SINGLETON-BISS MUSEUM OF FINE ART

© SINGLETON-BISS MUSEUM OF FINE ART, SANTA FE, NM 2010

                            (b. 1935)

Singleton's sculptures are famous around the world.  He is arguably the only artist ever to be represented simultaneously in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Cowboy Hall of Fame, the Vatican Museum and the State of Israel (whose large collection of his art was a bequest of Prime Minister Golda Maier).

Today, Pope Benedict XVI carries his crosier with a bronze cross at the top, which was designed by Gib Singleton.  Another of his crosses rests next to the Shroud of Turin.  His talent is backed by an education at Southern Illinois University and the Art Institute of Chicago where he won a Fulbright Fellowship to Italy.  While there, at the request of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, he assisted with the restoration of centuries-old flood damaged art in Florence.  He is a modern master in the tradition of Rodin and Donatello and has often been compared with Giacometti.

                   (1947-1998)

Biss was a profound contributor to the explosion of Southwestern Art in the last half of the 20th Century, and particularly for the rise of contemporary Native American Art.  His compelling portraits of Plains Indian horsemen, his phenomenal grasp of the medium of oil painting, and above all the sheer exuberance of his brushwork earned him a place in the history books of modern art.

Biss was a central figure in the miracle generation of students at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe during the late sixties.  Together, these brilliant young artists changed the face of Indian Art and Southwestern Art, injecting vivid color and a modernistic sensibility into what had been a sedate genre of linear realism.  Biss was known as the catalyst for this remarkable group.  He went on to make it famous worldwide.

After graduating from the Institute of American Indian Arts, Biss was invited to attend, and given a scholarship, to the prestigious San Francisco Art Institute.  Upon graduation from SFAI he continued his education with a year of independent study in Europe.  There, he maintained a studio in the Netherlands, haunting museums in his spare time.  He moved on to France, where he studied the masters of French Impressionist painting.  After a month of intense painting and absorbing as much as possible of the French museums, he traveled south to Greece, where he settled for six months on the Isle of Corfu.  Painting with a new found enthusiansm for the the entire time.  When he returned to the United States he had matured into a master oil painter.