D'ARCANGELO, ALLAN (American, 1930-1998)

D’Arcangelo’s reputation as a Pop artist was established in 1963 with a series of paintings of American highways and signs. These paintings are typically flat planes with a perspectival highway extending into the distance. Some of the characteristics of Pop are retained in his highway paintings, particularly the use of popular brand name logos, and the expanses of flat colour. However, as the highway paintings evolved, they moved away from Pop art. D'Arcangelo's paintings became much more abstracted, sometimes reduced to a stylized traffic barrier repeated at different angles. In 1965 he started his ‘Proposition Series’.

Allan D'Arcangelo began his studies interested in history and government, but eventually switched to art. He was born in Buffalo, New York in 1930. After earning a degree in history from the University of Buffalo and he moved to Mexico City where he studied art under John Golding for two years and where he had the first exhibition of his work in 1958. In 1964, he was commissioned to paint the mural for the Transportation and Travel Pavilion at the New York World's Fair, and in 1967 he was commissioned to paint a mural on the side of a New York building, one of the first instances of outdoor murals in New York City.

D’Arcangelo’s work has been the subject of dozens of solo exhibitions beginning in the late 1950s. Since the 1960s his paintings were seen in hundreds of group exhibitions in important galleries and museums in the United States and in Europe. He taught Fine Art at Cornell University, Brooklyn College, and the School of Visual Arts during the 1960s. He taught painting in several other institutions throughout his career. He won the National Institute of Arts and Letters Annual Award in 1970 as well as painting a poster for the Olympic Games in Munich, also in 1970. More recently, he won a Guggenheim Fellowship (1987-88).

MUSEUMS:
Tate, London
Museums of Modern Art, New York
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Denver Art Museum, Colorado
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
The Guggenheim Museum, New York