Mokha Laget is a New Mexico-based painter known for her geometric abstractions that utilize shaped canvas to take hard-edge color field imagery into another dimension. Her work has been exhibited internationally over the past 30 years and has been written about in Art in America, The New Art Examiner, The Washington Post, Art Ltd., and many others. Her work is included in the collections of the Ulrich Museum, The Museum of Geometric and Madi Art, Art in Embassies, The Artery Collection, The National Institutes of Health as well as private and corporate collections around the world.

Born in North Africa, a region of radiant light and dramatic geographical contrasts, Mokha went on to study Fine Arts at the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington DC. There she studied under several prominent members of the Washington Color School (WCS), an influential non-objective painting group whose principal members included Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Thomas Downing, Howard Mehring and Paul Reed. During her years in DC, she worked as a professional artist and studio assistant to WCS painter Gene Davis.

Mokha has enjoyed a diverse career characterized by travel, color, and curiosity. In addition to her painting practices, she has also worked as an independent curator, art restorer, arts writer and was Curatorial Assistant for the New Mexico Museum of Fine Arts. In theatre, she was a set designer, scriptwriter, actor and director. With a degree from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, she has spent much of the past 25 years traveling parts of Africa, Latin America, and Asia as a simultaneous French interpreter. She lives and works in an off-grid studio in the mountains of New Mexico.

Thomas Downing was born in Suffolk, Virginia. He studied at Randolph-Macon College, Ashland, Virginia, where he received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1948. He then studied at the Pratt Institute, a well-known art school in Brooklyn, New York, until 1950. That year he received a grant from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, enabling him to travel to Europe, where he studied briefly at the Académie Julian in Paris.

In 1951 he returned to the United States, and after serving in the U.S. Army, settled in Washington, D.C., where he began to teach, in 1953.
The following summer, he enrolled in a summer institute at Catholic University, studying under Kenneth Noland. He became a friend of Noland, who became a significant influence on Downing's art and who was one of the founders of the Washington Color Field Movement.

In the late 1950s, Downing shared a studio with Howard Mehring, another artist of the Washington Color School and Color Field painting. In 1964 Clement Greenberg included Noland, Mehring, Downing and others in his traveling museum exhibition called Post-painterly Abstraction.

From 1965 to 1968, Downing taught at the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, D.C. There he taught several people who in their turn became artists influenced by Downing's ideas, including Sam Gilliam.
His paintings to a large extent consisted of circles arranged in precise patterns on the canvas, with colors often chosen according to ideas of symmetry. Downing's Spot Paintings are his best known works.

In the last ten years of his life, Downing lived in Provincetown, Massachusetts. He died in October 1985 in Provincetown, Massachusetts at the age of 57. In its obituary the Washington Times characterized his death as mysterious. The newspaper was referring to the then recent demise of Washington Color Field artist Gene Davis (1920–1985) and to the earlier death of Howard Mehring (1931–1978), as well.

Alvin Loving Jr. was an innovative African American artist whose diverse body of work included striking geometric paintings. Just a year after leaving his native Detroit for New York in 1969, Loving was given a solo show at the Whitney Museum. Of the exhibition, Loving later reflected: “My geometric abstractions of this time represented a post-graduate end to my education in western culture and art history. The Whitney show would force me to scramble to find my own non-eclectic position in art.” Throughout his career, Loving developed a recognizably bold style, organizing vivid color into arresting visual arrangements with precision and subtlety.

Charles Hinman, known for his shaped-canvas sculpture, was born in Syracuse, New York on December 29, 1932. He attended art classes at Syracuse Museum of Fine Arts (now Everson Museum of Art) and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Syracuse University in 1955. He was a professional baseball pitcher for the Milwaukee Braves while pursuing his BFA. From 1955 to 1966, he studied at the Art Students League; then served in the United States Army from 1956 to 1958.

Hinman lived in New York City and held various part-time jobs while he continued to paint. Charles Hinman taught painting and engineering drawing at Staten Island Academy, New York from 1960 to 1962, and was the shop instructor at Woodmere Academy on Long Island from 1962 to 1964. In these two positions, he developed carpentry and engineering skills that gave him the ability to construct his own shaped canvases with complex three-dimensional curves.

In 1963, while seeking an independent path, he created his first shaped canvases in his studio on the Bowery, where Will Insley, who was also working on shaped canvases, and Robert Indiana had studios, as well.

