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Title: Artist, Poet
Location: Brentwood, California, United States
Lanier Graham, Artist and Poet, has been recognized by Marquis Who’s Who Top Artists for dedication, achievements, and leadership in art and poetry.
Mr. Graham has achieved international distinction as an artist and poet. His visual art is in the permanent collections of major museums in the United States, France, and Germany. His poetry has been published in America, Europe, Australia, and Japan. He is described as an “Artist-Poet” because most of his work involves being both at the same time.
He also is well-known as an educator with an international reputation. That includes his work as an art historian, curator, and professor, and as an author and editor who has sold over a million books. A long profile of that work as an educator may be found by reading his press release for his Lifetime Achievement Award, located by clicking here. Of the 1.5 million biographies in Who’s Who publications worldwide, only five percent have been given this Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award.
The short profile on this page summarizes his career as one of under 300 Top Professional Artists in the United States. As an artist-poet, he spends about half of his studio time making portraits, and half his studio time making illustrated books. Mr. Graham has been doing both since 1954 when he was 14. Inspired by the simultaneous visual/verbal work of William Blake, he started Sun Moon Press in the attic of his family home. He has been writing, illustrating, and publishing poetry books ever since.
Continuing the Dada/Surrealist tradition of Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Cornell, his sculpted portraits (usually collaged images and words framed inside deep wooden boxes) are widely admired. His “Box Art” is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and in a number of other American museums.
His work as a visual artist is difficult to separate from this work as a poet. He rarely writes poems he does not illustrate in a book format. He rarely makes a drawing or a collage that he does not accompany with a poem. In other words, he uses his left/right brain at the same time. The bibliography for this line of work has over 50 citations. This bibliography may be found at WORLDARTPRESS.COM.
Mr. Graham’s work on educational books is equally bimodal. For most of the books he has written or edited on the history of art, culture, and consciousness, he also has directed the visual dimension of the presentation as the book’s art director or designer. The list of this group of books, catalogs, and exhibition brochures has over 100 citations. An illustrated bibliography of these educational books may be found at WORLDARTPRESS.COM.
Three of the best-known of Mr. Graham’s illustrated books are in the Artist’s Book Collection of the Getty in Los Angeles, and in the Artist’s Book Collection of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco: THE RAINBOW BOOK of 1975, DUCHAMP (in-a-Box) of 2001, and DUCHAMP & ANDROGYNY: ART, GENDER, AND METAPHYSICS of 2003.
Mr. Graham has been exhibiting his work in museums and galleries for most of his life, starting with being part of a group exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1967. “SPIRIT-MATTER” – a retrospective exhibition of his sculpted portraits and illustrated poems – has been planned for 2020 at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley.
For more information, please visit:
Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award Press Release
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