Artists from Tucson

Arthur Jeph Parker (June 4, 1923 – December 15, 2002) was an American set decorator. He was nominated for two Academy Awards in the category Best Art Direction.

Ray Manley (September 4, 1921 in Cottonwood, Arizona – July 15, 2006 in Tucson, Arizona) was an American photographer whose photographs of Arizona helped increase tourism and migration to Arizona.

Steven Douglas Paxton (January 21, 1939 – February 20, 2024) was an American experimental dancer and choreographer. His early background was in gymnastics while his later training included three years with Merce Cunningham and a year with José Limón. As a founding member of the Judson Dance Theater, he performed works by Yvonne Rainer and Trisha Brown. He was a founding member of the experimental group Grand Union and in 1972 named and began to develop the dance form known as Contact Improvisation, a form of dance that utilizes the physical laws of friction, momentum, gravity, and inertia to explore the relationship between dancers.
Paxton believed that even an untrained dancer could contribute to the dance form, and so began his great interest in pedestrian movement. After working with Cunningham, he attempted to remain reclusive, except when performing, teaching, and choreographing internationally.

Paul John Wonner (April 24, 1920 – April 23, 2008) was an American artist best known for his still-life paintings done in an abstract expressionist style.
Born in Tucson, Arizona, he received a B.A. in 1952, an M.A. in 1953, and an M.L.S. in 1955―all from the University of California, Berkeley. He rose to prominence in the 1950s as an abstract expressionist associated with the Bay Area Figurative Movement, along with his partner, Theophilus Brown, whom he met in 1952 while attending graduate school. In 1956, Wonner started painting a series of dreamlike male bathers and boys with bouquets. In 1962, he began teaching at the University of California, Los Angeles. By the end of the 1960s, he had abandoned his loose figurative style and focused exclusively on still lifes in a hyperrealist style. Wonner died April 23, 2008, in San Francisco, California.

Charles Stewart (May 21, 1927 – January 20, 2017) was an American photographer best known for his portraits of jazz singers and musicians such as Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, John Coltrane, Ella Fitzgerald, and Miles Davis, as well as artists in the R&B and salsa genres. Stewart's photographs have graced more than 2,000 album covers.

Roy Thomas Brown (8 July 1932 – 22 January 2001) was an American television personality, puppeteer, clown and artist known for playing "Cooky the Cook" (also Cooky the Clown) on Chicago's Bozo's Circus.