Mel Alexenberg
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.
Mel Alexenberg | |
|---|---|
 Biofeedback-generated self-portrait created at MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies | |
| Born | Mel Alexenberg 1937 (age 82–83) New York City, USA |
| Nationality | American-Israeli |
| Known for | experimental art |
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.
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).
Museum Collections
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City; Museum of Modern Art in New York City; Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York; High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia; Birmingham Museum of Art in Birmingham, Alabama; Cincinnati Art Museum in Cincinnati, Ohio; Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio; Hunter Museum of Art in Chattanooga, Tennessee; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri; University of Kentucky Art Museum in Lexington, Kentucky; New Orleans Museum of Art in New Orleans, Louisiana; Midwest Museum of America Art in Elkhart, Indiana; University of Michigan Museum of Art in Ann Arbor, Michigan; San Antonio Museum of Art in San Antonio, Texas; Greenville Museum of Art in Greenville, North Carolina; University of Wyoming Art Museum in Laramie, Wyoming; Meridian Museum of Art in Meridian, Mississippi; National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC; Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax, Canada; Museum Moderner Kunst in Vienna, Austria; Victoria and Albert Museum in London, England; Rembrandt House Museum in Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Art Museum of The Hague in The Netherlands; Jewish Museum in Prague, Czech Republic; Israel Museum in Jerusalem, Israel; Haifa Museum of Art in Haifa, Israel; Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest, Hungary; Malmö Art Museum in Malmo, Sweden; Museum of Contemporary Art in Caracas, Venezuela; Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery in Launceston, Tasmania, Australia.
Art Works
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: Spiritual Dimensions of the Electronic Age" exhibition created in collaboration with Otto Piene at MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies 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.
Mel Alexenberg's experimental printmaking was praised my MoMA and Smithsonian: "The Committee on Prints of the Museum of Modern Art is pleased to accept this computer-assisted etching of Rembrandt’s imagery. As an example of the innovative technological experimentation taking place at Pratt Graphic Center, it will be of great interest to students of the development of graphic techniques.” "As Chairman of the Department of Social & Cultural History, it gives me great pleasure to acknowledge, on behalf of the National Museum of American History, the receipt of Digitized Homage to Rembrandt: Day Angels presented to our Division of Graphic Arts. This lithograph from a computer-generated image is a most valuable addition to our collection."
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, Copenhagen, 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)
- Global Tribute to Rembrandt (Cyberangel flights from Israel Museum in Jerusalem to 30 museums on five continents with Mel Alexenberg's artworks in their collections, 2020)
Books
- Through a Bible Lens: Biblical Insights for Smartphone Photography and Social Media (HarperCollins Christian Publishing, 2019) ISBN 978-1-5955-5712-4
- 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)
Book Chapters
"How the Rebbe Rebuilt a Small Israeli Town in Here's My Story (2019), "Autoethnographic Blogart Exploring Postdigital Relationships Between Digital and Hebraic Writing" in Routledge Handbook of Digital Writing and Rhetoric (2018),"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), "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), "Legacy Thrones: Intergenerational Collaboration in Creating Multicultural Art" in Community Connections: Intergenerational Links in Art Education (2004)
Selected Papers
"Postdigital Consciousness" in Archithese: International Thematic Review of Architecture (2012), "Art Education for Jewish Life in a Networked World" in Jewish Educational Leadership (2011), "Eruv as Conceptual and Kinetic Art" in Images: A Journal of Jewish Art and Visual Culture (2011), "Concerning Down-to-Earth Spirituality in Art Education" (position paper on founding of the National Art Education Association Caucus on Spirituality in Art Education) NAEA News (2009), "Autoethnographic Identification of Realms of Learning for Art Education in a Post-Digital Age" in International Journal of Education through Art (2008), "Cyberangels: An Aesthetic Peace Plan for the Middle East" in Leonardo: Journal of the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology (2006), "Ancient Schema and Technoetic Creativity" in Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research (2006),"Creating Public Art through Intergenerational Collaboration" in Art Education: Journal of National Art Education Association (2004), "Jewish Consciousness and Art in the Digital Age" in Journal of Judaism and Civilization (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), "Art with Computers: The Human Spirit and the Electronic Revolution" in The Visual Computer: International Journal of Computer Graphics (1988), 'Biology Education in the Elementary School: The First Task and Central Purpose" in The American Biology Teacher (1967), "The Binary System and Computers” in Science and Children: Journal of the National Science Teachers Association (1964).
References
Ori Z. Soltis. Tradition and Transformation: Three Millennia of Jewish Art and Architecture (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. ISBN 978-0-8379-6316-7.
