Walter Francis Bishop Jr. (1927-1998) was an American jazz pianist raised in Harlem. Bishop Jr.'s career spanned from the later 1940s to the early 1990s. Resulting in almost 50 years of music.

Bishop Jr. was the son of drummer, composer, and songwriter Walter Bishop Sr., a Jamaican emigrant who came to New York to start a professional music career. Due to this, Bishop Jr. started piano at an early age.

Influenced by jazz musicians Art Tatum, Bud Powell, and Nat King Cole, Bishop Jr. became interested in jazz music. Bishop Jr. dropped out of high school to pursue jazz. At the time his friends included other future jazz musicians Kenny Drew, Sonny Rollins, and Art Taylor. From 1945 to 1947 Bishop Jr. served in the Army Air Corps, stationed near St. Louis. During his service he met touring bebop artists who would further influence his style.

Later in 1947, Bishop Jr. returned to New York where he incorporated bebop into his jam sessions at Minton's Playhouse. In 1949 he began recording with other artists such as Milt Jackson and Stan Getz. He continued recording with other artists into the 50s. Around this time he also ran into issues with drug addiction, though he was eventually able to get clean . In the late 1950s Bishop Jr. converted to Islam and adopted the name Ibrahim ibn Ismail, although he never used it publicly.

In 1961 Bishop Jr. released his debut album "Speak Low" as the leading artists. The album was released with a trio consisting of himself, bassist Jimmy Garrison, and drummer G.T. Hogan. He continued releasing music featuring other artists until the 1990s.

In addition to recording music, Bishop Jr. taught music theory at several colleges in Los Angeles in the 70s after studying at Juilliard in the late 60s. He then moved back to New York in 1975 where he wrote a book on jazz theory called, A Study in Fourths. In the 80s he began to teach at University of Hartford, Connecticut. Throughout this time he never stopped performing. Continuing until a few years before his death in 1998, which was the result of a heart attack. The last album he released was "Speak Low Again" in 1993.

William Sidney Mount (1807-1868) was an American painter from Setauket, New York. Although not the first artist to use this style, Mount was the foremost "American genre painter" of the 19th century. American genre painting focused on scenes of everyday life. He produced naturalistic portraits and narrative scenes that documented the daily life of the common man.

Mount began painting as an apprentice at his brother, Henry Mount's (1804-1841) sign shop in 1825, spending his free time drawing and painting primarily portraits. Wanting to learn more, Mount enrolled in drawing classes at the newly established National Academy of Design in New York. In 1830 Mount displayed his first successful genre painting entitled, "Rustic Dance After a Sleigh Ride" at the National Academy exhibition. Within two years of this piece, Mount secured full membership to the National Academy of Design and was quickly hailed a pioneer of American art. Mount lived and worked in Long Island, often depicting the yeomen of the area. Mount was one of the first artists to specialize in the American rural scene. Previously, there was a belief that the American daily life of rural areas was not worth depicting. Mount's refreshing and down-to-earth style contradicted this notion and became widely popular.

Music also played a large role in Mount's life. Mount grew up surrounded by music. He maintained this passion not only through his depictions of music and dance in his paintings, but also as a fiddler, fife player, collector of folk songs, and a violin designer. He designed the "Hollow Back" violin and displayed this instrument in the 1853 New York World’s Fair, Crystal Palace, where the violin received praise by contemporary musicians. The violin was designed in a concave shape and a short sound-post to create a fuller, richer, more powerful tone.

Some of Mount's most prominent works featured music and dance. Mount loved to capture his subjects in spontaneous moments of dancing, farming, fiddling, reading, conversing, or playing. When painting musicians, he would often ask them to play while he was sketching because it "enlivens the subject’s face." Two such examples of this liveliness is "The Banjo Player" (1856) and "The Bone Player" (1856), two of Mount's more famous works. "The Banjo Player" is a portrait of a young Black musician smiling while in the midst of playing a banjo. "The Bone Player" similarly depicts a Black musician playing two sets of bones, an instrument connected with African-American minstrels. Because Mount sought to portray real people from his area, his work is much more inclusive than other artists' of the time. Mount used his art to show Black men in a more sensitive and dignified light. He was the first painter to give Black Americans a prominent, non-stereotypical place in his paintings. This aligned with his egalitarian belief that individuals must be accepted for their own worth.

Mount himself was an interesting figure. Along with his egalitarian beliefs, Mount had an interest in Spiritualism. Spiritualism follows the belief that spirits of the dead exist and can be communicated with. Mount became invested in this belief in the 1850s and even reported that he was able to contact the spirits of his deceased relatives. He wrote his experience in his journal, dubbed "The Spirit Journal."

Mount fell sick after dealing with the affairs of his recently diseased brother Shepard Alonzo Mount (1804-1868). Shepard Alonzo Mount was also a well renowned artist who studied under the National Academy of Design. William Sidney Mount contracted pneumonia and died only a couple months after his brother. Mount never married or had any children. In 1965, his family home, surrounding property, and various outbuildings in Stony Brook, became a National Historic Landmark named the William Sidney Mount House. Mounts artwork can be found in various museums across the country, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, The New-York Historical Society, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The Long Island Museum of American Art, History, and Carriages owns the largest repository of Mount artwork and archival material