Famous Figures

Her design of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, conceived as a structure that would allow grief and memory to persist and be visited across generations, reflects a Legacy orientation applied to architectural and civic art.

His Hamilton, which explicitly takes legacy itself as its subject, and his investment in creating pipelines for young artists of colour, reflect a Legacy orientation in which the question of what endures beyond us is both artistic theme and personal commitment.

His improvisational performances, characterised by generosity of comic energy and genuine delight in making others laugh, reflect a Vitality orientation in which aliveness is shared rather than performed and the other's joy is the real aim.

Her physical comedy, which required and expressed total bodily commitment to each moment, and her documented capacity to energise every set she worked on, reflect a Vitality orientation applied to the craft of comedy.

Her documented insistence on celebrating and painting her life with full intensity despite chronic pain, her legendary parties, and her refusal to allow suffering to diminish her engagement with existence, reflect a Vitality orientation of extraordinary determination.

His documented capacity for energising the social and artistic circles around him, his relentless production, and his treatment of every period of life as containing full creative possibility reflect a Vitality orientation applied to the life of the working artist.

Haring's documented decision to make his art in public spaces - subways, streets, fences - so that it was available to communities that couldn't enter galleries, and his sustained investment in AIDS activism and HIV awareness at a time when public discussion of AIDS was considered shameful, reflect a Liberation orientation.

Rivera's documented commitment to making public art - murals in government buildings, factories, hospitals - rather than gallery work, and his explicit belief that art belongs to the communities that produced the labour depicted in it, reflect a Community orientation that made public access an aesthetic principle.

Dalí's documented cultivation of public excess - the ocelot on a leash, the lobster telephone, the media performances - and his explicit statement that he did not use drugs because he was already more interesting than anything drugs could produce, reflect a Vitality orientation in which the artist's life is itself the primary work of art.

Matisse's documented pursuit of pleasure as a formal principle - his stated goal of making painting that functioned like a comfortable armchair - and his late-period cut-outs made from a wheelchair when he could no longer stand, reflect a Vitality orientation that persisted even as his body failed.