and for her later site-specific wall drawings.
Steir has had retrospectives and exhibitions all over the world, including the Tate Gallery in London, and shows at the Brooklyn Museum and the New Museum of Contemporary Art that traveled throughout Europe. She has won numerous awards for her work, and is thoroughly represented in major museum collections in the United States and abroad, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the Tate Gallery. She is a founding board member of Printed Matter bookshop in New York City, and of the landmark feminist journal, , first published in 1977. Steir has also taught art at Parsons School of Design, Princeton University and Hunter College. She has lived and worked primarily in New York City as an adult. She lives in Greenwich Village.
Early life and education.
Steir was born Iris Patricia Sukoneck in 1940 in Newark, New Jersey. She attended the Pratt Institute in New York (1956–1958), where she was influenced by her teachers Richard Lindner and Phillip Guston, and Boston University College of Fine Arts (1958–1960). Steir returned to Pratt and earned a BFA degree in 1962.
Career.
Early years.
In 1962, the year she graduated from art school, Steir was included in a group show at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia. In 1964, her work was in a show called “Drawings” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Her first one-person exhibition was at the Terry Dintenfass Gallery, New York, in 1964. During that time, she worked in New York as an illustrator and a book designer (1962–1966). Between 1966–1969, Steir was an art director at Harper & Row publishing company, New York. Around 1970 she became friends with Sol LeWitt, Lawrence Weiner, and other conceptual artists, and she made the first of many trips to New Mexico to visit Agnes Martin.
She rose to fame in the 1970s with monochromatic canvases of roses and other images that were X-ed out. The artist explained, “I wanted to destroy images as symbols. To make the image a symbol for a symbol. I had to act it out―make the image and cross it out. …no imagery, but at the same time endless imagery. Every nuance of paint texture worked as an image.” "Nothing" from 1974, in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art, is an example of this phase of the artist's work.
Mature work.
Steir's first museum exhibition, in 1973 at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., marks the beginning of a career dense with painting exhibitions. She has also made installation work (shown at Documenta IX, Kassel, Germany, in 1992) and is an important printmaker. Crown Point Press began publishing her prints in 1977 and in 1983 the Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, gave her a print and drawing exhibition. A print retrospective at the Cabinet des Estampes in Geneva traveled to the Tate Gallery in London, England. Steir has had one-person painting exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum in 1984 and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York in 1987, both of which traveled to other museums, many in Europe.
In the late 1980s, Steir became influenced by the artists John Cage and Agnes Martin and began producing dripped, splashed and poured works, embracing the element of chance. The artist relates this work to the 8th and 9th century Chinese Yipin "ink-splashing" painters, having studied ink splash in the harmony of nature and humanity, inspired by Tibetan philosophy. "Wind and Water" is an example of this phase of her work. In 1989–92 Steir began limiting her colors to monochrome. In 1995, the monograph "Pat Steir" was published by the American art critic Thomas McEvilley, chronicling the artists' life work up to that point. In November 1999, Steir was the subject of an "Art in America" cover feature, "Watercourse Way," by critic G. Roger Denson, who wrote that Steir's lyrical waterfall paintings attest to her long-standing interest in Asian art and thought, particularly the ancient Chinese philosophy of Daoism, with Steir's literal and figurative motif embodying the flow of water (or in her case, paint) down a surface.
Describing Steir's 2010 installation at Sue Scott Gallery, "The Nearly Endless Line", which consisted of a white line snaking around the gallery's blue-black walls, lit with blue light, Sharon Butler writes in "The Brooklyn Rail", "Walking through the darkened space, observers find themselves inside Steir’s painting, where they become part of the illusion she has created with paint and light." Pat Steir said "I wanted to be a great artist, again not in slang in someone who is great. But in the fantastic, reaching the soul of other people."
Awards.
