Mel Pekarsky

Education and early years

The son of Inda Levin and Abe Pekarsky, who owned a haberdashery, he attended public school in Gary, Indiana. While in high school, he studied weekends at the Saturday School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he began his undergraduate studies in 1951, transferring the following year to Northwestern University, where he received his B.A. in Studio Art in 1955. He completed his M.A. in Art History there in 1956, writing his thesis on The Drawings of Jean-Francois Millet, while teaching studio art at Northwestern's Chicago campus.

Pekarsky moved to New York City in 1956, joining the staff of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, then under the directorship of James Johnson Sweeney. He also began PhD studies at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts in the fall of 1956, but was soon called up to military service, serving in the US Army Combat Engineers. During this period he spent time training in Texas mesa country, his "first face-to-face meeting with the southwest desert."

Academic career

Returning to Chicago after military service, he was asked to start the Art Department at Kendall College in Evanston, IL. During this period (1960–1967), Pekarsky showed with the Devorah Sheman and John L. Hunt Galleries, with "Artists of Chicago and Vicinity" at the Art Institute of Chicago, among other venues, and in Exhibition Momentum, from which work was selected by the US Information Agency to travel in an exhibition of American art in France and Germany. During this period he also worked as an illustrator, and produced a number of children's books (The Curious Cow, The Little Red Hen, and others) before returning to New York in the fall of 1967, accepting an appointment as assistant dean at the School of Visual Arts. After serving there as assistant and then associate dean, Pekarsky spent the 1970–71 academic year as visiting graduate faculty at New York University, moving in 1973 to a visiting artist position at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

He was appointed associate professor in 1974, and in 1976 became studio programs coordinator (in which position he would remain until 2004), re-writing the department's B.A. in Studio Art. Promoted to Professor in 1984, he began a five-year tenure as chair of the Department of Art, writing and implementing the MFA program in Studio Art, which he directed from 1989 until 2003. Also in that year, Pekarsky chaired a College Art Association panel on "The Idea of the Moral Imperative in Contemporary Art," discussed in Judith Seigel's Mutiny and the Mainstream: Talk That Changed Art, 1975–1990. A transcript of this panel was published in Art Criticism in 1991. A second term as chair of the Department followed from 2005–2007, shortly preceding his retirement in 2009. Pekarsky continued to teach in the MFA Program as professor emeritus and visiting professor until 2014.

Early years

Initially influenced by the Chicago figurative style, Pekarsky would transition from this "to the figure in landscape, to groups of figures in the landscape. The figure would later grow smaller and finally withdraw from the stage altogether, with the exception of the implicit presence of the viewer."

New York and public art

After moving back to New York in 1967, Pekarsky became involved with public art, specifically City Walls, Inc., an artist-directed nonprofit which he helped found in 1969. Pekarsky painted five large-scale, public murals for City Walls between 1969 and 1974. The City Walls project would eventually evolve into New York's Public Art Fund.

In addition to the visibility that City Walls brought to his work, its scale, according to Gil Einstein – Director of G.W. Einstein Co., Inc., and his art dealer for almost thirty years – also "forced him to simplify his imagery," after which "his paintings and drawings of formal gardens and landscapes became increasingly stylized."

While he was working on the public murals, these formal gardens – empty of humans though shaped by them – were being painted in the studio, and the artist's ideas about both the urban environment and our relationships to the earth were changing.

It was during this period that he became involved with environmental organizations and designed posters for the first Earth Day (April 22, 1970).

The Desert

By the mid-1970s, figures had already "walked off the picture plane…left behind in the move" from Chicago back to New York. In 1975 a "catalyst for more change" occurred in the form of a trip to the Mojave Desert, causing him to turn from the crafting of public, abstract "landscape symbols" to the "quiet private making" of what he termed "environmentally political" pieces. Pekarsky's work then became more explicitly "engaged in a moral imperative which – like it or not, I suppose – as artists today we're all engaged in."

Rather than containing human subjects, Pekarsky's paintings increasingly treat the viewer as the subject, and the canvas as a lens onto both a physical and psychic landscape. As Donald Kuspit put it, "Pekarsky's desert landscapes are interior as well as exterior landscapes, subjective and objective at the same time, which is why they seem uncannily real rather than materially real."

In 1989, Pekarsky was invited to participate in "Painting Beyond the Death of Painting," the first group exhibition of contemporary American painting in the Soviet Union Since 1917, in which he showed recent large-scale work from this period.

The early 1990s saw a noticeable change in Pekarsky's style. Gil Einstein noted in 1995 that "the fine detail of the work of the 1980's has disappeared and been replaced by an expressionism which partially reflects the artist's earlier work. Where methodology was the invention before, imagery is the invention now. Having shown us for many years what he saw, Pekarsky is now beginning to show us what he thinks."

Pekarsky's work throughout the 1990s and 2000s continued this trend. Reviewing a 2009 retrospective of his work, Benjamin Genocchio wrote in The New York Times:

The secret of the success of these little sketches is that the artist does not so much seek to record exactly what he sees, like a camera, as to translate an overall vision and experience of the landscape. He makes do with little more than intimations of scenery, using streaks, flecks and blobs of paint to suggest vegetation, rocks and the contours of the land.

In a statement for the opening of an installation of his work in 2013, Pekarsky wrote:

I've been painting for over sixty years.

The earth, my work and I have been discussing our anxiety for well over 40 years.

The discussion keeps getting more complicated.

It didn't start out that way. At first the desert was for me an epiphany, the confluence of form and meaning, abstraction and representation; it stands in as an icon for all land.

I go there and walk and ride and climb in it and sometimes fly over it, and talk to and drink and eat with the people who live in it, and read and think about it. I've come to see the water wars, the ethnic wars, the racial wars, the economic wars, the political wars, the war; I look at it and watch the land watching us, and try to bring that back with me and show the earth's quiet waiting.

Pekarsky continues to paint, curate, and teach in the MFA program as emeritus and visiting professor at Stony Brook University.

Selected one-man exhibitions

Selected group exhibitions

Also:

Selected public and corporate collections