whether doing it or teaching it, and I had the good luck to have wonderful teachers/mentors along the way. I’ll name a few you might recognize: Ron Gorchov, Philip Pearlstein, Lee Bontecou, Leo Steinberg (historian), Susan Woodford (historian). And naturally there were many superb instructors whose names are less well known today. I studied at the Brooklyn Museum Art School, the Art Students League of New York, Hunter College and ended with an MFA from Brooklyn College. In my final term I was the only one awarded a Teaching Assistantship, which taught me how little I really knew. I moved to Chicago in 1974 and taught at Chicago State University and at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago until 2015.
The topics I taught included all of the studio practices--easel painting, printmaking, watercolor, drawing, figure drawing, color theory, composition, and Intro to Art History. Interpreting Masterworks was a course I designed and particularly enjoyed teaching for years at SAIC. The goal was to embody the spirit, concepts, technique and style of the great artists exhibiting at that moment in the Art Institute of Chicago Museum. Our subjects ranged from Caravaggio to Kiefer. Annually I replicate this approach in workshops at my studio. This past summer one workshop analyzed the effect of Henri Matisse on Richard Diebenkorn and another paired Paul Gauguin and Peter Doig. The results can be seen in the Student Gallery section of this website.
With hard work and good fortune, my own work showed over the years at the following galleries: Rosa Esman; Nancy Hoffman; Phyllis Kind, and Frumkin-Struve. Museum shows included the Brooklyn Museum, the Jewish Museum of New York, The Butler Institute of American Art, and the Rahr-West Art Museum. All these museum shows were group shows. One of my watercolors traveled to more than fifty venues nationwide, thanks to a traveling exhibit organized by the American Watercolor Society.
In 1982 I grabbed the opportunity to teach my way in my own space. I love this wabi-sabi place and the richness of all the experiences it offers my students and me.
