A native of Wichita, Kansas, James Gross (b. 1950) has had a prolific art career spanning over thirty years. Gross is a postmodern artist noted for his abstract paintings and geometric lithographs, containing squares made of various sizes that overlap each other in the center of the composition. He often includes found objects—leaves, wood or metal fragments, pieces of cloth or paper—into his paintings as a means of unifying the ephemeral matter of the real world and pure form of the ideal world. After receiving his Master of Fine Arts degree from Wichita State University in Kansas, Gross was encouraged by Martin Bush, former director of the university’s Ulrich Museum of Art, to establish himself and his art in New York. Gross became studio assistant to Robert Goodnough, an abstract expressionist and the last artist from the New York School movement, and displayed twelve original artworks at the Guggenheim Museum around the 1980s. Growing weary of the constant self-promotion required to be a contemporary artist, he moved back to Wichita where he would later teach art history at Butler Community College and abstract painting at the Mary R. Koch Art Center in the Mark Arts Gallery. The artist has been featured in ARTS Magazine and American Abstract Artists Journal. His work is in public collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of Art, both in New York; the British Museum, London, England; the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Paris; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; and in the United States embassies in Beijing, China, and Vienna, Austria.
