Gregory A. Amenoff

During his career of almost forty years, Gregory Amenoff has established himself as a masterly painter and as an artist dedicated to supporting and encouraging young artists, as a professor in and chair of the Visual Arts Division of Columbia University’s School of the Arts, as President of the National Academy of Design, and as founding board member and Curator Governor of CUE Art Foundation.

His immense oeuvre, which has generated comparisons to the work of Arthur Dove and fellow Guggenheim Fellow Marsden Hartley (1931), includes such important and varied paintings as The Seasons, a series of six landscape paintings inspired by Breughel’s similarly themed six-painting cycle; a series of eighteen paintings, detailed in the book The Sky Below, that were based on William Blake’s Songs of Experience; and a triptych altar piece and designs for complementary vestments (executed by Fabric Works in Philadelphia) for St. Peter’s Church in Cologne, Germany; to name but a fraction of his works.

Three traveling exhibitions—Works on Paper: 1975-1992, The Sky Below: 18 Paintings by Gregory Amenoff, and 30 Views—as well as dozens of other solo shows have brought his art to all corners of the United States. He has also shown his work in scores of group exhibitions at galleries around the country, throughout Europe, and in Japan, and at such impressive venues as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Cleveland Museum of Art, Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art and Museum of Fine Arts, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts, twice at the Whitney Biennial (1981, 1985), four times at the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and at the Corcoran Gallery of Art’s 40th Biennial Exhibition of American Contemporary Painting.

Among the approximately thirty major institutions that can boast of his works in their permanent collections are the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Brooklyn Museum of Art; the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Missouri; the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City; the Minneapolis Institute of Art; the New York Public Library; and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.

His honors include the Massachusetts Bicentennial Painting Award (1976), a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, three Purchase Awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1993, 1995, 1997), and three grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1994, he awarded an honorary doctorate in fine art from the Massachusetts College of Art.