Rich Arnold fecit
www.ceccobravo.com
Wall mounted, life size terracotta
figures, "Lord and Lady", 1992 --Collection of the Artist
See
an exhibition of new work by Rich Arnold
Rich
Arnold recently interviewed by Amelia Pearson
A
small collection of classical figures and heads (1981-1998)
Education
Yale University, B.A., Summa cum laude, in Art
History, 1970
Queens College, City University of New York,
1970-1973, Graduate Study in Art and Art History
Pratt Institute, M.L.S.,
Summa cum laude, 1979
Elected lifelong member
of Phi Beta Kappa, 1969
One and Two-Person Exhibitions
Gallery 484, New York,
NY. Rich Arnold: Terracotta Sculptures. October, 1982
Ellenville Library and
Museum, Ellenville, NY. A New York City Sketchbook by Richard Arnold.
December, 1984
The Artfull Eye,
Lambertville, N.J. Richard Arnold:
Baroque Visions. May-June, 1987
Cragsmoor Federated
Church, Cragsmoor, NY. Rich Arnold: New Sculpture; John
Hart: New Paintings. August, 1987
Watermark/Cargo Gallery,
Kingston, NY. Rich Arnold: Terracotta Sketches; Leslie Roitman: Monoprints.
September, 1991
Donskoj & Company,
Kingston, NY. Rich Arnold: Sculptures. June, 1992
Benedictine Hospital Art Gallery, Kingston, NY. Drawn from
Life: Observations of Family and Friends, 1979-1994: Portrait Drawings by Rick
Arnold. October, 1994
Marcuse Gallery,
Kingston, NY. Rich Arnold's Terracotta Animals from the Hudson Valley and
Elsewhere. April-May, 1995
Benedictine Hospital Art Gallery, Kingston, NY. "Double-pages
and Doppelganger of Richard Arnold". Introduction by Tram Combs.
February, 1996
Ellenville Library and
Museum, Ellenville, NY. Richard Arnold: Recent Book Drawings. February, 2000
Group Exhibitions
Metropolitan Museum of
Art, New York, NY. Staff
Art Show. October, 1982
Cragsmoor Free Library,
Cragsmoor, NY. Artists of the Shawangunk Region. Curated by Nancy
Kearing. July, 1985
Kingston Library, Kingston, NY.
Drawings by Kingston Artists. September, 1990
Cooperstown Art Association, Cooperstown, NY.
The 58th Annual National Exhibition of Paintings, Drawings, Sculpture and
Fine Prints. Ivan Karp, Juror. June-July-August, 1993
Woodstock Artists Association, Woodstock,
N.Y. Color: An Exhibition. June, 1993
Donskoj & Company,
Kingston, NY. Food For Thought. December, 1993
Gallery at Park West,
Kingston, NY. New Art from Kingston. Curated by Tram Combs.
January, 1994
Leslie/Lohman Art
Gallery, New York, NY. Universal Diversity 2: Our Vision, Our Selves.
July, 1994
Blue
Mountain Gallery,
New York,
NY. First Small Works Invitational. July, 1994
Leslie-Lohman Art Gallery, NY. ArtGroup Addresses AIDS.
January, 1995
Warren Street Gallery,
Hudson, NY. ArtGroup: First Outing. May-June, 1995
Warren Street Gallery,
Hudson, NY. Bestiary. June, 1995
Blue
Mountain Gallery,
New York,
NY. Second Annual Small Works Invitational Part 1: Works on Paper.
June-July, 1995
Pump House Gallery, Hartford, Conn.
Art Without Borders: Exhibition 1996. June, 1996
Blue
Mountain Gallery,
New York,
NY. 3rd Annual Small Works Invitational: Works on Paper. July,
1996
Fowler Gallery,
Provincetown, Mass. The Male Image. June-September, 1997
Leslie-Lohman Art Gallery, New York, NY. Leslie-Lohman
Selects. July, 1999
Blue
Mountain Gallery,
New York,
NY. Small Works Invitational: Paintings 2000. June-July,
2000
Kingston City Hall, Kingston, NY. Kingston
Library Live [Benefit] Auction, Sunday, November 19, 2000.
Barrett Art Center, Poughkeepsie, NY. Art
Auction 2001 Sunday,
March 11, 2001, Casperkill Country Club... to benefit the Youth Art
Programs of Barrett Art Center/Dutchess County Art Association.
