Raymond Elman: The Portraits
October 22– March 3, 2024
Raymond Elman documented his life in the Outer Cape Cod art colony of Provincetown, Truro, and Wellfleet, from 1970 to the present, by making large-scale, mixed-media portraits of the many impactful artists and writers that had befriended him when he was still in his twenties (and onward).
The first painting in this portrait series (1989) portrayed E.J. Kahn, Jr. (veteran New Yorker writer) and Palmer Williams (Executive Producer of “60 Minutes”) playing backgammon outdoors on the edge of the Cape Cod National Seashore – in positions reminiscent of Cezanne’s “The Card Players.” The painting is 6 x 5 feet.
Since then, he has made hundreds of paintings in this series of notable talents such as Norman Mailer, Robert Motherwell, Stanley Kunitz, Alan Dugan, Douglas Huebler, Justin Kaplan, Joel Meyerowitz, Annie Dillard, Mark Strand, Sebastian Junger, Alec Wilkinson, Varujan Boghosian, Budd Hopkins, Paul Resika, Mischa Richter, Al Jaffee, Lee Falk, Anne Bernays, Jane Leavy, Daniel Okrent, Alice Brock, Susan Orlean, Jhumpa Lahiri, Robert Pinsky, and Morton Dean. The dimensions of most pieces are either 60 x 40 inches or 40 x 30 inches. Four of Elman’s portraits are in the collection of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery and have been exhibited there.
Elman moved his studio to Miami from Cape Cod in 2012 and began working with Miami’s diverse art communities, making large-scale portraits of people like Richard Blanco, Lourdes Lopez, Campbell McGrath, Khalilah Ali, Robert Zuckerman, Winston Scott, Gary Burton, Michele Oka Donor, Mitchell Kaplan, Kimberly Green, Richard Saul Wurman, Nicole Henry and many others.
RAYMOND ELMAN: The Portraits will feature approximately twenty-five large-scale, mixed-media portraits, combined with curated video clips of the people in the portraits that can be accessed via QR code on a mobile device (phone or tablet). The exhibition will include portraits of:
The Wolfsonian–FIU @ 1001 Washington Avenue