Lisa Yuskavage facts for kids

Lisa Yuskavage (born 1962) is an American artist. She lives and works in New York City. She is famous for her figure paintings. These paintings often show people and challenge how we usually think about art. Her style uses old painting methods. But her ideas often come from popular culture. This mix creates interesting contrasts in her art.

Education and Early Life

Lisa Yuskavage was born in 1962 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She went to the Tyler School of Art at Temple University. During her third year, she studied art in Rome. She earned her first art degree (BFA) in 1984. Later, she received her master's degree (MFA) from the Yale School of Art in 1986.

About Her Artworks

Since the early 1990s, Lisa Yuskavage has been important in bringing back figurative painting. This means painting pictures of people or objects. Her artworks often include landscapes and still life scenes too. Sometimes, all three types of art appear in one painting.

Yuskavage uses color in a special way. She learns from old painting styles, like those from the Renaissance. She also gets ideas from Color Field painting, which uses large areas of flat color. She looks up to famous painters like Giovanni Bellini from Italy, Johannes Vermeer from the Netherlands, and Edgar Degas from France.

Her paintings are very popular. One of her shows in New York sold out even before it opened! Also, one of her paintings was sold at an auction for more than $1 million.

Major Exhibitions

Lisa Yuskavage's art has been shown in many solo exhibitions around the world. These include:

• The Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2000)
• The Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève in Geneva (2001)
• The Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City (2006)
• The Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin (2011)

In September 2015, a big show called Lisa Yuskavage: The Brood opened. It was at the Rose Art Museum in Waltham, Massachusetts. This exhibition showed her work from 25 years.

Yuskavage was also part of a new online series. It was from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2015. In this series, she talked about a painting by Édouard Vuillard.

In 2020, two museums worked together for a show. The Baltimore Museum of Art and the Aspen Art Museum organized Wilderness. This exhibition focused on how she uses landscapes in her art. It showed her early watercolor series from the 1990s. The show was first in Aspen in 2020. Then it moved to Baltimore in spring 2021.

Her work was also part of the 2022 exhibition Women Painting Women. This show was at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

Awards and Honors

Lisa Yuskavage has received many awards for her art. Some of these include:

• The Aspen Award for Art (2019)
• Temple University Gallery of Success Award (2005)
• The Founder's Day Certificate of Honor from Tyler School of the Arts (2000)
• The Tiffany Foundation Grant (1996)
• The MacDowell Colony Fellowship (1994)

Notable Works in Public Collections