Arnold Mesches was born on August 11, 1923, in the Bronx, New York and died on November 5, 2016.
He was an American visual artist.
He was raised in Buffalo, New York.
He had moved to Los Angeles in 1943 on a scholarship at the Art Center School.
During 1945, the FBI opened a file on him targeting him as a subversive communist.
A few of his collected paintings represented images from the Senator Eugene McCarthy era.
Arnold Mesches created many series of “provocative, layered collages composed from his personal FBI file plus news clippings, 1950’s magazine cutouts, personal photographs, and hand written scripts.”
He has explored contemporary social and historical issues, informed by world history and his life during the Depression, which also reflect his art.
During the early seventies he married a young artist and student of his, Jill Ciment, who was thirty years his junior.
Then, Ciment went to become an accomplished novelist and memoirist.
During 1984, he relocated to New York City and taught at New York University.
Arnold Mesches also taught at Parsons College and Rutgers University.
Arnold Mesches eventually ended up teaching at University of Florida in Gainesville.
Arnold Mesches has had over 125 solo exhibitions and is represented in places such as the Metropolitan Museum of Arts, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art in Sydney, Australia, among others.
Arnold Mesches passed away at 93 years old.