Edward Rothfarb

ED ROTHFARB: NARRATIVE CV

Ed Rothfarb is an artist and art historian currently working on large-scale drawings exploring architecture, landscape and mapping, both real and imaginary.  He employs a paper substrate composed of digital prints of the artist’s drawings depicting patterning in South Asian architecture. He then draws anew on this printed surface using pastel chalk and pencil. The patterning - sometimes revealed, sometimes obscured - provides an under-structure to work with and against, setting up a complex dialectic pervading the finished drawing.

BEGINNINGS

Born in Brooklyn in 1950, Rothfarb wanted to be an architect ever since discovering the Compton’s Encyclopedia illustrated section on architecture at the age of 7, and was endlessly doodling buildings and imaginary cities throughout childhood and adolescence. Entering architecture school at Washington University in St. Louis (1967), however, quickly proved to be a shock. He realized that he was far more comfortable using architecture as a muse, an artistic inspiration, then as a nuts and bolts occupation. Moreover, he experienced parameters, the meat and potatoes of design problems, as confusing and oppressive.  Leaving architecture he transferred to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston) in 1969 where he gravitated towards making sculpture in an environment as far removed from the rigidity of architecture school as possible. In the school’s ultra-progressive environment he thrived without restrictions, created this own curriculum and also worked as a teaching assistant in the Museum School’s small art history department.  It was in those classes and within the Boston MFA”s rich collections that he first discovered the art of south and east Asia, an interest that would bear fruit many years later. Graduating with a BFA in 1972 , he eventually set up a studio in downtown Boston.

BOSTON

His earliest work in Boston consisted of studio pieces and site-specific installations using found objects, construction materials and detritus gathered from urban road and building sites. His very first show was in a cafe in Cambridge where he exhibited drawings. His second show was an interior installation at the 1975 Whitney Biennial, thanks to visionary curator Marcia Tucker seeing his work as a juror reviewing artist applicants for the inaugural Massachusetts Artists Foundation Fellowship Award that same year.  It’s worth noting that Rothfarb, out of school for just 3 years, had solicited the opinion of the Museum School’s Dean as to whether he should apply for this new award.  “No”, was the firm answer. “You’re too young.” Rothfarb applied anyway, winning the Massachusetts Artists Foundation Fellowship in Sculpture (1975) and an offer from Tucker to participate in the Whitney Biennial.

Those years saw a number of changes to the work. Moving to a new live-in studio which he assisted in building Rothfarb began thinking in terms of architecture once again, only this time as object, as icon and as environment. Gone were the found objects and detritus. Instead minimal, life-size structures of wood and sheetrock began to rise in the studio. Their doorways, unable to be entered, nevertheless offered views of light-filled interiors.  The viewer negotiated their own distance from the piece, which hovered between dimensionality and the flatness of an icon.

Those years saw a number of exhibitions and awards.

Group exhibitions included:

Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC, NY (1975)

Whitney Biennial - Five Artists, School of the Museum of Fine Arts Gallery, Boston, MA (1975)

Alan Motch / Ed Rothfarb at Nielsen Gallery, Boston (1977)

Current Concerns, University of Iowa Museum of Art, Iowa City, IA  (1977)

A Dream That My Friend Told Me, PS 1 Institute for Art and Urban Resources, Long Island City, NY (1978)

Two Views: Two Sculptors, Hayden Gallery , MIT, Cambridge, MA (1979)

Six Sculptors, ICA, Boston, MA  (1979)

Architectural Sculpture, Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA (1980)

Recent Acquisitions, Rose Art Museum, Waltham, MA (1983)

Individual exhibitions included:

City at the Center, Goodrich Gallery Williams College, Williamstown , MA  (1978)

Studio Show, sponsored by Nielsen Gallery, Boston, MA (1978)

Story: A Walk In the Woods (Site specific exterior piece within the grounds of the St. Gaudens National Historical Park, Cornish, NH) (1980)

Monumenta Merziana, Danforth Museum, Framingham, MA (1982)

Fellowships and Awards included:

Works in Progress, (NEA and ICA, Boston & Boston 200), Boston MA (1975)

Massachusetts Artists Foundation Fellowship in Sculpture (1975)

The Saint Gaudens Memorial Fellowship (1978)

Massachusetts Artists Foundation Fellowship in Sculpture (1978)

Blanche Colman Award (1980)

Graham Foundation For Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts (1981)

New Works: Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities (1982)

During this period, starting in 1979,  he began teaching 3-D Design in the Foundation Department at the Rhode Island School of Design where he remained teaching for 5 years at the adjunct level in both the Foundation and Sculpture Departments.

In 1982 he attained a long held dream to travel in Europe through a grant that he received from the Graham Foundation For Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. Rothfarb spent 4 1/2 months traveling in Eastern and Southern Europe  (as well as Uzbekistan) , the trip culminating in a five-week stay at the American Academy in Rome arranged by the Graham Foundation. He was so happy during this long journey that he actually remembers the one day when he was sad. Suitably, perhaps, it was in Novgorod, the Soviet Union, then still deeply mired in stagnant Post-Brezhnev era Communism. But even there, as he walked through a city park and people began to waltz to the lilting sound of an accordion, he felt something akin to joy.  He returned to Boston filled with ideas for new work based on the historic architecture that he had visited in the Soviet Union, in Greece, Macedonia,Yugoslavia and, of course, in Rome.

One immediate artistic outcome of that trip was a large, temporary site-specific public sculpture erected on the campus of Brandeis University through the New Works program of the Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities. Entitled “Istra” (1983) the piece, erected on a specially constructed outdoor platform, was a large architectural /sculptural composition, an ode to the Byzantine architectural shapes and spaces that Rothfarb had visited in Greece and Yugoslavia. A later temporary public piece drawing on that same material, as well as the landscape imagery in Eastern Orthodox icons, would be built in Brooklyn in 1985.

NEW YORK

By 1983 It was time to leave Boston. The city had grown too small for Rothfarb and New York City, ever beckoning, finally won out.  Actually, it was way beyond time to make the move , as the city had grown more expensive in the years that Rothfarb had stayed on in Boston, limiting where he could affordably live and make art. The move, first to a ragged loft on Chrystie Street, and thence to Greenpoint and finally to Cobble Hill (apartment) and Gowanus (art studio), was challenging yet energizing. He was welcomed. So many people to meet! He was enthralled. So much to see!  He was intimidated. So much more to strive /compete for! And…he was broke.  Indeed, Rothfarb realized that he could barely afford living in  NYC on his RISD adjunct salary and decided to leave teaching at the end of that year. Drawing upon an older skill - cooking -  that he had pursued before teaching became a possibility, he returned to the kitchen, developing a “day job” as an executive chef for an investment banking company, with selected catering on the side. The new job, unlike teaching, drew his time away from the art world, although the compensation was a renewed interest in food and cuisine.

During the 1980’s in NYC Rothfarb began to exhibit there and elsewhere, and received fellowships and residencies.

Group exhibitions included:

Sited Sculpture at Walt Whitman Park, Brooklyn, NY (1984)

Eight Artists at Northside , Brooklyn, NY  (1984)

Creighton Michael / Ed Rothfarb: East Hampton Center for Contemporary Art, East Hampton, NY (1986)

Small Works, Sculpture Center Gallery, NYC, NY (1987)

Artists Choose Artists, Socrates Sculpture Park, Long Island City, NY (1987)

Everson Museum Biennial, Syracuse, NY (1988)

Models and Drawings of Finalists, Rotunda Gallery, Brooklyn, NY (1991)

Artists at Home, Bill Bace Gallery, NYC, NY  (1991)

Solo Exhibitions included:

Edward Rothfarb: New Drawing and Sculpture, Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY (1987)

Sculpture Center, Gallery Two, NY, NY  (1989)

Residencies included:

Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY (1986)

Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY (1989)

The MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, NH (1992)

Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts, Newcastle, ME (1993)

Sanskriti Kendra, Aya Nagar, New Delhi. India (1993)

Fellowships and Awards included:

The Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (1986)

The Penny McCall Foundation Fellowship (1992)

Indo-American Fellowship Program (Indo-U.S. Subcommision on Education and Culture (1993)

In 1993 Rothfarb received a fellowship to travel to India for 7 months, ostensibly to explore and study historic Hindu temple architecture.  While he did spend a few rewarding months exploring stone-built and carved temple sites, particularly in South India, he was quickly taken with India’s richly abundant, omnipresent visuality and sought out alternative routes of exploration, less classic monuments and major temples and more experiential reckoning with art at a myriad of levels, from the popular to the mundane, the courtly and the contemporary. He spent the middle of those 7 months at Sanskriti Kendra, an artist residency within the Delhi metropolitan area where he worked on drawings and models for sculptures based on his travels. When he finally returned home to the US he realized that it was time to leave New York City for a more tranquil environment.

