Artistic Alphabetics Trivia Quiz

Answer: Maya Angelou

In addition to being a poet and civil rights activist, Dr. Maya Angelou was a novelist, memoirist, teacher, historian, actress, and filmmaker. She was born 4 April 1928 in St. Louis, Missouri. Dr. Angelou's script for "Georgia, Georgia" (1972 film) was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

She was nominated for a National Book Award in 1970 for "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings." In all, she had written more than 30 bestselling novels. Other awards she has won include the Presidential Medal of Arts in 2000, the Lincoln Medal in 2008, and three Grammy Awards.

She has received over thirty honorary university degrees, and in her later years, she had worked as a Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University.

Answer: Ludwig van Beethoven

Ludwig van Beethoven was born 16 December 1770. When he was young, Beethoven's father taught him music. Beethoven started losing his hearing in his late 20s/early 30s. By the time Beethoven finished composing his famous "Opus 67: Symphony No. 5 in C minor" in 1808, he was almost completely deaf. Though by 1814 Beethoven had totally lost his hearing, he was able to continue composing music by sawing off the legs of his piano so that he could better hear/feel the vibrations of the notes as he played. Beethoven never heard a single note of his "Opus 125: Symphony No. 9 in D minor", which was composed 1817-1824.

Answer: Paul Cezanne

Paul Cezanne was born in 1839 in Aix-en-Provence and started painting in 1860. Cezanne's early works were romantic and classical themes with dark colors. Starting in the mid-1870s, Paul Cezanne began work on still-life paintings, many of which center around apples.

These still-life paintings and his later landscapes show Cezanne's break with classical perspective into the style of painting for which he is most well-known. Beginning around 1882, Cezanne began painting a large number of landscapes from his home, Aix-en-Provence, and L'Estaque near Marseille, France.

His latest works, completed around the turn of the 19th Century, were portraits.

Answer: Dadaism

Dadaism was an early 20th Century avant-garde movement, primarily in Europe. The movement itself grew out of an anti-war and anti-art mentality post-World War I. Dada art is often associated with Surrealism, Social Realism, Regionalism, and Cubism. A famous work of the Dada art movement is Marcel Duchamp's painting "Nude Descending A Staircase." Though Dadaism was short-lived in the post-war era, the movement affected future artists, most notably Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg was strongly influenced by Carl Solomon, a Dada and Surrealism enthusiast. Ginsberg dedicated his controversial 1955 poem, "Howl," to Solomon. "Howl" displays many ideas that grew out of the Dada movement.

Answer: Clark Gable

Clark Gable was not only a movie actor, but was a stage actor starting from an early age. He was born 1 February 1901 and at age 17 joined a traveling theatre group. Gable's first acting appearance on screen was an uncredited role in the silent film "Fighting Blood" in 1923.

He was offered his first sound role for the 1931 film "The Painted Desert" with MGM. Gable was nominated for several Best Actor Academy Awards during his film career, but he won only once for his role as Peter Warne in "It Happened One Night." Clark Gable died in 1960 at the age of 59 after a severe heart attack.

Answer: Maya Lin

Maya Lin was born 5 October 1959 in Athens, Ohio to Chinese immigrants. She has both a bachelor's and a master's degree in architecture from Yale University. Though she works in both sculpture and architecture, she is most famous for her 1980 design of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

She also designed The Civil Rights Memorial for the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama in 1989. In the 1990s, she moved away from memorial designs into other forms of architecture and sculpture. She has done several art installations at museums across the United States.

Answer: Michelangelo

Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni was born 6 March 1475 into a banking family. At a very early age, Michelangelo became fascinated with the world of painting and sculpture. At age 13, Michelangelo was apprenticed to the Florentine painter Domenico Ghirlandaio, but spent only one year with the painter before moving to the palace of Lorenzo de' Medici where he studied sculpture in the Medici Gardens.

In 1495, Michelangelo began work as a sculptor. His most renowned sculptures are the "David" in Florence, and the "Pieta," currently in place at St. Peter's Basilica in Vatican City. On 31 October 1512, Michelangelo finished his most famous painting, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

Answer: William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare was born in April 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon. Through the years there has been a lot of controversy over whether or not William Shakespeare wrote all 38 plays which bear his name. Many believe that at least some of the plays attributed to Shakespeare were written by Christopher Marlowe. All of the plays, sonnets, and poems attributed to Shakespeare were written in a span of 23 years, from approximately 1590 to 1613.

In 1599, the Globe Theatre in London, where the majority of Shakespeare's plays were performed, was constructed.

The Globe Theatre was accidentally burned to the ground in 1613 during a performance of "Henry VIII," but was quickly rebuilt in another location along the Thames. Though the Globe Theatre was rebuilt, Shakespeare retired in 1613, and died just three years later at the age of 52.

Answer: Mark Twain

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born 30 November 1835 in Florida, Missouri and was the sixth of seven children. He became interested in writing when he joined his brother Orion's newspaper at the age of 15, working as a printer and editorial assistant. In 1858, Samuel Clemens became a licensed river pilot.

His pen name, Mark Twain, comes from his time as a river pilot. "Mark Twain" is a river term meaning two fathoms (12 feet), the depth at which a river is safe to navigate. When river trade ended in 1861 due to the Civil War, Mark Twain returned to writing, working as a newspaper reporter. Twain wrote a total of 28 books during his career, from "Advice for Little Girls" in 1867 to "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" in 1909. Three books, including his autobiography, and his notebook, were published posthumously.

Answer: Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright was born Frank Lincoln Wright on 8 June 1867 to William Cary Wright and Anna Lloyd-Jones. He changed his middle name to Lloyd when his parents got divorced. He designed homes and buildings around the world, with his most famous designs in Chicago, Mill Run, and New York City. Throughout his lifetime Wright completed construction of 532 of his 1,141 designs. Wright was famous for not only the form of his designs, but for the function of his designs.

He developed a style of his own, the Prairie homes, and he widely employed a design technique known as the invisible corner. Frank Lloyd Wright's most notable designs are the Robie House in Chicago, Illinois, the Kaufmann House (Fallingwater) in Mill Run, Pennsylvania, and the Guggenheim museum in New York City, New York.