ARCHIE RAND

1949
Born in Brooklyn, New York

A visual storyteller defying categorization, Archie Rand has occupied noteworthy space in the abstract, color-field, representational, and symbolist landscapes over the course of his more than fifty-year career. He first exhibited in 1966 (at age 17) at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York after having attended the Art Students League and later received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in cinegraphics from Pratt Institute. Exploring painting as a conceptual statement, he frequently engages text, religious subject matter and comic book imagery, and has provided a counterpoint to more easily definable genre practitioners. Working in scales of magnitude in both number and size, Rand uses acrylic, industrial resin, and manual printmaking techniques to push technical invention, sometimes assuming multiple personas in one series of paintings. For over three decades he has continued to collaborate and publish with noted poets such as Robert Creeley and John Ashbery. Rand is currently Presidential Professor of Art at Brooklyn College, having previously been chair of the Department of Visual Arts at Columbia University, and awarded a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 1999. Rand’s work has been the subject of national and international retrospectives at venues ranging from the Cincinnati Contemporary Art Center to the Museo Palazzo Ducale of Genoa. His works are held in many public collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Smithsonian Institution, The Brooklyn Museum, The Carnegie Museum of Art, The Bibliotheque Nationale de France, The Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and numerous university archives.