Hinman first received critical attention in the exhibition 7 New Artisits at the Sidney Janis Gallery in May 1964 where he exhibited flat canvases cut at angles and suspended by cords. The other artists in the exhibition were: Larry Bell, Robert Irwin, Norman Ives, Robert Slutsky, Robert Whitman, and Arakawa.

Hinman went on to add the third dimension to his shaped canvases while examining the subtle boundary between the picture plane and the space in front of it, as well as playing with the idea of literal versus illusionistic depth.

Usually Hinman begins his work by building charcoal drawings of volumetric shapes. Out of the series of drawings, he will select one drawing and turn it into “shop drawings” to determine how the organic shape can be turned into a constructed form with intricate shape stretchers supporting it. While building the armature, he addresses the level of three-dimensionality of the work. Once the work has been stretched with canvas and given a ground, he then determines colors, often creating more sketches and repainting areas several times.

In the 1960’s, Hinman used bright colors in his work adding an almost Pop aesthetic to his canvases, such as Poltergeist, 1964, which is in the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He said he was then using color as if he were painting a hot rod. In 1975, Hinman began an all-white series of paintings. Returning to color in the late 1970’s, Hinman treated color as spatial indicators with each color representing a different canvas unit; each color having a separate stretcher underneath it. With a more muted palette of grays, silvers, and tans, the artist attained subtle interactions of color shapes interlocking with each other in space within a rhythmic order.

Hinman’s first solo exhibition was at the Feigen Gallery in New York in Nov.-Dec.1964, quickly followed by exhibitions with Feigen in 1965 at both his New York and Chicago galleries. Out of the 1964 show, the Museum of Modern Art, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, and Nelson Rockefeller purchased works. In 1965, Hinman was one of four Americans invited to exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Arts in Nagaoka, Japan where Hinman shared first prize with the Japanese artist Jiro Takamatsu. More solo and group exhibitions followed with Feigen through 1969 and then Hinman signed on with the Paris dealer Denise Rene, having solo exhibitions at Galerie Denise Rene in Paris in 1971 and then in her New York gallery in 1972, 1973 and 1975.

Hinman has visited Japan, Thailand, India, Iran, Greece, Italy, France and England. He served as artist-in-Residence, Aspen, Colorado in 1966. Hinman has taught at Cornell University and at Syracuse University. He has also held teaching positions at Pratt Institute, School of Visual Arts, the Cooper Union, Princeton University, University of Georgia campuses in Athens, Georgia and Cortona, Italy, and other distinguished institutions. Presently, he is teaching at the Art Students League of New York. In 1989, Hinman’s work traveled to Russia for an exhibition organized by Donald Kuspit titled Painting Beyond the Death of Painting at the Kuznetsky Most Exhibition Hall in Moscow. Hinman has credited Russian Supremacists as having a strong influence on his work.

Museum collections with Charles Hinman’s work include: the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; the Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC; the Phoenix Art Museum, AZ; the Denver Art Museum, CO; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; the Nagaoke Museum in Japan; the Louisiana Museum in Denmark; the Tel Aviv Museum in Israel; and the Pfalzgalerie Museum in Germany, among others.

Hinman passed away May 2026 in Raleigh, North Carolina.


Download Full Biography

Leo Valledor (1935–1989) was a Filipino-American painter who was a pioneer of the hard-edge painting style. During the 1960s he was a member of the Park Place Gallery in Soho, New York, which exhibited many influential and significant artists of the period. He exhibited in several prominent galleries and museums, such as the Graham Gallery, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum. He was the Exhibition Director and teacher at Lone Mountain College. He was a two-time recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Artist Fellowship Grant, and was a leader of the minimalist movement in the 1970s.


Download Full Biography

Leon Polk Smith (1906–1996) was an American painter who combined the rhythmic patterns of his Cherokee ancestry with the Hard-Edged and Minimalist styles of abstraction that he helped popularize in New York during the latter half of the 20th century.

Smith was born near Chickasha, a year before Oklahoma became a state. His parents, William and Samantha Smith, had arrived in present-day Oklahoma from Tennessee at the end of the 19th century, and had settled on land with the Chickasaw Nation and Choctaw Nation in Indian Territory. Smith was the eighth of nine children and labored on his parents' modest homestead throughout an impoverished childhood.

When he was still quite young, one of Smith’s brothers had married a woman of Chickasaw origin, who taught him her songs and language. His parents themselves had Cherokee ancestry. Although at the time Oklahoma had only a small African American population compared to its American Indian population, Smith’s parents were committed to the principle of equal opportunity and instilled this in their offspring. They had observed the marginalization of the American Indian population by the white settlers, and they encouraged their children to recognize their own Indian ancestry by socializing openly with all of their neighbors, regardless of origin. As a consequence, Smith would prove to be a staunch, early supporter of the civil rights movement during his first two full-time appointments outside Oklahoma.

