What Does It Mean to Be Inspired?

Charles White

Charles White (1918–1979) was an American artist born in Chicago whose powerful figurative work made him one of the most important voices in 20th century American art. Growing up on the South Side during the Great Migration, White was surrounded by the energy and struggle of Black urban life, and that experience became the bedrock of everything he created.

White came up through the Chicago Black Renaissance of the 1930s and 40s, a cultural movement that ran parallel to the better-known Harlem Renaissance and produced some of equally remarkable work. He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and later worked under the Federal Art Project — the New Deal program that put artists to work during the Depression — where he crossed paths with fellow Social Realists and sharpened his commitment to art as a vehicle for social truth.

His subject was Black life and Black history, explored with a dignity and heroism that was genuinely radical for its time. Working primarily in charcoal, ink, and lithography — as well as oil and tempera — White developed a draftsmanship that was nothing short of extraordinary. His figures are monumental, deeply human, rendered with a weight and presence that commands attention. There’s a sculptural quality to his drawing that puts him in rare company.

Works like Harvest Talk, The Contribution of the Negro to Democracy in America, and his later Images of Dignity series speak directly to the experience of African Americans with honesty and profound respect. He never sensationalized and never sentimentalized — he simply looked clearly and drew what he saw.

White spent his later years in Los Angeles teaching at Otis Art Institute, where he influenced a generation of younger artists including David Hammons and Kerry James Marshall — both of whom have cited him as a foundational figure. That lineage alone tells you something about his reach. He remains one of the most technically gifted and morally serious artists America has produced.

Milton Glaser

Milton Glaser (1929–2020) was an American graphic designer whose work became so embedded in everyday visual culture that most people have encountered it without ever knowing his name. Born in the Bronx, New York, he co-founded Push Pin Studios in 1954 alongside Seymour Chwast, and the two of them helped define a new direction in American graphic design — one that embraced illustration, historical references, and wit at a time when the field was moving toward stark Swiss minimalism.

Glaser had an extraordinary range. He could work in a dozen different styles without losing his own voice, drawing freely from Art Nouveau, Pop Art, psychedelia, and classical illustration depending on what the job called for. That versatility was rare and it kept his work feeling fresh across six decades.

His most famous single image is probably the I ♥ NY logo, designed in 1977 to help revive a city that was financially and spiritually on its knees at the time. It’s one of the most imitated designs in history — simple, warm, and somehow still not exhausted. He reportedly sketched it in the back of a taxi on a scrap of paper. Another landmark was his 1966 Bob Dylan poster — that swirling, silhouetted profile with the rainbow hair — which became one of the defining images of the psychedelic era and remains instantly recognizable today.

Beyond iconic images, Glaser was a thoughtful writer and educator who cared deeply about the ethics and purpose of design. He was skeptical of work that deceived or manipulated, and he spent a good part of his later years thinking and writing about what it means to design responsibly. He helped found New York magazine in 1968 and shaped its visual identity from the ground up.

What sets Glaser apart from many of his contemporaries is that his work always felt human and a little playful — never cold, never purely mechanical. He believed design should connect with people emotionally, and looking at his body of work, it’s hard to argue he was wrong.

NORMAN ROCKWELL

Norman Rockwell (1894–1978) was an American illustrator and painter whose work became one of the most beloved and recognizable visual records of everyday American life in the 20th century. Born in New York City, he showed remarkable talent from an early age and landed his first cover for the Saturday Evening Post at just 22 years old. Over the next 47 years he would produce 321 covers for the magazine — a run that made him a household name and cemented his place in American popular culture.

Rockwell had a gift for narrative. Each painting told a story, often with humor, warmth, and an almost theatrical attention to character and detail. He worked from photographs and live models, obsessing over every gesture, expression, and wrinkle of clothing until the scene felt completely alive. His technical command was formidable — people sometimes underestimated him precisely because his work looked so effortless and accessible.

