Few artists have done more to reconstruct the course of contemporary culture than Patti Smith (b. December 30 1946). Celebrated as the “Godmother of Punk,” her musical influence reverberates across acclaimed artists from Garbage to Morrissey to Madonna, and Michael Stipe famously cited her as the core inspiration for founding R.E.M. As a poet and visual artist, she has explored with lyrical poignancy issues of irrepressible urgency, ranging from foreign policy to mortality.

Among Smith’s greatest feats it the systematic demolition of the the perilous and artificial divide between “high” and “low” culture. In 1978, her song “Because the Night” from the groundbreaking album Horses reached #13 on the Billboard 100 chart; in 2010, her remarkable memoir Just Kids earned her the National Book Award. William Blake and Arthur Rimbaud have inspired much of her music, which has moved generations of hearts and bodies across dance floors and mosh pits. In 2005, she was named a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture; in 2006, she brought down the house at CBGB’s with an extraordinary 3½-hour masterpiece of a performance. The following year, she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Allen Ginsberg once bought her a sandwich in the East Village after mistaking her for “a very pretty boy.”

In the decades between Horses (1975) and Banga (2012), Smith recorded nine other studio albums, delivered countless poetry readings, and authored a number of books, including the breathtaking The Coral Sea, which chronicles her grief over the loss of her onetime lover, lifelong friend, and comrade-in-artistic-arms Robert Mapplethorpe.

In Just Kids, which documents how Smith found her creative voice during her early life with Mapplethorpe when both were aspiring artists in New York City, she articulates the singular duality of her muse:

It’s the artist’s responsibility to balance mystical communication and the labor of creation.

Learn more: Just Kids | Wikipedia

For more than half a century, poet and essayist Adrienne Rich (May 16, 1929 — March 27, 2012) explored with equal parts courage and conviction such complex cultural phenomena as identity and ideology, gender and politics, oppression and freedom. The recipient of numerous honors, including the National Book Award for Poetry, two Guggenheim fellowships, and a MacArthur “genius” grant — Rich is celebrated as one of the most influential poets of the twentieth century.

For Rich, art was as much a tool of creative expression as it was a vehicle for empathy, for expanding one’s understanding of the world beyond the limits of the individual. In a 2005 conversation at the Kelly Writers House, she articulates her ethos with a beautiful definition of art:

One of the great functions of art is to help us imagine what it is like to be not ourselves, what it is like to be someone or something else, what it is like to live in another skin, what it is like to live in another body, and in that sense to surpass ourselves, to go out beyond ourselves.

Rich’s own life was anything but ordinary. In 1953, she married Harvard professor Alfred Haskell Conrad, who fathered her three children. Over the decade that followed, her career exploded, in the process catapulting her into a spurt of personal growth, self-discovery, and political awakening. In 1970, stifled by the institution of marriage, Rich divorced Conrad. In 1976, she met and fell in love with Jamaican-born novelist and editor Michelle Cliff, who became her lifelong partner and inspired Rich’s Twenty-One Love Poems (1977), her first literary exploration of lesbian desire and sexuality, later included in one of her most celebrated works, The Dream of a Common Language (1978). The two remained together for thirty-six years, until Rich’s death in 2012. In a lamentable manifestation of the current failings of marriage equality, as of this writing, her Wikipedia entry still lists Conrad as her only spouse.

In 1997, in protest against the growing monopoly of power and the government’s proposed plan to end funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, Rich famously became the first and only person to date to decline the prestigious National Medal of Arts, the highest honor bestowed upon an individual artist on behalf of the people of the United States, previously awarded to such luminaries as Ralph Ellison, Georgia O’Keeffe, John Updike, Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan, and fellow reconstructionist Maya Angelou.

But despite the strong undercurrents of political and sociocultural commentary, Rich’s work was driven first and foremost by the irrepressible stirrings of her inner life. She reflected in an interview:

A poem can come out of something seen, something overheard, listening to music, an article in a newspaper, a book, a combination of all these… There’s a kind of emotional release that I then find in the act of writing the poem. It’s not, ‘I’m now going to sit down and write a poem about this.’

