The Letter Paintings, by incorporating the names of mainly male and female African-American musicians, undermined prevailing aesthetic categories by conflating many contemporary movements including Conceptual Art, Color Field, Pattern and Decoration, diary entry and social commentary.
"[18] Others described them as "an uncannily accurate step in the right direction",[19] "[a]s exhilarating as a Charlie Parker solo or a holler from Big Joe Turner",[20] and, almost thirty years after they had been painted, as carrying "the force of a visionary project".
The work took three years, and completing this commission made Rand the author of the only narratively painted synagogue in the world and the only one we know of since the 2nd Century Dura-Europos.
[3] Director Amala Lane's 45 minute film, titled The Painted Shul, documenting the B'nai Yosef Murals, was released in 2003.
In the contemporary arena he is known primarily as an abstractionist, a near-cult figure who started out as a child prodigy and whose admirers range from John Ashbery to Julian Schnabel.
[29]By the 1970s and 1980s Rand had developed and maintained concurrent reputations: one as a visible gallery and museum artist whose work had loosely morphed into representation, and the other as an authority on Jewish iconography.
[30] As Dan Cameron observed in Arts at the time, "Far from an emerging talent, Archie Rand is a seasoned young master whom history is finally catching up with.
Exhibitions from the mid-1970s onward announced a return to mural-scale paintings and showed a prescient neo-expressionism joined with a fealty to narratives which were drawn in cartoon style.
His recent paintings actually carry an air of accumulated, earned experience ... that makes this work so engaging: it is built on an old-fashioned, generous inclusiveness – critical and evangelical at once – that few of Rand's contemporaries seem interested in attempting, and none that I know of can match.
"[35] In 1988, with master printer Jon Cone, Rand produced a surprising and imaginative series of potato prints, some editioned and some very large, which were exhibited at a number of public and private institutions.
[37]Printmaker and critic Ron Netsky urged, "Viewers should be sure not to miss what surely must be the most exquisite bit of potato carving done in the 20th century ..."[38] And Lawrence J. Merrill elaborated, "[Rand] is an artist with a shameless appetite to encompass more: an expanding universe aesthetic ... Rand has had a career marked by attraction to projects unsanctioned by the official art world ... which were ultimately discovered and trumpeted by the art press ..."[39] A 1988 series of 20 large triptychs ("Songs of Dispersion") was shown in various venues in 1989.
Donald Kuspit reviewed the Black and White series for Artforum at the time: "Rand's works are post-Modernist in the best sense ... the intimacy Rand evokes is reminiscent of Paul Klee's: he reinvents an alphabet of familiar shapes ... and the result evokes a primary sense of magical meaning and feeling.
"[41] The exhibition featured large paintings which offered startling and effective revisions on the formats of contemporary abstraction, prompting critic Terry R. Myers to write in Flash Art: Dare a critic put a word like "inspiration" down on paper, sincerely mean it in its larger sense, and still think he or she has a voice among the pedantry that is the art world?
I'm tempted to believe that there is some type of visionary impact in Archie Rand's latest paintings, but nowadays such a claim would seem delirious at best and at worst illicit.
[44] On the occasion of a 1992 exhibition of serial paintings, which linked the Kabbalah's view of the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet to the 22 major arcana cards of the Tarot deck, David Brown wrote: "Extremely competent in any style that he chooses to call his own, it can be said of Archie what young players say of greats in the jazz world: "somebody should just break their fingers.
He has completed many series after the works of Paul Celan, Moyshe-Leyb Halpern, Eugenio Montale, Yehuda Amichai, Rainer Maria Rilke, Samuel Beckett/Paul Eluard and Jack Spicer.
They are – thanks mostly to Rand – part fairy tales of staring cats and castle walls and, with Creeley's poems, part brilliant condensations of real-life emotions and desires ... "Robert Creeley's Collaborations", mounted last year by the Castellani Art Museum in Niagara Falls and currently touring nationally, documents the phenomenal scope of the poet's interests in the visual arts.
Do a Google search for 'Archie Rand: Iconoclast'-- easily the most important exhibit the Yeshiva University Museum (YUM) has ever hosted or ever will ...
It is composed of 614 contiguous panels, each of which deals with one of the obscure but traditionally fixed number of 613 commandments, which were salvaged by sages from a literal reading of the Hebrew Bible.
[63] Menachem Wecker, describing this work in The Forward, averred that "Rand's series is arguably the most ambitious Jewish art enterprise, perhaps ever ...
"[64] Prompted by this showing, the art historian Matthew Baigell reflected on Rand's accomplishments in a 2009 article: He is arguably the best known, most important, the most imaginative, and the most prolific ... as well as the artist most willing to take risks ...
[65]By 2020, when he was awarded the Farash Foundation Fellowship in recognition of his accomplishments, Rand was generally considered the pioneering proponent of modern religious art.
The Wall Street Journal labeled The 613 as "dynamic ... remarkable ... thrilling"[69] The New York Times selected the book as "Editors' Choice" and praised it in two separate reviews calling it "wonderfully garish" and declaring that "nothing prepared the art world for 'The 613.
"[77] Radio personality Raul Gallyot named Rand "the essential creative and outspoken proponent of Jewish themed American art"[78] while the Museum's Director, Lori Starr, commented about the exhibition, "We are honored to present the museum debut of this significant work by one of the most important and original mavericks of the art world.
"[79][80] The 613 was again displayed from September to October 2018 in an installation at The Duke Gallery of Fine Art at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia.
[82]For the 2021 iteration of "The 613" at the Museum of the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, NY, Director Jonathan Binstock wrote: For over five decades Archie Rand has been regarded as a maverick and rule-breaker, and The 613 is his most ambitious work....
It exemplifies Rand's groundbreaking achievements in the construction of contemporary Jewish iconography, affirming his position as a relentlessly innovative artist....
[84] Also in 2016 Rand showed two bodies of work that were done in Italy, "La Certosa Di Pontignano, 1995" and "Mount Etna, 2005," at The Interchurch Center Galleries, New York.
Another 2017 exhibition, "Archie Rand: Early Works With Poetry", featuring two series of work from 1991 and 1993 after poems by Jack Spicer and Samuel Beckett/Paul Eluard, respectively, drew the following response from critic Raphael Rubinstein: "No artist of his generation (nor possibly of any other) has devoted as much time and energy and genius and love to collaborations with writers as Archie Rand.
"[93] In 2024 The Forward took note of Rand's having completed 915 canvases where the units of the series represented every successive sentence from the Book Of Proverbs.