After high school, he worked as a ranch-hand in Oklahoma, then built roads and constructed telephone systems in Arizona. During this period Smith sent money home to help his parents with the mortgage on their land, but even the aggregate of the family's funds proved insufficient to avoid foreclosure.

After the foreclosure and released from the burden of familial financial support, Smith enrolled at Oklahoma State College (now East Central University), in Ada, Oklahoma, with the intention of becoming a teacher. Following graduation, he moved to New York City (1936), where he attended the Columbia University Teacher's College. Smith's artistic development was set in motion during his first semester at Columbia, when one of his teachers took him to see the Gallatin Collection, then at New York University. The sight of paintings by Mondrian and sculpture by Constantin Brâncuși and Jean Arp was a formative and deeply influential experience.

A year after earning his M.A. degree at Columbia and returning home to Oklahoma, Smith had earned enough to plan his first trip to Europe, in the summer of 1939. He visited the major countries of Western Europe with the exception of Germany and the states on its eastern borders, which were already closed to tourism because of the brewing political circumstances.

Once back in Oklahoma, Smith decided that it was time for him to seek a post elsewhere on a more advanced level and became an assistant professor of art at Georgia Teachers College in Collegeboro.

Smith prospered in Georgia and made influential friends on the faculty. While holding a full-time job, he pursued his art and was inspired by a trip to Mexico. Prophetically, his first one-artist show took place in New York at the Uptown Galleries in January and February 1941. The fifteen paintings and eighteen watercolors were figurative, and reviewers generally found them praiseworthy. In the following year two more exhibitions followed in rapid succession, and Smith’s reputation was growing. The first of these 1942 shows consisted largely of works inspired by Mexico, and it was also Smith’s first one-artist exhibition in a museum, taking place at the Telfair Academy of Arts and Sciences in Savannah. The second 1942 exhibition was his debut in abstraction and took place at the Pinocoteca Gallery in New York. Also in the same year, Smith left Georgia when he felt that the state government’s resistance to campus desegregation was too far from his deeply held convictions. He accepted a post as State Supervisor of Art Education in Delaware, where much segregation remained in place but was less obvious.

In the decade that followed, Smith moved through preliminary explorations of neo-plasticism and began to paint in a more hard-edge style, typified by geometric lines, curving shapes of color, and the use of tondo (disk-shaped) canvases. A review for a 1956 solo show at the Camino Gallery noted Smith as a Geometric painter, who had "extended De Stijl principles to include tonal variations and nonrectilinear elements."

Smith acknowledged his debt to the De Stijl movement and to Mondrian, but stated that he was looking in his work to take the road beyond: "people said [Mondrian] had hit a dead end, or a stone wall and I said I don't think so." He was inspired by Mondrian’s works, if not fully convinced by the philosophy behind them. Pragmatic in his approach, Smith took what he wanted from the aesthetic experience and left the theorizing behind.

Critic Arthur Danto, in his analysis of Smith’s absorption of Mondrian’s style, suggests that the way in which Smith comprehended space is attributable directly to his Southwestern background. Smith’s perceptions of artistic space led to a quest to make color and form one. This quest consisted of a series of intuitive decisions rather than the theoretical, ruminative creative process that preoccupied Mondrian and other members of the De Stijl group.

Although he was pleased with his working situation and with the results of his efforts in Delaware, after two years Smith felt it was time to move on. “With me, New York City was love at first sight,” he wrote, and in 1944, he determined to return.

Smith shared Mondrian's affection for New York, writing in 1989: "New York City revealed its physical self to me through the mountains and canyons of the Southwest. There were the ups and downs--the high peaks, the in-betweens, or the canyons, and topped with the great dome....I felt the city to be a perfect equation for a great abstraction." (Ratcliff, 1996).

Lacking funds to remain financially independent, Smith sought a Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. In the process of application, he was offered a job assisting at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (later to become the Guggenheim Museum) by Hilla Rebay, who was director of both the foundation and the museum. She had informed him that he was too late for the current funding cycle but that he could apply the following spring.

It was an important learning opportunity, coming at the right moment for him, to work among examples of art by the leading European geometric abstractionists. As part of the Guggenheim Fellowship that Smith eventually received, he traveled back to the Southwest to proselytize as an art educator for the new abstraction, distributing Guggenheim materials in Oklahoma and New Mexico, where he still had many contacts. Santa Fe had a long-established, growing artists’ community, and he even attempted, unsuccessfully, to organize a show there of some of the Guggenheim’s collection.


