Mel Pekarsky attended public school in Gary, Indiana, and studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and then at Northwestern University, where he earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees. During this period, he exhibited at the Artists of Chicago and Vicinity show at the Art Institute, and then with the alternative Exhibition Momentum group, from which the USIA selected work to tour France and Germany. His continuing search for a valid iconography led to a systematic, unembarrassed examination of form and format, and a wide spectrum of imagery, leading to an eventual transition from Chicago School figure painting, to the figure in landscape, to groups of figures in the landscape. The figure would later grow smaller and finally withdraw from the stage altogether, with the exception of the implicit presence of the viewer.

Shortly after completing graduate studies and teaching at the Northwestern Chicago campus, Pekarsky came to New York and worked for the Guggenheim Museum under James Johnson Sweeney. He was called soon after to military service, where he spent time training in Texas mesa country, his first face-to-face meeting with the southwest desert. Separated from active duty, he returned to Chicago, where he started the art department at Kendall College, illustrated children's books and anything else he could, and began to show his work regularly.

Pekarsky moved back to New York in a few years to teach and become associate dean at the School of Visual Arts, and one of the founding members of City Walls, Inc., an organization of artists committed to placing large-scale outdoor murals in the public domain; the group had significant impact on the public art movement in the United States, and eventually evolved into New York City's Public Art Fund. These murals were not unrelated to Pekarsky's growing involvement with the environmental movement, and it was at about this time that he designed the posters for the first Earth Day.

Mural at Houston and Crosby Streets, NYC, 1972 Through grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and The Bernhard Foundation.

Gradually withdrawing from public art and weighing ideas of landscape and iconography, Pekarsky was painting Italian topiary gardens, carefully sculpted by humans, but with nobody present in them, when a trip to the Mojave Desert abruptly immersed him in examining the solitude, fragility and symbolism that have for decades since been his subject matter - from paintings and drawings of monumental scale to pocket-sized. For an exhibition of desert drawings, Donald Kuspit wrote:

The desert is theoretically the most absent place there is — the place where absence is at its most obscene. Pekarsky has described the desert in terms which show the fullness of its absence:

"It is vast, but fragile and vulnerable, beautiful and constantly changing. It's neat, clean, open and ordered, and precisely apportioned in space and object. Trying to capture and transmit that sense of light, isolation and fragility has led me in the last few years to eliminate color from most of my work". I think it important to note Pekarsky's resistance to this renunciation—the way the articulation of absence goes against the grain of his nature, as well as nature commonly understood.

"This was a tough thing to finally just do. It went against my training and my personal enjoyment of gesture, brio, dense brushwork, and color, which are in any case 'natural' to me. The current works are hard, and perhaps not fun to make".

Pekarsky's rejection of his own nature as well as nature at its most lush and colorful — in its traditional role as a symbol of abundance — also involves an ascetic relation to his own past. He grew up in the Chicago of figure painting and the "Monster Roster", the Chicago of obviously humanistic and dramatic concerns.

Woman, oil and tempera, 36" x 48", 1956. Private Collection, Chicago

Jacob Wrestles the Angel, oil, 12" x 16", 1959. Private Collection, NY

He has described the progressive diminution of the figure in his work until, in 1968, it was gone, "and only the landscape remained". Initially his pure landscapes were "invented stage sets, somewhat surreal and brooding, and painterly."  These "began to give way to the increasingly observed and site specific."  The turn to "real" subject matter enabled Pekarsky to become, as he noted, "less self-conscious."  It was not until 1975 that he "went to the Mojave Desert for the first time," catalyzing, in my opinion, a new consciousness of self. For it was in the absence of the desert that he achieved a sense of absolute integrity, impossible to have on the stage of the world.

Pekarsky's interest in gesture has gone underground, disguised by a kind of traditionalist respect for calm statement, an insistence on articulateness whatever the violence of the subject matter. Pekarsky gives us violence measured out in limited units of raw landscapes, violence spoonfed to us in carefully measured phrases of epic scenery . . . 

Altarpiece, oil, 8 pieces, 38 3/4" x 50 3/4", 1963-1964

detail, Moses Smites the Overseer

The more one studies Pekarsky's desert pictures, the more the desert seems to dissolve into the means of its own representation, and the whole issue of representation seems at stake.  .  .  The extraordinary delicacy of the works only heightens the confusion, the elegant intellectual uncertainty.  .  .  In the end Pekarsky's landscape pictures are intellectually as well as perceptually provocative, startling us not only into an awareness of the given but into the suspicion that it may have a fictional character.  .  .  Pekarsky, in his own special way, shows us a way out of the banalities of both realism and abstraction, illusionism and formulaic form, towards a sense of the problematic underlying both.  Forsaking both obvious signature and grandiose subject matter . . . he makes it clear that art is still a high risk demonstration of the boundaries of knowledge, the subtle limits of certainty.*

Mel Pekarsky's work is included in public, private and corporate collections in the United States and abroad. He has been Chair of the Department of Art at Kendall College; Associate Dean of the School of Visual Arts; a member of the graduate art faculty at New York University; and Chairman, MFA Director and Studio Programs Director in the Department of Art at Stony Brook University, where he wrote and initiated the undergraduate and graduate studio art programs. He is active as a curator, and has organized exhibitions of painting, sculpture, drawing, and printmaking.

*All quotes are from Donald Kuspit, Mel Pekarsky, G.W. Einstein Gallery, New
York, 1984, with permission.