25 Facts About Archie Rand

1.

Archie Rand was born on 1949 and is an American artist from Brooklyn, New York, United States.

2.

Archie Rand has since had over 100 solo exhibitions, and his work has been included in over 200 group exhibitions.

3.

Archie Rand is currently Presidential Professor of Art at Brooklyn College which granted him the Award for Excellence in Creative Achievement in 2016.

4.

Archie Rand had served as the Acting Director of the Hoffberger School of Painting and as Assistant Director of the Mount Royal Graduate Programs, both at the Maryland Institute College of Art.

5.

Archie Rand was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation Foundation Fellowship in 1999 and was made a Laureate of the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, which awarded him the Achievement Medal for Contributions in the Visual Arts.

6.

In 1974 Archie Rand received a commission from Congregation B'nai Yosef in Brooklyn.

7.

Archie Rand was asked to paint thematic murals on the complete 16,000-square-foot interior surfaces of the synagogue.

8.

Archie Rand's subsequent turn to figuration may have been influenced by his friendship with Philip Guston, whose own work was transformed in the late 1960s.

9.

In 1988, with master printer Jon Cone, Archie Rand produced a surprising and imaginative series of potato prints, some editioned and some very large, which were exhibited at a number of public and private institutions.

10.

Archie Rand has had a career marked by attraction to projects unsanctioned by the official art world.

11.

Archie Rand's work has been cited as influential, although some critics concede that his output has been difficult to pigeonhole.

12.

An artist of almost legendary energy and invention, Archie Rand has exhibited widely throughout the United States and Europe.

13.

In every project where Archie Rand joins forces with contemporary poets, or in which he employs liturgical texts, or collaboratively teams using the works of deceased poets, he utilizes a different visual persona, a vestige of the stylistic crucible from which he has always worked and which he sees as being consonant with his gradual invention of an unconventional Jewish iconography.

14.

Archie Rand's pioneering 1989 series "The Chapter Paintings", which dedicated one painting to each of the 54 divisions of the Hebrew Bible, instigated the groundbreaking 1996 "Too Jewish" exhibition, that originated at the Jewish Museum and traveled to other sites.

15.

In 2003 Archie Rand did two murals for Beth El Congregation in Fort Worth and in 2005 executed the large entrance mural at Congregation Beth-El in San Antonio.

16.

Archie Rand has been bravely creating radical Jewish art for the last twenty years, challenging both the contemporary art establishment and the purveyors of Jewish culture.

17.

In 2008, on a warehouse wall, Archie Rand mounted the painting, "The 613", which at 1700 square feet is nearly twice the size of James Rosenquist's F-111.

18.

Just as the medieval scholar wrote works that made the Bible more accessible, Archie Rand develops an accessible visual iconography that confronts the text.

19.

Archie Rand is arguably the best known, most important, the most imaginative, and the most prolific.

20.

Archie Rand became the most creative and outspoken proponent of a Jewish-themed art in America.

21.

Archie Rand has articulated in both words and images to a greater extent than anybody else a loose-jointed attempt to assure the viability, visibility and continuity of this art.

22.

For over five decades Archie Rand has been regarded as a maverick and rule-breaker, and The 613 is his most ambitious work.

23.

Also in 2016 Archie Rand showed two bodies of work that were done in Italy, "La Certosa Di Pontignano, 1995" and "Mount Etna, 2005," at The Interchurch Center Galleries, New York.

24.

In 2017 Archie Rand delivered a mural to Congregation Beth Hatikvah in Summit, New Jersey.

25.

Archie Rand's works are included in the university and library collections of Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Brown, and Johns Hopkins, among many others.