Archie Rand Biography
For three decades Archie Rand has been considered one of America's foremost painters. A teenaged prodigy. Rand has had over 80 solo exhibitions. His work is represented in many museum collections that include The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Bibliotheque Nationale of Paris, The Israel Museum of Jerusalem and The Victoria and Albert Museum in London. He often writes for international art journals and in 2002 Rand was given the Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching at Columbia University where he is the Senior Professor of Visual Arts.
Rand is regarded as both a technical and an iconographic innovator. His work displays a command of disparate philosophies and it is supported by an experienced array of painterly approaches. Comfortable working in any scale and engaging a variety of subjects. Rand's reputation is unique among artists of his generation in that he is seriously considered as both a figurative and an abstract painter. In 1999 he received the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. Among his numerous honors are The National Endowment for the Arts Grant, The New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, the SECCA Award in the Visual Arts and the Engelhard Foundation Grant.
He first drew national attention for "The Letter Paintings" or "Jazz Paintings", a controversial late 1960's/70's series, which by incorporating the names of male and female African-American musicians, on wall sized canvases, conflated conceptual and modernist practices, thereby challenging both the political and aesthetic status quo. These prescient paintings were influential on the practices of succeeding artists, both expressionist and conceptual, who, by incorporating words and graffiti in their artworks acknowledged the consequent social references of their works. Painted during the Vietnam War and predating the paintings of Jean Michel Basquiat by over a decade. Rand's work verified the importance of African-American music on the visual arts and places him among the earliest compounders of declassified "lists" of cultural workers. Now viewed as manifestations of a spiritual invocation, these paintings have achieved a legendary status among artists and have only rarely been displayed together in significant numbers. The 2002 exhibition at Castello dei Ronchi in Crevalcore featured the largest collection of "the Letter Paintings" to be assembled since their Exit Art showing in New York in 1991.
For three years, beginning in 1974, Rand further expanded notions of Jewish art when he painted the monumental 13,000 square foot interior of B'nai Yosef synagogue in Brooklyn, which is the only completely muraled synagogue in the world. A subsequent series of commissions at Jerusalem Teachers' College employed a pioneering chemical process, which marked the first use of a permanent full color exterior mural application. Rand's 1989 series on the 54 chapters of the Hebrew Bible instigated the groundbreaking "Too Jewish" exhibition at the Jewish Museum as the curators found it now necessary to contextualize Rand's Jewish work. He is in negotiations with the Vatican for an upcoming exhibition and his works are currently scheduled for display in Jewish museums world-wide. He is currently at work on a series which includes one painting for each of the 613 commandments of Judaism. In 1999 he was made a Laureate of the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, which awarded him the prestigious medal for Contributions to the Visual Arts. Rand is now regarded as the leading living master of Judaic iconography.
In the 1980's Rand's work featured an imaginative collision between figurative and abstract elements. On his work, Artforum in 1985, stated that Archie Rand was the "most ambitious and more importantly, the most accomplished painter of his generation". Over-scaled canvases and extensive serial works, which investigate a specific narrative, have earmarked Rand's recent museum and gallery exhibitions.