Arnold Mesches is an American visual artist.
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Arnold Mesches, born in 1923 in the Bronx, New York, He was raised in Buffalo, New York. He moved in Los Angeles in 1943 on a scholarship at the Art Center School. In 1945 the FBI opened a file on him targeting as a subversive communist. Many of his collected paintings represented images of Senator Eugene McCarthy era.[1] He created many series of "provocative, layered collages composed from his personal FBI file plus news clippings, 1950's magazine cutouts, personal photographs, and hand written scripts."[2] Mesches has explored contemporary social and historical issues, informed by world history and his life during the Depression which also reflect his art.
In the early seventies he married young artist and student of his Jill Ciment thirty years his junior. Ciment went to become an accomplished novelist and memoirist.
In 1984, he moved to New York City and taught at New York University. He also taught at Parsons College and Rutgers. He eventually ended up teaching at University of Florida in Gainesville. He has had over 125 solo exhibitions and is represented in places such as the Metropolitan Museum of Arts, Los Angeles County Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Museum of Modern Art in Sydney, Australia.[3]