Louise Nevelson belongs to a generation of Manhattan-based painters and sculptors whose careers coincided with the development of modernism in America. Nevelson created sculptures that audiences could both experience and see. Several of her pieces are now owned by the Whitney, the Brooklyn Museum, and MOMA.

Among art lovers in Israel and in the inner circles of artists, Aviva Uri is considered a legend who shaped generations of artists in Israel. Born in Safed, Uri was known for her abstract scribbles that expressed anxiety and distress, as well as her later depictions of mourning, death, and destruction. In 1952, she received the Dizengoff Prize and in 1957 she exhibited her work at the Tel Aviv Museum. 

Marie Trommer was an early twentieth-century writer, poet, artist, art critic, and contributor to American Jewish newspapers. After attending the Cooper Union Art School, Trommer became known for her contributions to Jewish newspapers, her poetry, and her oil and watercolor paintings. She was a member of the Creative Writers Group, Society of Independent Artists, and Art Alliance of America. 

From the moment she arrived in the city in 1912 until the day she died in 1980, Anna Ticho lovingly portrayed Jerusalem in paint, pen and ink, charcoal, pastel, and pencil. Her works have been shown around Israel and abroad, and she has received numerous honorary titles and awards. She bequeathed her home, Ticho House, to the Israel Museum to be used as a site for exhibitions and cultural events.

Florine Stettheimer's paintings are lively, diarylike accounts of her life and acute examinations of upper-class ways in New York between the wars. Her decorative style offered an alternative to prevailing modes of contemporary modernist painting. Through her work, she criticized the high-mindedness of modern art and the course of modern life. 

Irma Stern was a remarkably prolific artist, holding more than a hundred solo exhibitions. It took time for Stern's espousal of modernism, color, and rhythm to find acceptance in the conservative art world of South Africa. After her death, the Irma Stern Museum, administered by the University of Cape Town, was opened.