Archie Rand

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Archie Rand (born 1950) is an artist and academic from Brooklyn, New York, currently Presidential Professor of Art at Brooklyn College. [1]

Rand's work as a painter and muralist is displayed around the world, including in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris, and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.

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[edit] Education and career

Born in Brooklyn, Rand received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in cinegraphics from the Pratt Institute, and previously at the Art Students League of New York under Larry Poons, who hailed him as the heir apparent of the 1960s art world. [2] His first exhibition was in 1966 in the Tibor De Nagy Gallery in New York. He has since had over 80 solo exhibitions, and his work has been included in over 200 group exhibitions. [3]

Before joining Brooklyn College, he was the chair of the Department of Visual Arts at Columbia University. He was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 1999, and is a Laureate of the National Foundation for Jewish Culture. [4]

[edit] Work

Rand's work has ranged from self-portraits to themes like jazz and poetry, but he is best known for his work on Jewish themes, [5] and particularly for his painting of murals inside the B'nai Yosef Synagogue in Brooklyn, a three-year project he began in 1974. Now known as The Painted Shul, it is the only completely muraled synagogue in the world. [3]

His Judaism-themed easel paintings include 60 Paintings from the Bible (1991-92), Nachmanides' Letter to His Son (1993), and Midnight Festival (1995). [5]

His latest work, completed in 2006 after four years, is a representation of the 613 mitzvot on 613 canvases, each one the size of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, a series of images that will require 2,000 square feet of exhibition wall space, according to Rand's own calculations. [2] The first canvas — representing the mitzvah to know God — shows an astronaut seeking to discover the mysteries of the universe, floating upside down with a purple planet over his left shoulder. [2]

Rand has said that he tries to avoid "Yiddishized nostalgia," [5] and seeks to create "unparanoid, unvictimized Jewish art." [5]

[edit] See also

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ "Prominent Brooklyn Artist Archie Rand Joins Brooklyn College as Presidential Professor", Brooklyn College.
  2. ^ a b c Wecker, Menachem. "'Beyond Insane' Biblical Paintings", The Forward, June 9, 2006.
  3. ^ a b Trimmel, Suzanne. "New York Galleries Exhibit Painter Archie Rand's Collaborations with Poets", Columbia News, May 1, 2002.
  4. ^ McBee, Richard. "The Painted Shul: Archie Rand and the B'nai Yosef Murals Part 1", The Jewish Press, April 8, 2002.
  5. ^ a b c d Rubenstein, Raphael. "8 painters: New York", Art in America, November 2003.

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