Michael Rich

Michael Rich teaches painting and drawing in the Visual Art Studies Program. He has received a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design, and a MFA from The Savannah College of Art and Design.

Michael Rich exhibits nationally and internationally through Sotheby’s auction series, International Young Art, and regular gallery exhibits. Rich’s work has recently been the subject of a retrospective exhibit at the Walton Art Center, Fayetteville Arkansas in 2007. He is the 1996 recipient of the Basil H. Alkazzi Award (USA) and his work is featured in private and public collections nationally including, The Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, LA and the Springfield Museum of Art, Springfield, OH.

Michael is represented in New York and Los Angeles at the George Billis Gallery, in San Francisco at Adler and Co. Gallery, as well as the Patricia Carega Gallery, New Hampshire and the Old Spouter Gallery, Nantucket.

Time spent around the waters of Nantucket Island and the hills of central Italy helped to shape a love and interest in landscape and natural rhythms of color that remain very much a focal point in his work today. A dedicated practitioner of yoga, Rich is influenced greatly by Eastern philosophy and art in an approach to nature and landscape as a wellspring for spiritual investigation and meditation. In a recent essay entitled, Abstraction and Nature in the Paintings of Michael Rich, the noted critic, Donald Kuspit writes of Rich’s paintings:

“Rich’s abstract landscapes restore us to the prereflective --not to say prelapsarian--state of unity between object (nature) and subject (sensation and feeling) we experienced before we discovered our separateness from nature (or rather our difference within nature). Thus their mystic import, and with that their sense of radical aliveness.”