Alan Sonfist

United States of America  born 1946

Alan Sonfist was born in New York on 26 March 1946. He studied at the Art Students League in New York in 1963, then at Western Illinois University at Macomb, Illinois, from 1964 to 1967 and at the Pratt Institute in New York during the summers of 1965 and 1966. The artist received his Master of Fine Arts from Hunter College, New York, in 1969. Sonfist held his first solo exhibition at the Reese Palley Gallery in New York in 1970 and since then has exhibited extensively throughout the United States and internationally. A sense of personal autobiography and a focus on time pervade his ecological and environmental works, such as Time landscape 1965–78 in New York or the more recent Circles of time 1986–89 outside Florence, Italy. In 1982 the artist edited Art in the Land: A critical anthology of environmental art. He has received numerous grants and awards throughout his career, with a recent mid-career survey, Alan Sonfist: History and the Landscape, at the University of Iowa Art Museum in 1997. Sonfist lives and works in New York.

See more works by this artist in the NGA collection

Alan Sonfist Earth monument to New York -1979 Purchased 1980 Learn more