Archie Rand is renown as the world’s most prominent painter of Jewish themes. Since the earliest days of his extraordinary career, Jewish subject matters have been intertwined at the forefront of his studio production. Painter, muralist, graphic artist, and designer, Archie Rand began exhibiting at major venues while still in his teens and his paintings have been featured in hundreds of international gallery and museum shows.
His work is represented in many important museum collections, such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Bibliotheque Nationale of Paris, The Israel Museum in Jerusalem, and The Victoria and Albert Museum in London. His glass and mural works are housed in prestigious institutions worldwide.
Mr. Rand is a Laureate of the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, which awarded him the Achievement Medal for Contributions to the Visual Arts, joining him to the ranks of such talents as Itzhak Perlman, Philip Roth, Arthur Miller, and Elie Wiesel. He has been appointed as a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and has received numerous other honors.
Admired by an international spectrum of his peers, he is regarded as both a technical and an iconographic innovator. His work displays an interest in, and a command of, disparate philosophies; and it is supported by an experienced array of painterly approaches. Comfortable working in any scale of medium and engaging a variety of narrative positions, Rand’s reputation is unique in that he is simultaneously, and seriously, considered as a representational, a conceptual, and an abstract painter.
He first drew national attention for “The Letter Paintings,” or “Jazz Paintings,” a controversial late 1960s / 70s series, which, by incorporating the names of male and female African-American musicians, on wall sized canvases, conflated conceptual and modernist practices. For three years, beginning in 1974, Rand further expanded notions of Jewish art when he painted the monumental 18,000 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 Michlalah, The Jerusalem Women’s Teachers’ College, employed a pioneering chemical process, which marked the first use of a permanent color exterior mural application.
Prescient exhibitions of representational works throughout the 1970s and 1980s established Rand as a formidable presence among American painters and a 1990-91 exhibition, which featured large, black and white abstract paintings, still retains legendary status among New York artists. Working primarily with texts over the last two decades, Rand has published many collaborative works with poets, most notably John Ashbery and Robert Creeley, and has been using scriptural and liturgical elements as armatures for countless paintings. Most recently and notably, “The Eighteen (Amidah)” paintings, “The Nineteen (Amidah)” paintings, and “The Seven Days of Creation” series have received exceptional museum and gallery attention.
There is an extensive and enthusiastic critical bibliography on Archie Rand’s paintings. Artforum has called Archie Rand “the most accomplished artist of his generation.” The work of this thoughtful and independent artist has been an acknowledged reference for younger artists, and his paintings continue to manifest a significant influence among his peers who have followed his lead into the addressing of religious issues in contemporary art. The visions in his work shuttle between the acknowledgement “praise” and “remembrance,” as he is interested in aspects of those communities which are in critical transition. Rand then captures essential components and commits them to canvas, thereby freezing those emanations in a state of perpetual affection. This respectful interest makes him an ideal portraitist of both cultural and aesthetic practices, and in this regard, Judaism, specifically, has been of supreme interest to his work.
Recent books featuring Rand’s work include Jewish Art in America: An Introduction, by Matthew Baigell, Encyclopedia of Jewish American Artists, by Samantha Baskind, American Artists, Jewish Images, by Matthew Baigell and The Passionate Spectator: Essays on Art and Poetry, by John Yau.
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