Oli Sihvonen 1921-1991

Oli Sihvonen was born in 1921 in Brooklyn, NY of Finnish ancestry. He attended classes at the Art Students League, New York, from 1938 to 1941, before serving in the U.S. Army in WWII. Upon his return to the U.S. after the war, Sihvonen entered the important Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where he studied with Josef Albers, former instructor at the Bauhaus, whose color theories had a lifelong influence on the artist’s work.

In the late 1950s, Sihvonen moved to Taos, New Mexico, and became an influential member of the group of painters known as the Taos Moderns. He remained in Taos for more than a decade, after which he returned to New York where he lived and worked until his death in 1991.

Oli Sihvonen’s work has been exhibited and purchased by major institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.; The Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA; Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA; The Art Institute of Chicago; Dallas Museum of Art; Albuquerque Museum of Art; and the New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe.