Bio

Arnold Mesches, born in 1923 in the Bronx, New York, He was raised in Buffalo, New York

Buffalo, New York

Buffalo is the second most populous city in the state of New York, after New York City. Located in Western New York on the eastern shores of Lake Erie and at the head of the Niagara River across from Fort Erie, Ontario, Buffalo is the seat of Erie County and the principal city of the...

. He moved in Los Angeles in 1943 on a scholarship at the Art Center School. In 1945 the FBI opened a file on him targeting as a subversive communist. Many of his collected paintings represented images of Senator Eugene McCarthy era. 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."
Mesches has explored contemporary social and historical issues, informed by world history and his life during the Depression

Great Depression

The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...

 which also reflect his art.

In the early seventies he married young artist and student of his Jill Ciment

Jill Ciment

-Biography:Ciment was born in Montreal, Canada in 1955. Without finishing high school, she went to New York to become an artist, and ended up working at a "modeling" agency posing nude for lowlife shutterbugs. She went to study art at the California Institute of Arts, under John Baldessari. She...

 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

New York University

New York University is a private, nonsectarian research university based in New York City. NYU's main campus is situated in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan...

. He also taught at Parsons College

Parsons College

Parsons College was a private liberal arts college in Fairfield, Iowa. The school, affiliated with the Presbyterian Church, was founded in 1875 and closed in 1973....

 and Rutgers. He eventually ended up teaching at University of Florida

University of Florida

The University of Florida is an American public land-grant, sea-grant, and space-grant research university located on a campus in Gainesville, Florida. The university traces its historical origins to 1853, and has operated continuously on its present Gainesville campus since September 1906...

 in Gainesville. He has had over 125 solo exhibitions and is represented in places such as the Metropolitan Museum of Arts, Los Angeles County Museum

Los Angeles County Museum

The Los Angeles County Museum may refer to:* Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County* Los Angeles County Museum of Art...

, Brooklyn Museum

Brooklyn Museum

The Brooklyn Museum is an encyclopedia art museum located in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. At 560,000 square feet, the museum holds New York City's second largest art collection with roughly 1.5 million works....

, Museum of Modern Art in Sydney, Australia.

Awards

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

External links

• website