Dorothea Tanning
ARTIST PAINTER (1910 - 2012)
Dorothea Tanning was a painter known for her
dreamscape paintings; however, she was also
a writer who wrote poetry, short stories and
often memoirs, these memoirs would be
published in the later part of her career in
1986 with Birthday and in 2001 with Between
Lives: An Artist and Her World, she
established the Wallace Stevens Award for
poetry in 1994. Tanning was inspired by
Surrealism, which was a mostly male
dominated art movement. Tanning was also
influenced by movement in her paintings with
how paint could flow, this idea of movement
developed from her work are a costume and
stage designer for the ballets of the Russian
choreographer George Blanchine.
Dorothea Lange
PHOTOGRAPHER (1895 - 1965)
Dorothea Lange, at the time of 1936 worked
as a photographer for Resettlement
Administration, a Depression-era government
agency formed to raise awareness of and
provide aid to struggling farmers. Lange did
not classify her images as art, but as images
to effect social change. At the height of the
Great Depression in 1933 Lange began to
photograph life outside of studio settings,
which led her to become confident in the
ability to use photography to document and
confront urgent social circumstances around
her and others. This remained throughout her
career. In 1942, Lange was assigned to
document the wartime internment of Japanese
Americans, a policy she strongly opposed.
The images she created that were critical of
the subject were suppressed by the
government for the duration of the war.
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