Ethel Fisher was an American painter whose career spanned more than seven decades in New York City, Miami and Los Angeles. Her work ranges across abstraction and representational genres including large-scale portraiture, architectural "portraits," landscape and still-life, and is unified by a sustained formal emphasis on color and space. After studying at the Art Students League in the 1940s, Fisher found success as an abstract artist in Florida in the late 1950s, and began exhibiting her work nationally and in Havana, Cuba. Her formative work of this period embraced the history of art, architecture and anthropology; she referred to it as "abstract impressionist" to distinguish her approach to form and color from that of Abstract Expressionism.
Ethel Fisher, Fine Arts Building, Chicago (410 S. Michigan Avenue), oil on canvas, 66" x 47", 1976.
Ethel Fisher, Garden Gift, oil on canvas, 32" x 32", 1958. Crocker Art Museum collection.
Ethel Fisher, Two Figures (Profile)/Orange Space, oil on canvas, 60" x 40", 1968. Los Angeles County Museum of Art collection.
Margaret Fisher is an American performance and media artist best known for interdisciplinary works that pair gestural choreography to experimental visual theater characterized by a cartoon aesthetic with wide-ranging cultural references. She emerged amid a 1970s Bay Area experimental performance scene that included artists such as Lynn Hershman Leeson, George Coates, Bill Irwin and Winston Tong, and co-founded the intermedia production group MA FISH CO and the alternative theater Cat's Paw Palace in Berkeley.
MA FISH CO, Ag Nature (1983–9). Performance still, 1985. Pictured: Julius Webster as Pulcinella at Dance Theatre Workshop, New York City, 1985. Sets by Jerry Carniglia, costumes by Jacqueline Humbert
MA FISH CO, Antebellum Bedlam, Performance still, 1985. Pictured: Dominica Kriz at KALA Institute, Berkeley, CA, 1985
MA FISH CO, The Bride Stripped Bare by her bachelors even… (1984), Performance still from 1986. Pictured left to right, Tony Gnazzo, Larry London, Jerry Carniglia, Bob Hughes, Toyoji Tomita. Costumes by Cynthia DuVal