Blue
Mountain Gallery,
New York,
N.Y. Annual Small Works Invitational Paintings 2001. June-July, 2001
Mary Elizabeth Dee Shaw
Gallery, Ethel Wattis Kimball Visual Arts Center, Weber State University,
Ogden, Utah. A Spellbound Vision: Viewing Asmat Art Through the Eyes
of the Western Contemporary Artist. September, 2002
Kingston City Hall, Kingston, NY.
Friends of the Kingston Library 2002 [Benefit] Art Auction. November, 2002
Muroff Kotler Visual Arts
Gallery, SUNY Ulster, Stone Ridge, NY. Food:
A Regional Juried Exhibition. Mar. 13 – Apr. 17, 2009
Bibliography
Baum, Roger.
"Neoclassical Conjury: In Which a Fondness for the Very Particular has
Outweighed the Fashionable." House & Garden 157 (Jan.
1985): 102-109.
Chiaramonte, Steven
C. A Spellbound Vision: Viewing Asmat Art Through the Eyes of the
Western Contemporary Artist. [Exhibition, August 26 - October 12, 2002,
Mary Elizabeth Dee Shaw Gallery, Ethel Wattis Kimball Visual Arts Center, Weber
State University]. Ogden,
Utah: The University, 2002.
Isaacs, Leigh.
"Fired Up: Richard Arnold Sculptures Have Mass Appeal." Huguenot
Herald (June 11, 1992): 24.
"On View Along the
River's Edge." [Review of Baroque Visions at the ArtFull Eye
Gallery] Time Off (3 June 1987):17-18.
Who's
Who in the World,
27th Edition; Who's Who in America,
63rd, 64th Editions
Selected Collections
Lincoln Kirstein
Collection, New York, NY / Shelby White and Leon Levy Collection, Lewisboro, NY
/ Mareech Goup, Ltd., Bangalore, India, Public Art Gallery / Amitava
Bhattacharya / Ankit and Manisha Patel, Sardar Patel Marg, Jaipur, India /
Barbara White / David de Roberts / Domenico Sepe, Naples, Italy / JoAnn Verburg
/ Carol Verburg / Bob Shulman,
Winahdin, Cragsmoor, NY / Peter and Lydia Stenzel / Kaycee Benton / Michael
Hall Fine Arts, Ltd., New York, NY / Philippe Roques / Candler, Charles, and
Johnston, Gary Collection / Mary Fussell /
Gregor Benko / Dr. Stephen
Zwirn (Dumbarton Oaks) / Richard Handy / Chuck Bowdish / Dr. Malcolm Nanes, New
York, NY. / Tram Combs / Cragsmoor Free Library, Cragsmoor, NY / Yale
University, Sterling Memorial Library, Division of Manuscripts and Archives /
Leslie Lohman Art Foundation / Eric and Helen Rosenberg, Mamaroneck, NY / Duane
Wilder
Documentation:
Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York, N.Y., Watson Library, Artist's File [and] Research
Libraries, New York Public Library, New York, N.Y., Art Division, Vertical
File Collection
A Biography
Rich Arnold was born in Summit, New
Jersey, the second son of Robert, a WWII veteran of
the war in the Philippines,
and Kathryn, a Brooklyn native whom Robert had
met at a neighborhood Methodist Church Group. His childhood was
spent in the suburbs of New Jersey
and Connecticut,
with an interlude of two grade school years with his family in India. He
attended Ridge High School in Basking Ridge, New Jersey,
and began to think of himself as an artist among his peers; for some
meticulously rendered life studies of plants in pen and ink he won a National
Merit Scholarship Award in Art in his senior year. Then he studied Art
History and a little of whatever else he liked, including languages and studio
art, at Yale, and received the Bachelor of Arts degree in 1970, winning a
prize for his thesis on American art. His topic was "Representational
Painting in New York City Today." In his Junior and Senior years he worked
in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the Yale University
Art Gallery
where he learned to sharpen his eye under the mentorship of Alan Shestack and
Anne-Marie Logan. He loved this chance to come into intimate contact with
these wonderful masterworks on paper which he carefully studied as he hinged
and matted them for storage or exhibition.
After Yale, Arnold moved
to New York and studied art and art history at Queens College of City
University. Among his teachers there were the notable contemporary art
critic Max Kozloff, the figurative sculptors Mary
Frank and William
King, and the painter Robert de Niro, Sr., father of the Hollywood
film actor. However, it was Louis Finkelstein from whom Arnold learned the most about construction
and deconstruction of the work of art.
