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Exhibition of Mesches "FBI Files" on display in UB Art Gallery
By KRISTIN E.M. RIEMER
Reporter Contributor
"Arnold Mesches: The FBI Files," an exhibition of approximately 40 collages and five large paintings by artist Arnold Mesches, is on display in the UB Art Gallery in the Center for the Arts, North Campus, through Sept. 13.
Arnold Mesches
FBI Files 42
2002
14 x 20, pen and ink, transfer on board,
acrylic on canvas/paper
Collection of the artist
The exhibition will close with a reception for the artist from 5-7 p.m. on Sept. 10 in the gallery. Mesches will give a lecture about the exhibition from 6-8 p.m. Sept. 13 in the Screening Room of the Center for the Arts.
Mesches, who grew up in Buffalo, creates work informed by world history and his own experiences during the Depression, World War II, the Cold War and the McCarthy "Red Scare" era. His paintings, first exhibited in Los Angeles in the 1940s, are included in a large number of major museum collections worldwide and have been featured in 102 solo exhibitions, including "Echoes: Survey of a Century" at The Castellani Art Museum of Niagara University in 2001. His work explores contemporary philosophical and social debates through collage, drawings and expressionistic paintings.
Arnold Mesches
Surveillance
2000
Acrylic on Canvas
Collection of the artist
In the 1950s, Mesches painted a series of works responding to the trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were accused of communist espionage. When this series of paintings was stolen from the artist's studio in 1956, Mesches suspected the FBI. In 2000, through the Freedom of Information Act, he discovered and gained access to 760 pages of his FBI files covering intelligence about his activities in protests, personal life and work between 1945 and 1972.
Through these files, Mesches became aware of the hundreds of FBI officials who were in his life for 22 years—lovers, friends, models, truck drivers, fellow artists and teachers. The artist still has no information about the 200 paintings and drawings that vanished from his studio or the dozens of pages missing from his FBI files from the six months surrounding the date of the theft.
The striking visual character of the typed FBI files, in which large portions of text were obscured by black marker, inspired Mesches to combine the actual pages from the files with newspaper clippings, photographs, paintings, drawings and hand-written texts, creating vividly colored "contemporary illuminated manuscripts" that depict current events of the time. His works are collages of color, ideas and historical references.
"Arnold Mesches: The FBI Files" was organized by Daniel Marzona, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center associate curator.
The UB Art Gallery's summer hours, effective through Sept. 3, are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday. The gallery will be closed on July 5 and Sept. 6. Fall hours, which will begin on Sept. 7, are 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday.