Robert Mapplethorpe

Robert Mapplethorpe (November 4, 1946 – March 9, 1989) was an American photographer, known for his sensitive yet blunt treatment of controversial subject-matter in the large-scale, highly stylized black and white medium of photography. His work featured an array of subjects, including celebrity portraits, male and female nudes, self-portraits and still-life images of flowers. His most controversial work is that of the underground BDSM scene in the late 1960s and early 1970s of New York City. The homoeroticism of this work fuelled a national debate over the public funding of controversial artwork.

Jaroslav Ježek

Jaroslav Ježek (September 25, 1906 – January 1, 1942) was a Czechoslovakian composer, pianist and conductor, author of jazz, classical, incidental and film music.

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Maria Remarque (born Erich Paul Remark; 22 June 1898 – 25 September 1970) was a German novelist who created many works about the horrors of war. His best known novel All Quiet on the Western Front (1928), about German soldiers in the First World War, was made into an Oscar-winning film. His book made him an enemy of the Nazis, who burned many of his works.

Billie Holiday

Eleanora Fagan (April 7, 1915 – July 17, 1959), better known as Billie Holiday, was an American jazz musician and singer-songwriter with a career spanning nearly thirty years. Nicknamed "Lady Day" by her friend and music partner Lester Young, Holiday had a seminal influence on jazz music and pop singing. Her vocal style, strongly inspired by jazz instrumentalists, pioneered a new way of manipulating phrasing and tempo. She was known for her vocal delivery and improvisational skills, which made up for her limited range and lack of formal music education.

Whoopi Goldberg

Caryn Elaine Johnson (born November 13, 1955),^[3] known professionally as Whoopi Goldberg (, is an American actress, comedian, author, and television host. She has been nominated for 13 Emmy Awards and is one of the few entertainers to have won an Emmy Award, a Grammy Award, an Academy Award, and a Tony Award. She was the second black woman to win an Academy Award for acting.

James Dean

James Byron Dean (February 8, 1931 – September 30, 1955) was an American actor. He is remembered as a cultural icon of teenage disillusionment and social estrangement, as expressed in the title of his most celebrated film, Rebel Without a Cause (1955), in which he starred as troubled teenager Jim Stark. The other two roles that defined his stardom were loner Cal Trask in East of Eden (1955) and surly ranch hand Jett Rink in Giant (1956).

After his death in a car crash, Dean became the first actor to receive a posthumous Academy Award nomination for Best Actor, and remains the only actor to have had two posthumous acting nominations. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked him the 18th best male movie star of Golden Age Hollywood in AFI's 100 Years...100 Stars list.

Robert La Vigne

An Idaho native, LaVigne moved to San Francisco around 1951 and became an important member of the bohemian subculture that soon flourished there. The painter among poets, he created portraits of many of its luminaries, including Philip Whalen, Kerouac and Creeley, made poet Philip Lamantia a floor-length cape to wear for a "Mad Monster Poets' Reading," and transformed poet Michael McClure into a wolf man for the cover of a recent reissue of McClure's signature 1964 collection, "Ghost Tantras." He painted Ginsberg and designed the cover of a special fine press edition of his classic "Howl" published in 1971.

LaVigne also was a model for characters in two Kerouac novels: Robert Browning in "Big Sur" and Levesque in "Desolation Angels."