With the support of prominent gallerists in the late 1950s, by the mid-60s Smith had found an audience for his work as an independent voice. His artwork was included in two important group exhibitions, The Responsive Eye at the Museum of Modern Art (1965) and Systemic Painting at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1966). His two important series of the period, Correspondences and Constellations impressed reviewers with their interplay of form, color, and space.

During the next few years Smith established affiliations with various galleries and maintained studio and living spaces in buildings housing other artists, while leaving on occasion for visiting teaching posts. An appointment lasting two years at Rollins College in Florida was followed by a brief residence in Cuba.

In 1966, Smith established a summer home on Long Island at Shoreham, which for a time also served as his principal residence. For most of the remaining years of his life, Smith remained in New York City.

Smith died in Manhattan in 1996, with an acknowledged position in the development of American geometric abstraction. He had arrived at geometry before others and remained steadfastly loyal to its principles, cultivating aspects of scale and simplicity that presaged the Hard-Edge and Minimal painting styles of the late 1950s and '60s. Younger painters like Ellsworth Kelly, Jack Youngerman and Al Held visited his studio and came away inspired. But he cultivated a maverick attitude as a New York outsider that resisted definition as part of any single contemporary movement on the arts scene. This challenged his reviewers, as they looked for easy ways to describe his status and his work. When asked for his inspirations at a post-commencement speech roundtable, Smith cited the two professors of English who opened his mind to the beauty of Middle-English and poetry, rather than name-dropping his contemporaries or artistic mentors.


The Leon Polk Smith Foundation was established by the artist before his death to "preserve and promote the art and legacy of Leon Polk Smith."


Smith's work is included in the collections of numerous museums including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Boston, Massachusetts; the Brooklyn Museum , Brooklyn, New York; the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Buenos Aires;
 Buenos Aires, Argentina; the Art Institute of Chicago,Chicago, Illinois; the Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, Georgia; the Musée de Grenoble, Grenoble, France; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art, New York, New York; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden,
Washington D.C. ; the Institut für Diskrete Mathematiks, Bonn, Germany; the Israel Museum; Jerusalem, Israel; the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma; the Museum für Konkrete Kunst,Ingolstadt, Germany; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art,Los Angeles, California; the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York; the mumok, Museum of Modern Art, Ludwig Foundation, Vienna, Austria; the National Gallery of Art ,Washington, D.C.; the Neue Nationalgalerie,Berlin, Germany; the Neues Museum Nuremberg (State Museum for Art and Design), Nuremberg, Germany; the Oklahoma State University Museum of Art, Stillwater, Oklahoma; the Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, New York; the Pogue Art Gallery, East Central University, Ada, Oklahoma; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York, among others.


biographical sources inlcude Artsy; Artnet; Robert Buck, “Leon Polk Smith American Original,” Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, The University of Oklahoma; and others

Donald Roy Thompson was born in 1936, in Fowler, California. He received his B.A. and M.A. degrees from Sacramento State University in 1960 and 1962, respectively. His most notable art instructor was Wayne Thiebaud. Among his classmates were Fritz Scholder and Merrill Mahaffey, both successful artists in Santa Fe.

From 1964-2000 Donald was an art instructor at Cabrillo College in Aptos, California. Before he settled down to teach, Donald traveled and lived in Mexico City, where he was able to observe closely the murals of Diego Rivera.

Like so many color field painters of his generation, Thompson was influenced by Johannes Itten and Josef Albers, as well as by Matisse and Mondrian.

During an impoverished time in his early art career he was unable to afford good quality paint, so instead he used layers of hand-dyed cheesecloth for a large installation at the Cabrillo College Gallery. It helped form the basis of the ideas of transparency that he later produced in his acrylic color field paintings of 1971-75.

In 1972 Donald began again to use opaque colors on various sizes of canvas, focusing on the illusion of transparency.

By 1974 he began to feel the need for greater physicality and began to employ the use of stretched canvases of a single color bolted together, from large to huge (7.5’ X 10’), now in the Oakland Museum.

In 2013 Thompson settled in Santa Fe. There he began his current series of work, rekindling an aesthetic from four decades previous.

He continues to refine his approach and vision.

“I am habitually focused on the relationship of colors!” he wrote in July of 2022. “I’ve tried, in my paintings during the recent past, to experiment with various forms of pictorial composition - both symmetrical and asymmetrical.

