Dorothea Lange (May 25 1895 - October 11 1965) was an influential American documentary photographer and photojournalist, best known for her Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Lange's photographs humanized the tragic consequences of the Great Depression and profoundly influenced the development of documentary photography. Born in Hoboken, New Jersey, her birth name was Dorothea Margarette Nutzhorn.

Walker Evans (November 3, 1903 - April 10, 1975) was an American photographer best known for his work for the Farm Security Administration documenting the effects of the Great Depression. Much of Evans' work from the FSA period uses the large-format, 8x10-inch camera. He wrote that his goal as a photographer was to make pictures that are "literate, authoritative, transcendent." Many of his works are in the permanent collections of museums, …

Ben Shahn (September 12, 1898 - March 14 1969) was a Lithuanian-born American artist, muralist, social activist, photographer and teacher. He is best known for his works of Social realism, his leftist political views, and his series of lectures published as "The Shape of Content". He was born in Kovno (Kaunas), Lithuania, to Joshua Hessel and Gittel (Lieberman) Shahn. His father was exiled to Siberia for alleged revolutionary activities in 1902, at which point Shahn, …

Isabel Bishop (March 3 1902 - February 19 1988) was an American painter and graphic artist, who produced numerous paintings and prints of working women in realistic urban settings. She was widely exhibited in her lifetime, and was recognised with a number of awards including one for Outstanding Achievement in the Arts, presented to her by President Jimmy Carter in 1979. Bishop was born in Cincinnati, Ohio and brought up in Detroit, Michigan, …

Diego Rivera, (full name "Diego María de la Concepción Juan Nepomuceno Estanislao de la Rivera y Barrientos Acosta y Rodríguez") was a Mexican painter and muralist born in Guanajuato City, Guanajuato. Diego Rivera is perhaps best known by the public world for his 1933 mural, "Man at the Crossroads," in the lobby of the RCA Building at Rockefeller Center.

David Alfaro Siqueiros (December 29, 1896 in Camargo, Chihuahua, Mexico - January 6, 1974 in Cuernavaca, Morelos, Mexico) was a painter and muralist known for his social realism work. His notable projects include his collaborative mural at the Mexican Electricians' Union (1939-40), "From Porfiriato to the Revolution" at the Museum of National History (1957-55), "March of Humanity" and the Polyforum Cultural Siqueiros on Avenida Insurgentes (1965-71), …

Noel Counihan (October 4, 1913 - July 5, 1986) was an Australian social realist painter. Counihan was born in Albert Park, then a working-class suburb of Melbourne. He studied part-time under Charles Wheeler at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School in Melbourne during 1930-31, where he met the social realists Herbert McClintock and Roy Dalgarno. Social realism, the belief that art should reflect the realities of society under capitalism, …

Reginald Marsh (14 March 1898 - 3 July 1954) was an American painter, born in Paris, most notable for his detailed depictions of life in New York City in the 1920's and 1930's. He painted using egg tempera, a forgotten medium revived in the mid-twentieth century. He also produced many watercolors, oil paintings, Chinese ink drawings, and a number of lithographs and etchings. Marsh attended the Lawrenceville School and graduated in 1920 from Yale University, …

Roy Dalgarno is a social realist artist, born in Melbourne, Victoria (Australia) in 1910, died February 2001 in Auckland, New Zealand.

Mahonri Macintosh Young (August 9, 1877 - November 2, 1957) was an American sculptor and artist. Although he lived most of his life in New York City, Young is most remembered in Utah as being the grandson of Brigham Young who sculpted the This Is The Place Monument and the Seagull Monument in Salt Lake City. Young is one of the best-known artists from Utah.

Isaac Soyer was a social realist painter and often portrayed working-class people of New York City in his paintings.

José Clemente Orozco (born November 23, 1883, in Zapotlán el Grande (now Ciudad Guzmán), Jalisco; died September 7, 1949, in Mexico City) was a Mexican social realist painter who specialized in bold murals. Orozco was fond of the theme of the human versus the mechanical. He was also a genre painter and lithographer. Orozco studied in Mexico City at the San Carlos Academy. With Diego Rivera, he was a leader of the Mexican Renaissance.

