EMMA AMOS: Born in Atlanta, Georgia, where her father was a pharmacist, Amos grew up in a middle-class home with parents who encouraged her artistic aspirations. From her earliest childhood she loved to draw, and her talent was apparent to her grade school classmates and teachers, who asked her to copy pictures for them. As Amos explained in an interview with Al Murray in Smithsonian Archives of American Art, she taught herself by looking at pictures in magazines. It wasn't until she enrolled as an art student at Antioch College that she began to realize that "I wasn't the best thing in the world, that there were people who didn't learn how to draw from [copying] Vargas girls [in magazines], who knew what drawing really was and that it wasn't just a technical thing, that there was something to it."

Born in 1984 in Philadelphia, Jennifer Packer received her BFA from the Tyler University School of Art at Temple University in 2007, and her MFA from Yale University School of Art in 2012. ... Packer currently lives and works in New York and is an assistant professor in the painting department at RISD.

Artist Gwendolyn Knight, primarily known for her figure compositions and portraits, used color and gesture to transform her own life experiences into vibrant visual images. Born in Barbados, Knight came to the United States at the age of seven. Initially, her family resided in Saint Louis, but in 1926 they moved to New York, where Knight began her explorations in art. After attending high school in New York’s Harlem, Knight enrolled at Howard University in Washington, D.C., where she studied with painter Loïs Mailou Jones. Jones’s interest in her own African origins expressed through her painted figures and portraits encouraged Knight to focus on depicting subjects that were part of her own experience. The Depression forced Knight to leave Howard University in 1933 and return to Harlem, a move that proved significant in her career and in her life.

Grace Hartigan (American, 1922–2008) was a leading Abstract Expressionist painter, known for work that combined gestural abstraction with imagery derived from art history or pop culture. Famed critic Clement Greenberg was an early champion of her work, singling her out for inclusion in the 1950 exhibition “New Talent” at Kootz Gallery, which launched her career in New York. She was subsequently included in the Museum of Modern Art’s seminal exhibitions “12 Americans” in 1954 and “The New American Painting” in 1958.

The graphic design career of Cipe Pineles (pronounced SEE-pee pi-NELL-iss).

Maya Angelou was an American author, actress, screenwriter, dancer, poet and civil rights activist best known for her 1969 memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which made literary history as the first nonfiction bestseller by an African American woman. Angelou received several honors throughout her career, including two NAACP Image Awards in the outstanding literary work (nonfiction) category, in 2005 and 2009.

Elaine de Kooning (American, March 12, 1918–February 1, 1989) was a painter, teacher, and editor. She is known for her work both as an Abstract Expressionist and Figurative Expressionist painter. De Kooning was born in Brooklyn, NY, as the oldest of four children. At a young age, de Kooning''s mother taught her how to draw, and frequently took her to museums. De Kooning attended Erasmus Hall High School, and upon graduation briefly attended Hunter College in New York City. In 1937, she studied at the Leonardo da Vinci Art School in Hoboken, NJ, and in 1938, she went back to New York City to attend the American Artists School.

Emmett Kelly, in full Emmett Leo Kelly, (born December 9, 1898, Sedan, Kansas, U.S.—died March 28, 1979, (Sarasota Florida), one of the great American circus clowns, best known for his role as Weary Willie, a mournful tramp dressed in tattered clothes and made up with a growth of beard and a bulbous nose.