Archie Rand

American painter

Archie Rand (born 1949) is an American artist from Brooklyn, New York, United States.

Born in Brooklyn, Rand received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in cinegraphics from the Pratt Institute, having studied previously at the Art Students League of New York. His first exhibition was in 1966, at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York. He has since had over 100 solo exhibitions, and his work has been included in over 200 group exhibitions. He is currently Presidential Professor of Art at Brooklyn College which granted him the Award for Excellence in Creative Achievement in 2016. Before joining Brooklyn College, Rand was the chair of the Department of Visual Arts at Columbia University. He 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. From 1992–1994 he was appointed Co Chair of the National Studio Arts Program of the College Art Association and from 1998–2003 he served as Chair of the College Art Association National Committee for the Distinguished Teaching of Art Award. The Italian Academy For Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University presented him with The Siena Prize in 1995. He 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. In 2002 he received the Presidential Award for Excellence in Teaching from Columbia University. Also in 2002 he became the artistic advisor to film director Ang Lee for his production of The Hulk, and was asked by Milestone Films to provide a commentary track for the DVD release of Henri Georges Clouzot's classic 1955 film The Mystery of Picasso. Following the inaugural selection of novelist Amos Oz, Rand, in 2020, became the second recipient of the $100,000 Farash Fellowship, awarded by the Farash Foundation for the Advancement of Jewish Humanities and Culture “in honor of an extraordinary luminary who exemplifies excellence and is celebrated for accomplishments in the field of Jewish humanities and culture.” In 2023, Rand's serial work, "The Seventeen: Iron Flock", was selected as the American representative to the Jerusalem Biennale.

In 1980 and 1981 he was commissioned to do a series of stained glass windows for two Chicago synagogues, Anshe Emet Synagogue and Temple Sholom and in 1984 received an offer to paint exterior murals at the Jerusalem Teachers College. For this project Rand asked Mark Golden of Golden Artist Colors to develop a system for the permanent application of full color outdoor paint. Some of the imagery used in these murals was recycled into his subsequent paintings. Exhibitions from the mid 1970s onward announced a return to mural scale paintings and showed a prescient neo expressionism joined with a fealty to narratives which were drawn in cartoon style. As John Yau wrote in Artforum, "Archie Rand is one of the most ambitious and more importantly, the most accomplished artist of his generation." Holland Cotter, reviewing Rand's 1986 show in Art in America, wrote, "His biography reads like that of a veteran. His recent paintings actually carry an air of accumulated, earned experience that makes this work so engaging: it is built on an old fashioned, generous inclusiveness – critical and evangelical at once – that few of Rand's contemporaries seem interested in attempting, and none that I know of can match." In 1988, with master printer Jon Cone, 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. As Beth Giacummo, director of the Islip Art Museum, noted on the occasion of a 2012 exhibition of these works:

Archie Rand's "The Potato Prints" have earned an unexpected niche in contemporary art history. They radiate joy and are appreciated by viewers of all ages. Bold in visual impact, they are filled with humanity and charm. Praised as technically remarkable achievements they remain just pure fun. Printmaker and critic Ron Netsky urged, "Viewers should be sure not to miss what surely must be the most exquisite bit of potato carving done in the 20th century " And Lawrence J. Merrill elaborated, "[Rand] is an artist with a shameless appetite to encompass more: an expanding universe aesthetic Rand has had a career marked by attraction to projects unsanctioned by the official art world which were ultimately discovered and trumpeted by the art press "

A 1988 series of 20 large triptychs ("Songs of Dispersion") was shown in various venues in 1989. From 1989 to 1991 he presented an unanticipated series of large scale black and white abstractions which retain a residual authority. Donald Kuspit reviewed the Black and White series for Artforum at the time: "Rand's works are post Modernist in the best sense the intimacy Rand evokes is reminiscent of Paul Klee's: he reinvents an alphabet of familiar shapes and the result evokes a primary sense of magical meaning and feeling." The exhibition featured large paintings which offered startling and effective revisions on the formats of contemporary abstraction, prompting critic Terry R. Myers to write in Flash Art:

Dare a critic put a word like "inspiration" down on paper, sincerely mean it in its larger sense, and still think he or she has a voice among the pedantry that is the art world? I'm tempted to believe that there is some type of visionary impact in Archie Rand's latest paintings, but nowadays such a claim would seem delirious at best and at worst illicit. These recent works stymie into oblivion attempts to classify them which is nothing new for Rand, who will be difficult to pinpoint on the misleading map of art history but perplexity on the part of the viewer obviously does not always lead to greatness on the part of the artist. Rand's latest paintings could very well be exceptional. Throughout the 1990s Rand produced abstract and figurative works simultaneously, although all of the works indicated an intention to re integrate representation into conceptual formats. In 1999 he mounted an exhibit of mural scale paintings ("The Segments") which featured hundreds of compartmentalized painted cartoon like images. On the occasion of a 1992 exhibition of serial paintings, which linked the Kabbalah's view of the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet to the 22 major arcana cards of the Tarot deck, David Brown wrote: "Extremely competent in any style that he chooses to call his own, it can be said of Archie what young players say of greats in the jazz world: "somebody should just break their fingers." In 2005 he completed a substantial painting commission for Aetna. His work has been cited as influential, although some critics concede that his output has been difficult to pigeonhole. Rand's paintings display a vast and savvy menu of inventive and finely executed approaches. He has completed many series after the works of Paul Celan, Moyshe Leyb Halpern, Eugenio Montale, Yehuda Amichai, Rainer Maria Rilke, Samuel Beckett/Paul Eluard and Jack Spicer. Working often with poets, he has produced books and continues to engage in publishing collaborative projects with, among others: Robert Creeley, John Ashbery, Clark Coolidge, Kenneth Koch, David Plante, Maryline Desbiolles, John Yau, Jim Cummins, David Lehman, Bob Holman, Bill Berkson, Lewis Warsh, David Shapiro, and Anne Waldman. The critical response to Rand's collaborative work with poets has been abundant and commendatory, as in this review of his work with Creeley:

