The Big Lebowski, struggled upon release with both audiences and critics, grossing only $17 million at the box office. But over the next decade, it became an object of adoration, inspiring a festival, a religion, and an enormous cult following. http://www.vulture.com/2016/02/breaking-down-the-coens-box-office-history.html
William Lyman Underwood and his brother Loring (1874–1930) were early leaders in nineteenth-century nature photography. Loring, trained as a horticulturist, focused on the cultivated landscapes of parks and estate gardens, while William preferred the wilderness of northeastern America. A renowned public speaker, William gave more than forty lectures a year about his experiences as “a camera hunter,” accompanied by a lantern slide show of his photographs. This run-of-the-century [sic] entertainment instructed audiences about an environment that Underwood feared was vanishing. http://americanart.si.edu/collections/search/artist/?id=6755
In 1895, William Lyman Underwood, director of a Massachusetts canned-food company, came to MIT seeking the help of a scientist–any scientist–who could fix the problem of his smelly canned clams. He went straight to the biology department, asking whether anyone could “suggest a cause and, better still, a remedy.” The department chair passed Underwood off to his assistant, Samuel Cate Prescott, advising the chemist to teach the canner a bit about microbes. … During these experiments, Underwood indulged his passion for photography. The March 1898 Technology Quarterly featured several of his actual-size photographs of petri dishes filled with circular spidery blooms of bacillus–each like a telescopic glance at a pockmarked moon–as well as some strikingly clear slides of microörganisms at 1,000 times their actual size. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/412221/two-happy-clams/
Today, Howard Pyle is not nearly as well known as his images. However, he was one of America’s most popular illustrators and storytellers at a time when top illustrators were celebrities. At his death, he was designated by the New York Times “the father of American magazine illustration as it is known to-day.” His illustrations appeared in magazines like Harper’s Monthly, Collier’s Weekly, St. Nicholas, and Scribner’s Magazine, gaining him national and international exposure. And because magazines so influenced the nation’s visual culture, Pyle’s images and stories—including American history and tales of pirates and medieval adventurers—reached millions, helping to shape the American imagination. https://www.delart.org/collections/howard-pyle/about-howard-pyle/
Born in Vienna and trained as a painter at the Kunstgewerbeschüle, Joseph Binder’s early designs won numerous international competitions that placed his posters in public spaces throughout Europe. A leader in the emerging field of graphic design, Binder felt that posters were “an expression of contemporary civilization reduced to its simplest forms for instantaneous visual communication.” FROM http://americanart.si.edu/collections/search/artist/?id=418
In 1936 Joseph Binder settled in New York for good and in 1944 became an American citizen.
In his design he focused on the reduction of geometric forms, on color contrasts and the psychological impact of colors. His clients included American Railroads, American Airlines, A&P Iced Coffee, Fortune and Graphis. In 1948 the U.S. Navy made him their art director and designer.
In the 1960s Binder turned away from commercial graphic work and renewed his explorations in graphic works of art in the abstract style. FROM http://www.aiga.org/medalist-josephbinder#5
Miller led one of the most popular and best-remembered dance bands of the swing era. In his lifetime he was seen as an intense, ambitious perfectionist, and his success was built on the precise playing of carefully crafted arrangements, rather than propulsive swing or fine jazz solo improvisation (his only important jazz soloist was Bobby Hackett). He was particularly noted for the device of doubling a melody on saxophone with a clarinet an octave higher. His arrangements were seamless and rich. Paradoxically, however, although he had many hits with sentimental ballads performed by such singers as Ray Eberle and Marion Hutton, it was his swinging riff tunes, for example In the Mood and Tuxedo Junction, which became most famous. In 1943, he published Glenn Miller’s Method for Orchestral Arranging. http://www.pbs.org/jazz/biography/artist_id_miller_glen.htm
Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin…and his family held his date of birth to be 1 March 1810, yet the certificate of baptism signed in the parish church of Brochów is dated 22 February. That discrepancy has still not been entirely resolved, although today it is the date celebrated by Chopin and his family that is more often used. http://en.chopin.nifc.pl/chopin/life/biography/page/1
Born March 1, 1927 in poverty-stricken Harlem to first-generation Jamaican immigrants, Belafonte emigrated with his mother back to Jamaica at eight years old, and returned to New York at age thirteen. Midway through high school, he dropped out and enlisted in the Navy. Upon discharge, the young man studied and performed at the Actors Studio (alongside such legends as Tony Curtis and Marlon Brando), Erwin Piscator’s Dramatic Workshop at the New School for Social Research, and The American Negro Theater. A singing role in a theatrical piece led to a string of cabaret engagements, and before long, Belafonte’s success enabled him to secure funding to open his own nightclub. His recording career officially began at the age of 22, in 1949, when he presented himself as a pop singer along the lines of Tony Bennett or Frank Sinatra, but in time he found a more unique niche by delving headfirst into the Library of Congress’s archive of folk song recordings and studying West Indian music. What emerged was a highly unique (and unprecedented) blend of pop, jazz and traditional Caribbean rhythms. https://www.nytimes.com/search?query=Harry+Belafonte
Harry Belafonte, a supporter of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the civil rights movement, used his celebrity as a beloved entertainer to garner funding for the movement. In her autobiography, Coretta Scott King said of Belafonte, “whenever we got into trouble or when tragedy struck, Harry has always come to our aid, his generous heart wide open” (King, 144-145). https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/belafonte-harold-george-jr
The Big Lebowski, struggled upon release with both audiences and critics, grossing only $17 million at the box office. But over the next decade, it became an object of adoration, inspiring a festival, a religion, and an enormous cult following.
The Misty Miss Christy 