Kenneth Koch
Kenneth Koch was an American poet, playwright, and professor, active from the 1950s until his death at age 77. He was a prominent poet of the New York School of poetry. This was a loose group of poets including Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery that eschewed contemporary introspective poetry in favor of an exuberant, cosmopolitan style that drew major inspiration from travel, painting, and music. American, 1925 – 2002
Red Grooms
Since the 1970s, Red Grooms has used cartoonish imagery to satirize city life, most notably in crowd-pleasing, large-scale sculptures and public installations. He found acclaim in 1975 with Ruckus Manhattan, a caricatured, three-dimensional recreation of New York City. The interactive installation features iconic landmarks populated by life-sized wooden figures of sex workers, thieves, gamblers, tourists, shoppers, and families who altogether suggest the city’s grit and glamour. Grooms has also channeled his signature sense of satire, kitsch, and Americana into mixed-media paintings, drawings, prints, and performances. He studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the New School, and the Hans Hoffman School of Fine Arts, pursuing set design before turning his focus to fine art. Grooms has enjoyed solo shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Yale University Art Gallery, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, among other institutions. His work belongs in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Guggenheim Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Moderna Museet. American, b. 1937.