Allan d'Arcangelo (1930 - 1998)
Biography
Born in 1930 in Buffalo, New York, Allan D'Arcangelo is best known for his abstracted and stylised depictions of the American highway. Like many of his contemporaries such as Robert Indiana, Robert Rauschenberg and Ed Ruscha, the vivid and instantly recognizable graphics along the American motoring landscape provided a fertile ground for his elaboration of the Pop ideal.
Jean Reeves, an art critic from his hometown of Buffalo, once summed up his early education and life experiences, shedding light on much of the inspiration for his work later in his career:
"Even college wasn't for [Allan] an easy, straight-to-the-end experience. After a year at the University of Buffalo, he transferred to Bowling Green University in Ohio, stayed a semester, then quit and hitchhiked around the country. He tried for a job as an oil-well 'roughneck,' but wound up instead trying to sell encyclopedias in Houston. He finally hitchhiked back home and re-entered the University of Buffalo, receiving his B.A. in 1953."
When taking into account this period of transience and his relationship with being on the road in his formative years as an artist, it seems only natural that D'Arcangelo would choose the American highway as the most powerful and recurring subject matter in his work.
His earlier works were figurative and folk-like, but shortly after moving to New York in 1959 he was exposed to the strong images of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein and his work began to take on the bold colours, sharp lines and familiar imagery of the Pop movement. While in New York, he worked as an artist and as a teacher at the School of Visual Arts and Brooklyn College.
In the 1970's, D'Arcangelo moved to a farm near Kenoza Lake where he lived and worked for the rest of his life.