Mel (Menahem) Alexenberg is an artist and art educator best known for his explorations of the intersections between art, science, technology and culture through his artworks, teaching, writing and blogging. Professor Emeritus at the Ariel University Center of Samaria.
He was born and educated in New York City, where he earned degrees in biology from Queens College and in education from Yeshiva University, and an interdisciplinary doctorate in art, science, and psychology from New York University. He lives in Petah Tikva, Israel, with his wife, artist Miriam Benjamin.
Alexenberg’s artworks are in the collections of more than forty museums worldwide including Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art in New York, High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Baltimore Museum of Art, Cincinnati Art Museum, Denver Art Museum, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Portland Museum of Art in Oregon, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, Museum der Moderne Kunst in Vienna, Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Haags Gemeentemuseum in the Netherlands, Israel Museum in Jerusalem, and Malmo Museum in Sweden.
As an educator in the US, Alexenberg served as professor of art and education at Columbia University, head of the art department at Pratt Institute, research fellow at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies, and dean of visual arts at New World School of the Arts in Miami. In Israel, he has taught at Tel Aviv University, Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, University of Haifa, Bar-Ilan University, and Ariel University Center of Samaria. He is Head of the School of the Arts at Emuna College in Jerusalem.
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His works explore relationships between digital age art and Jewish patterns of thought, participatory art and community, and space-time systems and electronic technologies. Millions throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia have seen his blogart, environmental sculptures, multi-media installations, telecommunications art events, and exhibitions of paintings and prints that explore digital technologies and biological and cultural systems. The leading American art magazine, ARTnews, praised his LightsOROT exhibition created in collaboration with Otto Piene at MIT for Yeshiva University Museum in New York by writing: “Rarely is an exhibition as visually engaging and intellectually challenging.”
He has written numerous papers and book chapters: including: "Space-Time Structures of Digital Visual Culture: Paradigm Shift from Hellenistic to Hebraic Roots of Western Civilization" in Inter/sections/Inter/actions: Art Education in a Digital Visual Culture (2010), "Autoethnographic Identification of Realms of Learning for Art Education in a Post-Digital Age" in International Journal of Education through Art (2008), “Ancient Schema and Technoetic Creativity” in Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research (2006), “From Science to Art: Integral Structure and Ecological Perspective in a Digital Age” in Interdisciplinary Art Education: Building Bridges to Connect Disciplines and Cultures (2005), “Semiotic Redefinition of Art in a Digital Age” in Semiotics and Visual Culture: Sights, Signs, and Significance (2004), "Creating Public Art through Intergenerational Collaboration" in Art Education (2004), "An Interactive Dialogue: Talmud and the Net" in Parabola (2004), “Wright and Gehry: Biblical Consciousness in Postmodern Architecture” in Journal of Cultural Research in Art Education (2003), and “Jewish Consciousness and Art of the Digital Age’ in Journal of Judaism and Civilization (2003). He is former art editor of The Visual Computer: International Journal of Computer Graphics.
Ori Z. Soltis. Fixing the World: Jewish American Painters in the Twentieth Century. Brandeis University Press, 2003. ISBN 1-58465-049-4.
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