Arnold Mesches

Arnold Mesches (August 11, 1923 – November 5, 2016) was an American visual artist.

Bio

Arnold Mesches was born in 1923^[1] in the Bronx, New York and was raised in Buffalo, New York. Mesches moved to Los Angeles in 1943 on a scholarship at the Art Center School. In 1945, the FBI opened a file on him targeting him as a subversive communist. Many of his collected paintings represented images from the Senator Eugene McCarthy era.^[2] He created many series of "provocative, layered collages composed from his personal FBI file plus news clippings, 1950's magazine cutouts, personal photographs, and hand written scripts."^[3] Mesches has explored contemporary social and historical issues, informed by world history and his life during the Depression, which also reflect his art.

In the early seventies he married a young artist and student of his, Jill Ciment, who was thirty years his junior. Ciment went to become an accomplished novelist and memoirist.

In 1984, he moved to New York City and taught at New York University. He also taught at Parsons College and Rutgers University. He eventually ended up teaching at University of Florida in Gainesville. He has had over 125 solo exhibitions and is represented in places such as the Metropolitan Museum of Arts, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art in Sydney, Australia, among others.^[4] He died on November 5, 2016 in Gainesville, Florida at the age of 93.^[5]

Awards

• National Endowment of the Arts, 1982
• Pollock-Krasner award, 2002 and 2008
• Art Critics of America, 2004
• Florida State Individual Grant 2007

References

External links

• Official Website
• Arnold Mesches and Jill Ciment in conversation with the Brooklyn Rail