this is utterly joyous work, natural and unlabored They are – thanks mostly to Rand – part fairy tales of staring cats and castle walls and, with Creeley's poems, part brilliant condensations of real life emotions and desires "Robert Creeley's Collaborations", mounted last year by the Castellani Art Museum in Niagara Falls and currently touring nationally, documents the phenomenal scope of the poet's interests in the visual arts. Of these artists, Rand is especially compatible. The New York City artist moves freely from figurative and abstract modes, often combining the two in a single work. An artist of almost legendary energy and invention, Rand has exhibited widely throughout the United States and Europe Without at all losing individuality, Rand effortlessly evokes master draughstmen from Rembrandt and Fragonard to Matisse and Manet Somehow poet and painter always maintain a delicate and quite magical balance. It is a delightful performance to watch. In every project where 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. This approach stimulated an engaged correspondence with the painter R. B. Kitaj. 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. As Vincent Brook saw it, "A useful date from which to mark the onset of postmodern American Jewish art is 1989. The year that saw the Tiananmen Square massacre, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the premiere of Seinfeld was also the year Archie Rand exhibited at the Jewish Museum in New York a series of fifty four paintings inspired by the yearly cycle of Torah readings. Jewish artists were by then no strangers to the upper echelons of the American art world, but baldly Jewish iconography was." His interest in Judaic narrative has been seen in numerous recent painting series, each of which is painted with novel technical and/or content approaches for example: "Sixty Paintings from the Bible" (1992), "The Eighteen" (1994), "The Seven Days of Creation" (1996), "The Nineteen" (2002) and "Had Gadya" (2005). In a review in 2005, of an exhibition of the 1994 series "The Eighteen", Menachem Wecker wrote, "[Rand] has laid out a clearly demarcated path for others to follow. In his own way, he has effectively revolutionized the way the rest of us view Jewish art, heretofore an endangered species until Rand nurtured and raised it to fruition."

The 2016 exhibition "Sixty Paintings From The Bible" at The Galleries at Cleveland State University produced a scholarly book about those paintings, written by Samantha Baskind and published by CSU. Also in 2016 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. From 2016 to 2017 he served as the Curator and Juror for the Governor of Wyoming's Capitol Arts Exhibition at The Wyoming State Museum, Cheyenne, WY. In 2017 Rand delivered a mural to Congregation Beth Hatikvah in Summit, New Jersey. It features what is probably the only permanent architectural installation of the Gay Pride rainbow emblem in any religious institution. In September and October 2017 Rand and collaborator, the poet Bob Holman, displayed their entire fifty unit work "Invisible City" at Freight & Volume Gallery in New York City. Another 2017 exhibition, "Archie Rand: Early Works With Poetry", featuring two series of work from 1991 and 1993 after poems by Jack Spicer and Samuel Beckett/Paul Eluard, respectively, drew the following response from critic Raphael Rubinstein: "No artist of his generation (nor possibly of any other) has devoted as much time and energy and genius and love to collaborations with writers as Archie Rand." Barry Schwabsky’s 2020 Artforum review of Rand’s exhibition of collaborative works with poets concluded that Rand’s pairing of text and image “inspires imagery worthy of the world’s most profound children’s book." In 2021 the thematically grouped “Sweet Sixteen” paintings were exhibited at Totah Gallery, which was followed by Rand’s showing of the 157 collaborative works created with poet Anne Waldman for their serial work “Blood Moon”, exhibited at Freight & Volume Gallery in 2022. In a 2022 article entitled, “Archie Rand, The Jewish Michelangelo?”, journalist Menachem Wecker posits: "I believe his [Rand’s] serial paintings represent one of Jewish art history’s most unique and ambitious bodies of work, and that synagogue [Rand’s murals at Congregation B’nai Yosef] is the nearest thing I know to a Jewish Sistine Chapel.” In 2024 The Forward took note of Rand’s having completed 915 canvases where the units of the series represented every successive sentence from the Book Of Proverbs. In 2024 Rand's series of paintings, "The Seventeen: Iron Flock", was selected to be the United States representative at the Jerusalem Biennale.

Rand's work as a painter, muralist, and graphic artist is held in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, MOMA, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Brooklyn Museum, The Baltimore Museum of Art, The Smithsonian Institution, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Victoria and Albert Museum in London, The Bibliothèque Nationale de France, The Tel Aviv Museum of Art, The Carnegie Museum of Art, The Dallas Museum of Art, and The New York Public Library. His works are included in the university and library collections of Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Brown, and Johns Hopkins, among many others.