Title of the artwork: Sky Cathedral

Materials used to create: Wood

Location: New York City

Name of Artist: Louise Nevelson

Idea behind the artwork: Nevelson’s wall sculptures have an architectural scale and dramatic impact that suited the artist’s grand personality. The artist liked black paint because it conjured ​“totality, peace and greatness.” Here, the light gently picks up the spectral outlines of the fragmented objects to create an elusive handwriting across the velvety black field. Sky Cathedral evokes what Nevelson called ​“the heavenly spheres, the places between the land and the sea” lying beyond our experience of ordinary things.

 

Title of the artwork: Sappho

Materials used to create: Marble

Location: New York City

Name of Artist: Erastus Dow Palmer

Idea behind the artwork:  In the mid-1800s, many artists, including Palmer, were part of the neoclassicism movement, which centered around appreciating and taking inspiration from the art, culture, literature, and language of ancient antiquity.  Palmer imitates both the style and subject matter of ancient Greek sculpture; many of his fellow neoclassicists would have recognized Sappho as an Greek poet who lived around 600 BC.

Title of the artwork: Unknown it was an exchange gift 

Materials used to create: Copper alloy

Location: Smithsonian Institution

Name of Artist: Unknown but done in a Benin Kingdom Court Style

The idea behind the artwork:  An extraordinary seventeenth-century Bini plaque from the palace of the Oba is adorned with the heads of Portuguese soldiers in the upper corners, identified by long hair, drooping mustaches, and dome-shaped hats. The field photo shows a similar scene in the court of the current Oba of Benin. 

Many of the fundamentals of Egyptian art were established at the very beginning of Egyptian history and changed little over time. Subject matter also remained relatively unchanged over long periods of time. However, Egyptian art did not remain completely static over the three thousand years of pharaonic history. Despite the limited repertory of subject matter, Egyptian artists valued variation and avoided producing exact copies of the same forms. Essentially though the human figure was a composite with the face, limbs, waist and buttocks shown in profile, while the chest and shoulders were in full view facing the viewer as were one eye and an eyebrow.

 material -Spencer's mediums include clay, plaster, cement and bronze. 
location-Reidsville, North Carolina
name of artist-Brad Spencer
idea behind the artwork- he loved the idea of shaping ancient, eroded stone into images our history, our environment and our very selves, then returning it to stone through the firing process.
yea dats it-

Title of the artwork: The Horses of Anahita or The Flight of Night

Materials used to create: Tinted plaster

Location: The Met 5th Avenue in Gallery 774

Name of Artist: William Morris Hunt

The idea behind the artwork: In the year 1847 the idea started out as a pencil sketch. It was of Anahita(the Persian goddess of moon and night) But then became a high-relief art sculpture in 1848 because he had a hard time working out the dimensions of the horses.
Link to the work

Title of the artwork: Little Ida

Materials used to create: Marble

Location: The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 762

Name of Artist: Charles Calverley

Idea behind the artwork: In a 1908 interview Calverley recalled the subject of this naturalistic relief and the circumstances of its production. He met Ida at a summer hotel while she tended a boy whose portrait he was modeling, and noticed the "string of alabaster beads around her long neck, and large red ear-drops." Calverley included anecdotal touches in this portrait, including the curls of hair escaping from her knotted scarf, the unbuttoned collar, and the slight twist of the necklace. A prominent portraitist in Reconstruction-era New York, Calverley also produced likenesses of Abraham Lincoln and the radical abolitionist John Brown. In 1899 he revised Ida’s portrait to include the inscription "The Race John Brown Died For," a testament to Brown’s legacy.