Syd Solomon

Syd Solomon, an Abstract artist whose paintings hang in the Guggenheim Museum in New York, died on Jan. 28, 2004, he was 86.
Solomon, one of the first to use acrylic paints, helped turn Sarasota into a nationally known artists’ colony in the 1950s and connected it to the New York art world.  

His boldly colored abstract paintings also hang in the  Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C. and Israel's Tel Aviv Museum.

Solomon was born in Pennsylvania in 1917 and began painting in high school. Between 1935 to 1938 he attended the Art Institute of Chicago. By 1940, he enlisted in the Engineer Aviation Regiment, First Camouflage Battalion. After camouflaging the coast around San Francisco he was assigned to the Royal Engineer Camouflage Corps in London where he worked to fool the Germans, sharpening his skill on aerial reconnaissance. This enlarged his perspective and painting with the purpose of deception teaching him to be suspicious of all theories about what is or is not art.

In 1946 he and his wife Annie Solomon moved to Sarasota. Solomon became the first living artist whose work was collected by the Ringling Museum. He also taught there and had a retrospective exhibition of his work in 1975. In 1990 the Ringling Museum of Art give Solomon a one man exhibition "A Dialog With Nature".

Education:

Art Institute of Chicago; L'Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris.

Teaching:

Pittsburgh Art Institute;

Ringling Museum of Art;

Sarasota School of Art;

Famous Artists School;

New College in Sarasota;

Visiting Instructor at University of Illinois in Urbana;

Visiting Professor at Roberson Center for the Arts in Binghamton, NY;

Visiting Artist at Tampa Bay Art Center.

Awards:

State Department U.S. Cultural Exchange program to Israel;

Ford Foundation Special Purchase Grant for the Guggenheim Musuem.

Exhibitions: Many exhibits from 1944 including

Clearwater Museum of Art in Clearwater, FL;

Lowe Art Gallery in Coral Gables;

Associated American Artists Galleries;

Saidenberg Gallery in New York; Midtown Gallery;

Trend House Gallery in Florida;

Brevard College;

Paintings of the Circus at Sarasota Art Association;

Annual Exhibition at the American Water Color Society 1955;

Fifty Ninth Annual Exhibition at the National Collection of Fine Arts,

Smithsonian 1956;

Invitational Exhibition at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1959;

Whitney Museum of American Art in 1964;

Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center.