Arnold's twelve years in
Manhattan included another degree at Pratt in Library Science, and jobs at the
New York Pubic Library's Art Division and Rare Book Division, The New-York
Historical Society, and finally at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. While
at the museum, he was invited by Museum Educator Hazel Rodriguez to lecture
about his own art for the Department of Community Education. His artwork
also won the praise of Sir John Pope-Hennessy, Curator of European
Sculpture and Painting, who in turn introduced him to Lincoln
Kirstein. Kirstein passionately liked Arnold's terracotta figurines in
the manner of Clodion, and acquired three of them in exchange for a small
Nadelman bronze from his own collection. After seeing some drawings, Kirstein
later asked Arnold
to make some sketches of the New York City Ballet's lead dancer Joe
Duell. Arnold went backstage of the NY State Theater to meet with Duell
for a series of drawing sessions which ultimately resulted in a portrait head
in terracotta still in the artist's collection. A member of a small
circle of curators, dealers, patrons, and artists, as well as librarians and
writers, Arnold lived throughout the seventies in Washington Heights in a sixth
floor apartment/studio looking down the West Side of Manhattan. Arnold shared this life
with a partner, Ronald Fritz, who was a remarkably talented
young sculpture dealer with the firm of Michael Hall Fine Arts,
Ltd. During that time, Fritz's business and Arnold's hobby was auction-hopping and collecting
old masters. Arnold served for a time as art consultant to Michael Loman,
the producer of Sesame Street, put together Loman's collection of 17th-18th
century Italian master drawings. Meanwhile, Arnold discovered--or rediscovered--the joy
of modeling with clay, the start of his real career, in 1981.
While spending the
summers of the early eighties at his country house, Arnold worked on a
major commission for the Westchester residence of Shelby White and Leon Levy,
the well known family of art collectors and donors. This commission, a giant
terracotta chess set, was finally completed and installed in its
setting in September, 1985. Another friend, the art editor and writer
Marvin Schwartz, who knew Arnold
from the Thomas J. Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum,
asked Arnold to
illustrate his column "The Last Word" for Antiques World, an assignment Arnold
was delighted to accept. The result was a six-month series of wash
drawings of American decorative art objects based mostly on observations from
the Met's own American Wing collections. It was a happy endeavor.
Arnold became a part of
the historic artist colony of Cragsmoor, New York, a mountaintop hamlet where
he had his home and studio from 1980 to 1988. In this region many
nationally and internationally known artists have resided since the late
nineteenth century. In fact, Arnold's
house "Winahdin" was the eccentric turn-of-the-century creation of
the American amateur architect Frederick Dellenbaugh, an original founder of
Cragsmoor, and once belonged to the American Impressionist painter Charles Courtney Curran.
Arnold was touched and delighted to discover an original Curran drawing in the
attic--a still life in charcoal from Curran’s student days, which Arnold
later donated to the collection of the Cragsmoor Free Library. Arnold was included with
four of his own terracotta sculptures in an annual exhibition put on by the
Cragsmoor Library in 1985 entitled "Artists of the Shawangunk Region"
which provided a contemporary sampling of artists working/summering in
Cragsmoor and the surrounding mountains. Many, as in Curran's
day, were New York City artists--names from the New York art scene like
Milton Resnick, Pat Passlof, Lois Lane, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, and Robert
Mangold. The exhibition was guest curated by Nancy Kearing.
Arnold relocated to Kingston, New York
in 1989, and ran a studio for working and teaching in nearby West Park,
on the bank of the Black Creek, only a stone's throw from John Burroughs'
romantic cabin Slab Sides. He had periodic shows in and outside the region
as well as at the Blue
Mountain and the
Leslie-Lohman Foundation Gallery in New
York City, where he often returned for inspiration and
recognition. The Leslie-Lohman Foundation singled him out along with a
few others for a small but choice collection of the best work in its genre
featured in "Leslie-Lohman Selects" in 1999.
Arnold has been living
since 1996 in the Catskills of Sullivan County, New York, where he
continues to produce his art at the Glen Wild Studios. He has welcomed
visitors there from Europe and Asia as well as America; he teaches there and at
nearby Sullivan County Community College; gives demonstrations of his favorite
working methods; makes new friends all the time, and is always willing to share
his art with those who happen to have discovered him on the World Wide Web, or
elsewhere.
·
For
those interested in acquiring one of Arnold's
works of sculpture or other media, including digital images, or for those
simply interested to ask questions, please send e-mail to the artist
at Clayvirtuoso@Yahoo.com
·
Arnold is also a member of babelearte,
an international cybercommunity of artists hosted in Piacenza, Italy.
These
contents and images cannot be duplicated or used without permission from the
Copyright owner
This
page revised, February 23, 20011
