Mel Alexenberg

Mel Alexenberg
Biofeedback-generated portrait of Mel Alexenberg.jpg
Biofeedback-generated self-portrait created at MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies
Born
Mel Alexenberg

1937 (age 81–82)
NationalityAmerican-Israeli
Known forexperimental art

Mel (Menahem) Alexenberg is an artist and art educator best known for his explorations of the intersections between art, science, technology and culture through his artworks, teaching, writing and blogging.

He was born and educated in New York City, where he earned degrees in biology from Queens College, City University of New York and in education from Yeshiva University, and an interdisciplinary doctorate in art, science, and psychology from New York University. He lives in Ra'anana, Israel, with his wife, artist Miriam Benjamin. They have four children, Iyrit, Ari, Ron, and Moshe, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Alexenberg's artworks are in the collections of more than forty museums worldwide including Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art in New York, High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Cincinnati Art Museum, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Hunter Museum of American Art in Chattanooga, Midwest Museum of America Art in Elkhart, Indiana, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax, Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, Museum Moderner Kunst in Vienna, Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Kunstmuseum Den Haag in the Netherlands, Jewish Museum in Prague, Israel Museum in Jerusalem, Malmö Art Museum in Sweden, Museum of Contemporary Art [es] in Venezuela, and Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery in Tasmania, Australia.

As an educator in the US, Alexenberg served as professor of art and education at Columbia University, head of the art department at Pratt Institute, research fellow at MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies, and dean of visual arts at New World School of the Arts in Miami. In Israel, he has taught at Tel Aviv University, Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, University of Haifa, Bar-Ilan University, Ariel University, and was head of the School of the Arts at Emuna College in Jerusalem. Alexenberg has served as a member of the Council of the Wolf Foundation that awards the international Wolf Prizes in the sciences and arts. He was appointed to the Council by the President of Israel upon the recommendation of the Minister of Education (2002-2017).

Work

His works explore relationships between the networked world and spirituality, postdigital art and Jewish consciousness, participatory art and community, and space-time systems and electronic technologies. Millions throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia have seen his blogart, environmental sculptures, multi-media installations, telecommunications art events, and exhibitions of paintings and prints that explore digital technologies and global systems. The leading American art magazine, ARTnews, praised his LightsOROT exhibition created in collaboration with Otto Piene at MIT for Yeshiva University Museum in New York by writing: "Rarely is an exhibition as visually engaging and intellectually challenging." Alexenberg's papers, exhibition catalogs, and art project documents are in the collection of the Archives of American Art of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.

Art exhibitions

  • Mel Alexenberg: Computer Angels (Fine Arts Gallery, State University of NY at Stony Brook, 1987)
  • LightsOROT: Spiritual Dimensions of the Electronic Age (Yeshiva University Museum, 1988)
  • The Artist and The Computer (Bronx Museum of the Arts, 1987-1988)
  • Crash: Computer Assisted Hardcopy (Beliot College Museums, Wisconsin, 1988)
  • Golem! Danger, Deliverance and Art (The Jewish Museum, New York, 1988)
  • Lumia: International Light Art (Charlottenborg Museum, Denmark, 2000)
  • Cyberangels: Aesthetic Peace Plan for the Middle East (Robert Guttman Gallery, Jewish Museum in Prague, 2004)
  • Hidden Garden: An Art Journey into a Leaf (Jerusalem Botanical Gardens, 2007–2009)
  • Photograph God (Kuhn Fine Arts Gallery, Ohio State University, 2010)
  • Silent Witnesses: Bar Mitzvah in a Brooklyn Mosque (Holocaust Memorial Center, Detroit, 2012)
  • Shaping Community: Poetics and Politics of the Eruv (Yale University Art Galleries, 2012)

Publications

  • Through a Bible Lens: Biblical Insights for Smartphone Photography and Social Media (HarperCollins Christian Publishing, 2019) ISBN 978-1-59555-712-4
  • Photograph God: Creating a Spiritual Blog of Your Life (North Charleston, SC: CreateSpace, 2015) ISBN 978-1507658895
  • The Future of Art in a Postdigital Age: From Hellenistic to Hebraic Consciousness (Bristol and Chicago: Intellect Books/University of Chicago Press, 2011) ISBN 978-1-84150-377-6
  • Educating Artists for the Future: Learning at the Intersections of Art, Science, Technology and Culture (Bristol and Chicago: Intellect Books/University of Chicago Press, 2008) ISBN 978-1-84150-191-8
  • Dialogic Art in a Digital World: Four Essays on Judaism and Contemporary Art (Jerusalem: Reuven Mass House, 2008) in Hebrew ISBN 978-965-09-0227-8
  • The Future of Art in a Digital Age (Bristol and Chicago: Intellect Books/University of Chicago Press, 2006) ISBN 978-1-84150-136-9
  • Aesthetic Experience in Creative Process (Ramat Gan, Israel: Bar-Ilan University Press, 1981) ISBN 965-226-013-4
  • Light and Sight (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970)
  • A Unitary Model of Aesthetic Experience in Art and Science (doctoral dissertation, New York University, 1969)

He has written numerous papers and book chapters: including: "Autoethnographic Blogart Exploring Postdigital Relationships Between Digital and Hebraic Writing," in Routledge Handbook of Digital Writing and Rhetoric (2018), "Postdigital Consciousness" in Archithese (2012), "Eruv as Conceptual and Kinetic Art" in Images (2011), "Space-Time Structures of Digital Visual Culture: Paradigm Shift from Hellenistic to Hebraic Roots of Western Civilization" in Inter/sections/Inter/actions: Art Education in a Digital Visual Culture (2010), "Autoethnographic Identification of Realms of Learning for Art Education in a Post-Digital Age" in International Journal of Education through Art (2008), "Ancient Schema and Technoetic Creativity" in Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research (2006), "From Science to Art: Integral Structure and Ecological Perspective in a Digital Age" in Interdisciplinary Art Education: Building Bridges to Connect Disciplines and Cultures (2005), "Semiotic Redefinition of Art in a Digital Age" in Semiotics and Visual Culture: Sights, Signs, and Significance (2004), "Creating Public Art through Intergenerational Collaboration" in Art Education (2004), "An Interactive Dialogue: Talmud and the Net" in Parabola (2004), "Wright and Gehry: Biblical Consciousness in Postmodern Architecture" in Journal of Cultural Research in Art Education (2003), and "Jewish Consciousness and Art of the Digital Age' in Journal of Judaism and Civilization (2003). He is former art editor of The Visual Computer: International Journal of Computer Graphics.

References

Ori Z. Soltis. Tradition and Transformation: Three Millennia of Jewish Art and Architecture. Canal Street Studios, 2016. ISBN 978-1530201273. Ori Z. Soltis. Fixing the World: Jewish American Painters in the Twentieth Century. Brandeis University Press, 2003. ISBN 1-58465-049-4. Who's Who in American Art, 2016. ISBN 978-0-8379-6316-7.

External links


This page was last updated at 2019-11-15 15:28 UTC. Update now. View original page.

All our content comes from Wikipedia and under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.


Top

If mathematical, chemical, physical and other formulas are not displayed correctly on this page, please useFirefox or Safari