Learn more: Brain Pickings | Wikipedia

When asked, a good portion of people would admit in charmingly sheepish self-consciousness to have at one point believed that Ray Eames (December 15, 1912 – August 21, 1988) was a man. Ray, of course, is not a man. She is the remarkable painter-turned-designer-and-filmmaker who, together with her husband Charles, revolutionized not only the aesthetic of modernist design but also its popular understanding as an omnipresent bastion of contemporary culture.

While Charles arrived at design through architecture, Ray did through painting — and as the two intertwined their singular talents at that shared intersection, they ushered in a new era of design, pioneering not only new technologies like their now-iconic fiberglass and wire mesh chairs, but also a new ethos that held design to now-sacrosanct standards of utility underpinned by elegance, simplicity, and beauty. Their films, most notably the inventive Powers of Ten explainer of the scale of the universe (which was even turned into a flipbook), enlisted principles of design in illuminating various aspects of how the world works.

Between the 1940s and the 1980s, the Eames Office at 901 Washington Boulevard in Venice served as a haven for a number of notable designers, including Harry Bertoia and Gregory Ain, the Eames’s engineer during WWII, who marveled at Ray’s ability to “bring things into relation with one another [and] find the inner order in whatever she touched.”

The work and legacy of the Eameses was profiled in the wonderful PBS documentary Eames: The Architect and the Painter.

Learn more: Eames Designs | Brain Pickings

Long before photography became “the people’s art,” Berenice Abbott (July 17, 1898 – December 9, 1991) took a large-format camera to the streets to forge a new dialogue between the urban landscape and its inhabitants through her stark black-and-white photographs. Best-remembered for her Changing New York series — 307 evocative black-and-white portraits of the city’s architecture and urban design, taken between 1935 and 1939 — Abbott remains one of the most recognizable voices in the history of photography.

Her story is, in many ways, one of unlikely success. Raised by a divorced mother, Abbott left her Ohio home in 1918, at the age of twenty, and moved to New York’s Greenwich Village to study sculpture. There, “adopted” by anarchist Hippolyte Havel, Abbott moved into an apartment with several of the era’s celebrated thinkers — literary critic Malcolm Cowley, philosopher Kenneth Burke, and poet Djuna Barnes. The following year, she nearly lost her life to the deadly “Spanish flu” pandemic that killed an estimated 50 to 100 million people across the globe.

But Abbott persevered, and soon moved to Europe to continue her studies in sculpture. In 1923, she got word that legendary modernist artist Man Ray was looking to hire someone who knew nothing about photography to work in his portrait studio darkroom and as a blank-slate assistant. Abbott jumped at the opportunity and soon discovered her passion for photography, impressing Ray into allowing her to use his studio for her own portraits. She went on to photograph such cultural icons as James Joyce, Jean Cocteau, and Marcel Duchamp. To be photographed by Abbott eventually became a seal of cultural significance.

In 1925, Abbott discovered the work of Eugène Atget and was instantly mesmerized. After Atget’s death two years later, Abbott took it upon herself to see to his legacy. In early 1929, she set out to find an American publisher for Atget’s photographs and found herself in New York City. But, once there, she was taken with the city’s photogenic handsomeness and decided to pursue her own photography. She returned to Paris, closed down her studio, and returned to New York to capture its spirit with her large-format Century Universal camera. With a modernist aesthetic influenced by Atget and a cultural lens shaped by the writings of urbanism pioneer Lewis Mumford, who advocated for a human-centric antidote to the mechanical age of the Second Industrial Revolution, Abbott went on to produce a powerful visual time-capsule of unique turning point in twentieth-century history.

In 1935, she fell in love with art historian and critic Elizabeth McCausland, and the two moved into a loft in the Greenwich Village. They remained together until McCausland’s death in 1965.

In the late 1950s, Abbott turned to the intersection of art and science with her series of minimalist black-and-white photographic abstractions of scientific processes.

Today, Abbott’s legacy reverberates through both the aesthetic language of modern visual culture and the social change movements that succeeded the dawn of urbanism.

Learn more: Brain Pickings  |  Wikipedia  |  Biography