Steir has received many public honors for her work. She was the recipient of Individual Artist (1973) and Art in Public Institutions (1976) grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for Fine Arts in 1982. Both of her alma maters have recognized her: Pratt, with an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Art (1991) and a 2008 Alumni Achievement Award for “outstanding graduates who have distinguished themselves in their fields," and Boston University, with a Distinguished Alumni Award (2001). In 2016, Steir was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Exhibitions.
In a career spanning over fifty years, Steir has exhibited at a large number of galleries and institutions, throughout the U.S. and internationally. Selected galleries where she has had solo exhibitions include: Terry Dintenfass Gallery, Max Protech Gallery, Crown Point Press, M. Knoedler & Co., Victoria Miro Gallery, Robert Miller Gallery, Cheim & Read, Locks Gallery, and Lévy Gorvy.
Selected museums and institutions that have held retrospectives and exhibitions of her work include: Ball State University, Corcoran Gallery of Art (1973); Spencer Museum of Art, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston (1983); Brooklyn Museum (1984); Cincinnati Art Museum, Philadelphia College of Art (1985); Museum of Fine Arts Bern, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, The Baltimore Museum of Art (1987); Musée d'art contemporain de Lyon (1990); and the Rhode Island School of Design Museum (2010).
Collections.
Steir’s work is included in major public collections around the world, including: Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York City); Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York City), National Gallery of Art (Washington, D. C.), Tate Gallery (London), Honolulu Museum of Art, Walker Art Center, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Contemporary Museum, Honolulu.


Gen Paul

Gen Paul (July 2, 1895 – April 30, 1975) was a French painter and engraver.
Biography.
Born as Eugène Paul in a house in Montmartre on the Rue Lepic painted by Van Gogh, he began drawing and painting as a child. His father died when he was only ten years old and Gen Paul was trained to work in decorative furnishings. He served in the French army during World War I and was wounded twice, losing one of his legs. During his convalescence, he returned to painting, and at Le Bateau-Lavoir he became friends with Juan Gris who helped him a great deal. Although Paul never received any formal training, he made a living from his art for almost 60 years. While his early works reflected the influences of his friends in Montmartre, Vlaminck, Utrillo and Frank Will, he soon developed dynamic form of expressionism reflecting influences as varied as Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh, Cézanne, Goya, Velázquez and El Greco. Between 1925 and 1929, he produced many of his best works. The paintings during this phase are characterized by motion created by gestural brush strokes, daring compositions, forced perspectives, diagonals, zigzags, juxtaposed areas of abstraction and realism and flat areas of color. Unlike other expressionists of the time such as Soutine, Rouault and the German expressionists, Gen Paul's works are full of optimism – fueled by his passion for life and daily life and his desire to overcome his handicap. Due to the dynamism and motion inherent in his paintings, some consider Paul to be the first action painter, a precursor to the abstract expressionists of the 1950s.
Paul died at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris on 30 April 1975 and was interred in the Cimetière Saint-Vincent in Montmartre. A great many of his works remain in private hands but a number of his important pieces can be found at museums in France and in other parts of Europe.
Career.
Paul first exhibited at the Salon d’Automne and the Salon des Indépendants in Paris in 1920. In 1928, his works were exhibited with those of Pablo Picasso and Chaim Soutine. Paul began the 1930s with a serious addiction to alcohol, further complicating his chronic health problems. The paintings of 1930s reflect a more somber mood with precise lines and carefully chosen colors and an emphasis of rhythm over motion. From the 1940s through his death, Paul reverted to a style of action painting characterized by many of the elements of his work in the 1920s, but his later work never again succeeded in recapturing the innovation, emotion and expressionism of his earlier works.
In 1934, he was recognized for his contributions to France and was awarded the Legion of Honor. In 1937, he was contracted to paint a large fresco for the Pavilion of Wines of France at the Paris International Exposition.
In addition to painting scenes from his native Montmartre, including that of his friends, composer Darius Milhaud, writer Louis Ferdinand Celine, Paul travelled to the United States where he painted jazz and classical musicians, a subject with which he had much interest.