My current challenge is combining the geometric with curvilinear form in an effort to achieve an integrated synthesis of the two, as they are experienced in hard-edge color painting. “

Thompson has exhibited solo and group shows both nationally and internationally. These include solo shows at Larry Evans/Willis Gallery, Foster Goldstrom, and Galeria Carl Van der Voort in San Francisco, and Ibiza, Spain. He had solo shows at Frederick Spratt Gallery in San Jose, California, as well as Shasta College Gallery in Redding, California and Cabrillo College in Aptos, California. His group shows include Leila Taghinia-Milani, New York City, Basel Art Fair, Switzerland and the Second British International Print Biennale, Yorkshire, England.

Thompson’s paintings are found in major collections including The Oakland Museum, Oakland, CA.; Seattle First National Bank (Seafirst), Seattle, WA; Crocker Museum, Sacramento, CA, Art Museum of Santa Cruz County, Santa Cruz, CA.

Watch an interview with Donald Roy Thompson with art historian Kathryn Davis

Download Full Biography

"Abstract painting is an intellectual process. To be a modern painter and to make a truthful statement is the sum total of all I am and what I am continually striving to create. I am a painter and my paintings are all I can contribute to this world."

- Janet Lippincott, 1980, Southwest Art magazine

Born in New York into a privileged family, Janet Lippincott went to museums with her Aunt Gertrude, a modern dancer. When she saw her first Picasso, Lippincott was hooked, and residing in Paris for a period as a child brought her in contact with the most contemporary movements. At age fifteen, she took a life-drawing class at the Art Students League, where she would later enroll full time.

During World War II, she enlisted in the Women’s Army Corps and was attached to General Eisenhower’s staff. Later she liked to tell the story of how Patton stormed in demanding to see Ike and how she told him to take a seat and keep his mouth shut.

In 1949, she drove to Taos for instruction in Emil Bisttram’s School of Art on the G.I. Bill. In response to the transcendental painter’s dismissal of her talent, Lippincott told him that the G.I. Bill was paying him and that she would stay. If anything, his criticism only made her determined to prove him wrong, and she was vindicated when her one-time teacher wrote a glowing review of her exhibition at the Jamison Gallery in 1972.

After studying with Bisttram and Alfred Morang, Lippincott briefly studied at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. She took a job at the San Francisco Art Institute, and returned to New Mexico in 1954, establishing a house and studio in Santa Fe.

Many the artists in Santa Fe at the time were working in response to the Southwestern landscape, light, and culture, with no attention paid to Abstract Expressionism. After having started painting landscapes and portraits, Lippincott had experienced her conversion. "After the war, I came out here, and NO ONE was doing any modern painting. Here I came with my screwball ideas and shook everybody up."

She garnered several awards for her work in this period, including the 1956 Annual Circle Exhibition, Roswell Museum, Roswell, New Mexico; the 1957 Purchase Award, 10th Graphic Exhibition, NM Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe, NM; and the 1958 12th Graphic Exhibition, New Mexico Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Lippincott found a deep well working in various media. She continued to keep drawing as an underlying discipline, and she was a member of a drawing group in Santa Fe for about 25 years until about 1987. Lippincott was one of the first artists to create lithographs at the Tamarind Institute. In the 1970s, she dove into sculpture, shortly after the Shidoni Foundry opened in Tesuque.

She was very much a loner and was married once for 10 days. "That was 10 days too long," art dealer Karen Ruhlen recalls the artist saying. While she enjoyed the company of a man, she was always self-reliant and "a little on the ornery side," Ruhlen adds. "Janet was an artist to the core. Making art was like breathing - it was her way of talking and expressing emotions."

Lippincott received the Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts in New Mexico in 2002 and was honored in an exhibition by the New Mexico Committee of the National Museum of Women in the Arts in 2003.

Upon her death in 2007, her estate, including documents, sketchbooks, and artworks, was donated to St. John's College in Santa Fe.

Her selected exhibtions include 1957, Los Artisanos, Las Vegas, New Mexico; 1957, Mexican-American Cultural Institute, Mexico City; 1958, Abstractions in Colored India Ink, La Galleria Escondida, Taos, NM; and 1959, Mid American Exhibition, Nelson Atkins Museum, Kansas City, Missouri, among others.

Her works are in the collections of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA; Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City, UT; Museum of Fine Art, Santa Fe, New Mexico; State Capital Art Collection, Santa Fe, New Mexico; Harwood Foundation, Taos, New Mexico.


Download Full Biography