Archie Rand

Rand was asked to paint thematic murals on the complete 16000 sqft interior surfaces of the synagogue.

The work took three years, and completing this commission made Rand the author of the only narratively painted synagogue in the world and the only one we know of since the 2nd Century Dura-Europos.

The religious legal controversy raised by placing wall paintings in a traditionally iconoclastic space was resolved by the verdict of Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, then considered to be the world's leading Talmudic scholar, who declared the paintings to be in conformity with the law.

The murals were received with great enthusiasm: according to John Ashbery,

"So varied and intricate are the themes Rand has treated in his murals and so multifaceted the barrage of styles he has employed, that it is difficult to describe the murals. They demand to be viewed. The sweep and eclecticism add up to a startling wholeness. The courage to be hybrid is given to relatively few artists; it was required here and Rand supplied it. The work surrounds one in an environment of wonder, of spirituality and earthiness, of joy and terror, but mostly joy. It attempts to be as diverse as Creation itself and just about succeeds."

Others were equally laudatory, describing the murals as "exciting and exceptional" and "a remarkably impressive achievement" and "energetic tour-de-force".

The synagogue itself became known as "The Painted Shul".

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

Like Guston, Rand "chafed at the limitations of purely abstract forms."

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.

Archie Rand's earliest major works are "The Letter Paintings" (or "The Jazz Paintings") (1968–71), a radically positioned series of technically inventive, mural-sized canvases.

The Letter Paintings, by incorporating the names of mainly male and female African-American musicians, undermined prevailing aesthetic categories by conflating many contemporary movements including Conceptual Art, Color Field, Pattern and Decoration, diary entry and social commentary.

"What is undeniable is during the 1970s many of the artists who exhibited at the gallery – Rand himself, for example – were irrepressible individualists whose work resists easy classification ... the phenomenally talented Rand was unsystematically working his way through every image-making language known to modern man, from material-based abstraction to narrative figuration to cartoon symbolism, sometimes all at the same time, and being given the chance to exhibit the results of his research at regular intervals."

By the 1970s and 1980s Rand had developed and maintained concurrent reputations: one as a visible gallery and museum artist whose work had loosely morphed into representation, and the other as an authority on Jewish iconography.

As Dan Cameron observed in Arts at the time, "Far from an emerging talent, Archie Rand is a seasoned young master whom history is finally catching up with."

And as Barry Schwabsky described it, "His career has been a Protean flow of stylistic change. Rand's "courage to be hybrid" as John Ashbery once put it, has led him from color field painting to a combinatory painterly image-making of dazzling dissonance ... [by which he] pushed himself to the forefront of his generation's rediscovery of 'content' in painting (a position which has yet to be generally acknowledged)."

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

Although The Letter Paintings had been displayed individually, they were first shown as a unit in an exhibition at the Carnegie Museum of Art in 1983.

Selections from The Letter Paintings have been on continuing multi-venue exhibition tours of the United States and Europe (including Palazzo Ducale, Genoa) since their Exit Art exhibition in 1991.

Roberta Smith, art critic for The New York Times and a lecturer on contemporary art, described them as "exhilarating, precocious and lyric" and wrote that "Rand's paintings demand a substantial place in the history of an unusually fertile period in American art."

Others described them as "an uncannily accurate step in the right direction", "[a]s exhilarating as a Charlie Parker solo or a holler from Big Joe Turner", and, almost thirty years after they had been painted, as carrying "the force of a visionary project".

The New York Times called Rand's first solo exhibition of abstract collaged canvases "An impressive debut".

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.

Robin Cembalest, reviewing Rand's work in The Forward in 1994, noted that:

"Until a few years ago, Mr. Rand essentially had two parallel and – for the most part – distinct careers in the art world. In the contemporary arena he is known primarily as an abstractionist, a near-cult figure who started out as a child prodigy and whose admirers range from John Ashbery to Julian Schnabel. In the Jewish world he is a maverick muralist who paints scenes from the Bible in Orthodox synagogues."

Since then Rand, whose paintings range considerably in style and scale, has been seen as a respected and unclassifiable figure in the art world:

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.

Director Amala Lane's 45 minute film, titled The Painted Shul, documenting the B’nai Yosef Murals, was released in 2003.

As Matthew Baigell has recently written, "The B'Nai Yosef murals, then, when considered in the light of ... his mixture of figurative and abstract elements; his appeal to the viewer's imagination and awareness of the artist's sense of inventiveness, are, altogether, nothing less than revolutionary in Jewish American art ... After these murals, anything became possible for Jewish-American artists."

The aesthetic demands of the B'Nai Yosef murals marked a turning point in Rand's work.

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.

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.