But Rockwell was more than a feel-good illustrator. His later work in particular showed real moral seriousness. The Problem We All Live With (1964) — depicting six-year-old Ruby Bridges being escorted to a newly desegregated school by federal marshals — is one of the most powerful images of the Civil Rights era. His Four Freedoms series (1943), painted in response to FDR’s wartime speech, toured the country and raised over $130 million in war bonds. These weren’t decorative pictures — they carried genuine emotional and political weight.

For a long time the fine art world dismissed Rockwell as merely commercial, a sentiment he struggled with personally. That view has shifted considerably. Looking at his work now, the craftsmanship is undeniable and the humanity even more so. He understood ordinary people — their faces, their moments, their quiet dignity — and he painted them with a respect and affection that still comes through clearly decades later.

BILL EVANS

Bill Evans (1929–1980) was an American jazz pianist whose lyrical touch and harmonic sophistication changed the way people thought about the piano in jazz. Born in Plainfield, New Jersey, he came to wide attention as part of Miles Davis’s legendary Kind of Blue sessions in 1959 — an album that remains one of the best-selling jazz records of all time. But it was his own trio work, particularly with bassist Scott LaFaro and drummer Paul Motian, that truly set him apart. Evans treated the trio as a conversation between equals rather than a piano-led group, opening up a more democratic, interweaving approach that countless pianists have borrowed from since.

His playing had a distinctly introspective quality — thoughtful, sometimes melancholy, always searching. Albums like Waltz for Debby and Portrait in Jazz capture that intimacy beautifully. He struggled with addiction throughout much of his life, which cast a long shadow over his personal story, but his artistic output never wavered. He died at 51, leaving behind a body of work that still feels quietly revolutionary. If Coltrane pushed jazz outward, Evans pushed it inward — and both directions turned out to be essential.

Ben Shahn

Ben Shahn (1898–1969) was a Lithuanian-born American artist whose work became one of the most powerful voices for social justice in 20th century art. He came to the United States as a child, grew up in Brooklyn, and eventually found his calling not in the galleries of the fine art world but in the streets, courtrooms, and labor halls of everyday American life.

Shahn first gained widespread attention in the early 1930s with his series of paintings depicting the trial and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti — the Italian immigrant anarchists whose controversial case had divided the country. The work was unflinching and emotionally charged, and it announced clearly what Shahn was about: art as witness, art as conscience.

Throughout the Depression era he worked as a photographer and artist for the Farm Security Administration, documenting rural poverty across America with the same empathetic eye that ran through all his work. His paintings from this period — flat, angular figures rendered with a kind of raw expressiveness — have a graphic intensity that feels almost like woodcut prints. You always knew exactly whose side he was on.

Shahn was also a prolific poster artist and illustrator, working for labor unions, political campaigns, and later the CBS television network. His lettering and typographic sensibility were highly distinctive and widely influential — there’s a hand-drawn warmth to his text that feels completely integrated with the image rather than separate from it.

What makes Shahn endure is that his work never feels like propaganda, even when it is. It feels human. He cared deeply about ordinary people — their dignity, their struggles, their faces — and that comes through in every piece. For anyone working in the Social Realist tradition, he’s an anchor.

A.M. Cassandre

A.M. Cassandre (1901–1968) was a French graphic designer, poster artist, and typographer born Adolphe Jean-Marie Mouron in Kharkiv, Ukraine. He moved to Paris as a young man and went on to become one of the most influential commercial artists of the 20th century — a figure who essentially elevated the poster to the level of fine art.

Working primarily in the 1920s and 30s, Cassandre developed a visual language that was bold, geometric, and immediately arresting. He had a gift for distilling complex ideas down to a single, powerful image — something that sounds simple but is extraordinarily difficult to do well. His work drew heavily from Cubism and Art Deco, combining flat planes of color, strong diagonals, and a kind of cinematic drama that felt entirely modern for its time.