LEAVING NEW YORK

Leaving New York also meant leaving his studio, then filled with large wooden sculptures, intact as well as in storage,  drawing upon architectural ornamental forms such as finials, domes, etc.  There was no easy way to take such work with him when he wasn’t sure where he was going, nor was it clear that this particular series of large sculptural work was still feasible.  Eventually leaving New York for eastern Long Island, he relocated to a small house with a studio that was a fraction of the size of his Brooklyn space. There he began to make drawings influenced by the Bengali narrative scrolls that he had seen in an exhibition in Delhi. He also began to write about food and ritual, two topics that had always intrigued him.

Rothfarb unexpectedly received an opportunity to write a book about India and chose to research the history and visual culture of the 16th and 17th-century Mughal Dynasty.  Destined for a YA (young adult ) audience, the book In the Land of the Taj Mahal (Henry Holt, 1998), allowed Rothfarb to delve into the world of scholarship on the one hand, and into picture research on the other. The latter gave him access to museum collections via catalogues as he began to learn about which Mughal paintings were where. Moreover, his picture research provided him with a further sense of the range of Indian art beyond what he had seen on his travels.   Once the book was published he began to give lectures and book talks and eventually, after a move across the country to Los Angeles, he taught a few courses on Mughal Art at LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art ).

LOS ANGELES

By this point, having relocated to Los Angeles in the latter 1990’s, and still working as a chef, he had largely stopped his studio work.  A very pleasing foray into ceramics allowed him to maintain a visual practice, but this was soon to change.  Rothfarb’s teaching at LACMA and his increasing interest in the art of South Asia led him to re-consider the idea of teaching. By 2000 he had begun a Masters program in Art History at UCLA, with a minor in Islamic art and a major in the art of India. This led directly into a doctoral program for which he focused his research on the city state of Orchha in central India and its early 17th-century artistic patronage. His doctoral dissertation was eventually published as a book entitled Orchha and Beyond: Design at the Court of Raja Bir Singh Dev Bundela (Marg Foundation, 2012).

A RETURN

With the publication of his book, as well as scholarly essays he had written in other publications, Rothfarb began to consider the future. The future began to look like making art again. After working on one side of his brain (reading, writing, scholarship) for well over a decade and a half he began to yearn for what life might look like when experienced from the other side. That yearning led him to starting a studio in his home, taking drawing classes and beginning a studio practice. The result was that a former sculptor - who had produced drawings as an ancillary part of his work- was now primarily engaged in working two dimensionally. His first project was to draw jali screens  -geometric or floral-patterned Indian architectural screens carved from stone  - initially using charcoal and/or conte crayon. This series expanded into drawn variations on the jali patterns and their translation into digital prints on art paper that could be further worked with other media.

Using this printed paper, Rothfarb began working on large colored drawings  - both rectangular and irregularly shaped  - that were initially derived from Indian pilgrimage maps and diagrams.

The interest in mapping widened to include Eastern Europe, particularly present-day Ukraine,  the region in which his ancestors lived. Beyond maps, he created compositions drawing upon and jumbling up the conventions of Indian Rajput painting and architectural decoration, Persian painting, Russian Constructivism and Cubism. A recent interest in heraldic imagery, as well as iconic imagery of body parts was also thrown into the mix.   Pastel pencil and chalk were his primary materials, aided by an occasional use of gouache. These materials afforded him rich coloration and infinite possibilities for blending colors. They also allowed for a degree of fine drawing control, especially through the pastel pencils as well as expressive, gestural marks and passages through the chalk and sometimes the pencils. He employed collage, using the same printed papers as bases for drawing, when visual interventions or corrections were called for.

In the winter of 2021, still amid the pandemic, Rothfarb moved from Southern California to the Hudson Valley and set up a studio in Athens, NY.  In the period just preceding the pandemic, while still residing in California he was invited to participate in a group show curated by Betty Seid for Sundaram Tagore Gallery in NYC. This was his first group exhibition since the 1990’s.

Recent shows include:

Alterations / Activation / Abstraction:  Sundaram Tagore Gallery, NYC, NY (2019)

Twenty / 20, Athens Cultural Center.  Athens, NY  (2024)

Open Studio: Ed Rothfarb, Nancy Bowen, Monika Zarzezcna, Jean Feinberg. Rothfarb Studio, Athens , NY (2024)

Open Studio: Ed Rothfarb, Nancy Bowen, Monika Zarzezcna, Jean Feinberg, Mara Held, Joel Werring, Jenny Snider, Daniel Wiener. Rothfarb Studio, Athens, NY  (2025)