Esther Bubley (1921 - 1998) was an American photographer who specialized in expressive photos of ordinary people in everyday lives. She was born February 16, 1921 in Phillips, Wisconsin, the fourth of five children of Russian Jewish immigrants Louis and Ida Bubley. She became interested in photography in high school in Superior, Wisconsin, and, after two years at Superior State Teachers College (now the University of Wisconsin-Superior), …

Jacob Lawrence (September 7, 1917 - June 9, 2000) was an African American painter; he was married to fellow artist Gwendolyn Knight.

Jack Levine (b. Boston, Massachusetts, January 3 1915) is an American expressionist painter best known for his satires of modern life in the United States. He was a part of the Social Realism school in the 1930s and was for a time employed by the Works Progress Administration. Along with the Boston painters Hyman Bloom and Karl Zerbe, he became associated with the style known as Boston Expressionism.

Herbert McClintock was a social realist Artist born in Perth, Western Australia in 1906, died 1985. Studied at the National Gallery of Victoria School from 1925 to 1927 and again in 1930, where he met fellow social realists Noel Counihan and Roy Dalgarno. Earned a living as a signwriter and advertising artist while a student. He joined the Communist Party of Australia during the depression of the 1930s and did many political cartoons for communist publications.

Mark Vallen is an American graphic artist, painter, and blogger. He was born and raised in Los Angeles, California, and was strongly influenced by the Chicano Movement and the L.A. punk scene. Among his artistic influences he counts Francisco Goya and Honoré Daumier, as well as the German expressionists and the Mexican muralists. While still in his teens, he began publishing cartoons in the underground "Los Angeles Free Press", …

Stevan Dohanos (b. May 18 1907, Lorain, Ohio - d. 1994) was an artist and illustrator of the social realism school, best known for his "Saturday Evening Post" covers, and responsible for several of the "Don't Talk" set of World War II propaganda posters. He named Grant Wood and Edward Hopper as the greatest influences on his painting. Dohanos attended the Cleveland School of Art. He worked in fine art as well as in commercial art.

Frank Holl (July 4, 1845 - July 31, 1888), English painter, was born in London, and was educated chiefly at University College School. He was a grandson of William Holl, an engraver of note, and the son of Francis Holl, ARA, another engraver, whose profession he originally intended to follow. Entering the Royal Academy schools as a probationer in painting in 1860, he rapidly progressed, winning silver and gold medals, …

Felipe Seade was a Lebanese painter and teacher who spent most of his life in Uruguay. Seade was born in Santiago de Chile, the elder son of a Lebanese immigrant family. Eleven years later his whole family moved to Montevideo, Uruguay. At the age of 12 Seade began working as an assistant of the Muralist Enrique Albertazzi and the painter Guillermo Rodríguez. Under Rodríguez' influence Seade took some painting courses at the Fine Arts Circle school.

Leon Bibel (1913-1995) was a Polish-American painter and printmaker during the Great Depression. His themes were the social condition of workers and the politics of protest and war, although cityscapes and landscapes were included among his works. He later developed works in wood of especially Jewish themes. These included fanciful miniature buildings influenced by European spice boxes, figures and objects within shadow boxes, and in one case a synagogue ark.

Sir Hubert von Herkomer (1849 - 1914), British painter, was born at Waal, in Bavaria, and eight years later was brought to England by his father, a wood-carver of great ability. He lived for some time at Southampton and in the school of art there began his art training; but in 1866 he entered upon a more serious course of study at the South Kensington Schools, and in 1869 exhibited for the first time at the Royal Academy.

Raphael Soyer (1899 - November 4, 1987) was a Russian-born American painter, draftsman, and printmaker. Soyer was referred to as an American scene painter. He is identified as a Social Realist because of his interest in men and women viewed in contemporary settings which included the streets, subways, salons and artists' studios of New York City, although he avoided subjects that were particularly critical of society. He also wrote several books on his life and art.