His most celebrated posters — Normandie (1935), Nord Express (1927), and Étoile du Nord (1927) — are still widely reproduced today and remain benchmarks of graphic design. The ocean liner and locomotive were perfect subjects for him: machines of speed, power, and modernity, rendered with an almost mythological grandeur. He had a way of making commercial subjects feel monumental.

Beyond posters, Cassandre made significant contributions to typography, designing typefaces including Bifur, Acier Noir, and most notably Peignot, which became widely used in French design. He also worked in theater set design and painted fine art, though it was his commercial work that made him famous.

He was recognized in his lifetime — MoMA held an exhibition of his work as early as 1936 — yet he struggled with depression and financial instability in his later years, and died by suicide in 1968. His legacy, however, is enormous. You can feel his influence running through mid-century American design, in the work of Milton Glaser, Paul Rand, and countless others. If you’ve ever responded to a poster that stops you cold with a single image, chances are Cassandre had something to do with how that visual language was developed.

CHARLES ALSTON

Charles Alston (1907–1977) was an American painter, sculptor, muralist, and educator whose work bridged the Harlem Renaissance and the Civil Rights era, making him one of the most quietly influential figures in 20th century American art. Born in Charlotte, North Carolina, he moved north as a child after his father’s death and grew up in Harlem — a place that would shape his vision and anchor his career for decades.

Alston studied at Columbia University and quickly became a central figure in the cultural life of Harlem. He ran the legendary studio at 306 West 141st Street — known simply as “306” — which became an informal gathering place for writers, musicians, painters, and intellectuals. Jacob Lawrence, among others, studied under him there. As a mentor and teacher Alston had few equals, and his influence on younger artists rippled outward in ways that are still felt today.

His own work moved fluidly between styles — from Social Realist figuration to abstraction and back again — always anchored by a deep interest in Black identity, history, and the human figure. His two murals for Harlem Hospital (1936–37), depicting African and African American contributions to medicine, were among the first works by a Black artist commissioned for a New York City public building. Getting them approved was a fight. The city initially resisted their unapologetically Black subject matter, which only underscores how necessary they were.

Later in his career Alston contributed to the Civil Rights movement through his work as an illustrator and political cartoonist, and in 1963 he became the first Black artist to supervise work for the Associated Press.

He never quite received the solo spotlight that some of his contemporaries did, but those who know the tradition know his name. He was a builder — of art, of community, of other people’s careers — and that kind of contribution tends to outlast the headlines.

Alston was active in the Harlem Renaissance and was the first African-American supervisor for the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project.

John Coltrane

John Coltrane (1926–1967) was an American jazz saxophonist and composer widely regarded as one of the most influential musicians in the history of jazz. Born in Hamlet, North Carolina, he came up through the bebop era, honing his craft alongside Miles Davis before launching a landmark solo career. His 1960 quartet recordings — particularly A Love Supreme (1964) — are considered among the greatest achievements in American music, blending deep spiritual searching with extraordinary technical invention. Coltrane pushed jazz into what became known as “free jazz” and “avant-garde” territory, constantly evolving his sound right up until his death from liver cancer at just 40 years old. His influence stretches well beyond jazz, touching soul, rock, and contemporary classical music. Musicians and listeners still find new things in his recordings decades later — which is about as good a definition of a lasting legacy as there is.

MILES DAVIS

Miles Davis (1926–1991) was an American jazz trumpeter, bandleader, and composer who stands as one of the most innovative and restless figures in the history of music — not just jazz. Born in Alton, Illinois, he arrived in New York as a teenager and quickly fell in with the bebop pioneers, most notably Charlie Parker. But Davis was never content to stay in one place for long. Over five decades he essentially reinvented himself — and jazz along with him — multiple times.

He led or co-created some of the genre’s most pivotal movements: the cool, laid-back sound of Birth of the Cool (1957), the modal revolution of Kind of Blue (1959), the electric fusion experiments of Bitches Brew (1970), and his later forays into funk and hip-hop-influenced territory. Each shift was controversial at the time and influential in hindsight. Kind of Blue alone remains the best-selling jazz album ever recorded.

As a bandleader he had an almost uncanny eye for talent — John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, and Chick Corea all passed through his groups. He had a way of drawing the best out of musicians and then pushing them further than they expected to go. His tone on the trumpet — muted, intimate, and instantly recognizable — is one of the most distinctive sounds in American music. Simply put, if you’re tracing a line through the evolution of jazz, it runs directly through Miles Davis.

Thomas Hart Benton

Diego Rivera

Diego Rivera (1886–1957) was a Mexican painter and muralist whose monumental public works made him one of the most celebrated and controversial artists of the 20th century. Born in Guanajuato, Mexico, he studied in Europe for over a decade, absorbing the influence of Post-Impressionism and Cubism before returning to Mexico with a very different ambition — to create art that belonged to the people, not to galleries or private collectors.

Rivera became the driving force behind the Mexican Muralist movement, along with contemporaries José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Working in fresco across massive public walls — government buildings, schools, markets — he painted sprawling, densely populated scenes of Mexican history, indigenous culture, labor, and political struggle. His murals were essentially history lessons rendered in vivid, larger-than-life imagery, accessible to anyone who walked past them. The scale and ambition were extraordinary.

His work carried a strong socialist and Marxist philosophy, which brought him both admiration and trouble throughout his career. The most famous clash came in 1933 when his mural for Rockefeller Center in New York — Man at the Crossroads — was destroyed after he refused to remove a portrait of Lenin from the composition. Rivera famously recreated the mural in Mexico City, this time making Lenin even more prominent.

His personal life was equally dramatic, most notably his turbulent marriage to fellow painter Frida Kahlo — a relationship marked by mutual devotion, infidelity, and creative kinship that has fascinated people ever since.

Rivera’s influence on American art was significant too. His large-scale Detroit Industry Murals (1932–33) had a direct impact on the Social Realist movement in the United States and inspired a generation of artists who believed public art could carry real political and human weight. For anyone drawn to that tradition, Rivera is essential.

ELIZABETH CATLETT

Elizabeth Catlett (1915–2012) was an American-born sculptor and printmaker whose work stands as one of the most sustained and eloquent expressions of Black womanhood in the history of American art. Born in Washington D.C., she grew up in a family that valued education deeply — her grandmother had been enslaved, and that history of struggle and resilience ran like a current through everything Catlett eventually created.

She applied to the Carnegie Institute of Technology straight out of high school and was accepted — then rejected when they realized she was Black. She went on to study at Howard University instead, where she graduated with honors, and later became the first student to earn an MFA in sculpture from the University of Iowa, studying under Grant Wood. From the very beginning, doors were closed and she walked through them anyway.

Her early work was already focused on the subjects that would define her entire career — Black women, their labor, their strength, their quiet endurance. Her 1946–47 series The Negro Woman is a landmark, a sequence of linocuts and sculptures depicting mothers, workers, and freedom fighters with a monumental simplicity that owes something to both Mexican muralism and African sculpture. The images are tender and fierce at the same time.

That connection to Mexico was no accident. Catlett moved to Mexico City in the late 1940s, became a member of the Taller de Gráfica Popular — a collective of politically engaged printmakers — and eventually became a Mexican citizen. She spent most of her adult life there, and the influence of Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros deepened her belief that art should serve communities, not just collectors.

Her sculpture Homage to My Young Black Sisters (1968) and her iconic linocut Malcolm X Speaks for Us became touchstones of the Black Arts Movement. The U.S. government at one point labeled her a subversive and barred her from re-entering the country for years — which tells you something about how seriously her work was taken, and by whom.

What makes Catlett remarkable is the consistency of her vision across seven decades. She never chased trends or softened her message. She simply kept looking at the people she loved — Black women in particular — and kept finding new ways to honor them in wood, bronze, and ink. In a conversation that includes Charles White, Ben Shahn, and Diego Rivera, she belongs right at the center of it.

AUGUSTINE BARRIOS