Shortlisted, Fred Whitehead Award for Best Design of a Trade Book, 2006

A prolific artist with a prodigious gift for stimulating the creativity of others, James Surls is one of the most important sculptors working in America today. His art blends natural forms created of wood, steel, and bronze with sophisticated, sometimes edgy imagery and content to explore fundamental dualities and paradoxes--male and female, joyous optimism and anxious foreboding, conscious rationality and unconscious intuition. Fusing personalized folk idioms with the aesthetics of high modernism, Surls's...

Internationally acclaimed for paintings, collages, and prints that draw inspiration from sources as diverse as twentieth-century modernism, the geometry of Cubism and Minimalism, nineteenth-century English botanical illustrations, and the floral and geometic forms of traditional Indian and Egyptian art, Dan Rizzie is an artist with a seemingly endless capacity to absorb visual information and transform it into a unique iconography of the natural world. Since the mid-1970s, he has had some ninety solo exhibitions and has been included in over one hundred group exhibitions. Rizzie's work is...