Born in 1939 in Brooklyn, Jerome Witkin earned a bachelor of arts degree from The Cooper Union and a master of fine arts degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1970. Since 1971, Witkin has taught at Syracuse University’s College of Visual and Performing Arts. The artist’s cinematic, narrative paintings have been the subject of numerous solo shows, including the 2011 retrospective, Drawn to Paint: The Art of Jerome Witkin, at the Syracuse University Art Galleries. Witkin’s contribution to American representational painting has been recognized with awards and honors from the American Academy of Arts and Letter, the National Academy of Design, and with a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1961. The artist is included in the public collections of the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford, Connecticut, among many others.
