Jack Farkas
Jack Farkas’s devotion to art began on the shores of Bridgeport, Connecticut, where childhood visits to museums ignited a passion that never dimmed. “Looking at paintings and art,” he recalls, “formed me and my life around and about art.” That early conviction became a compass, guiding him into some of the nation’s most rigorous art institutions. He earned a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art, an MFA from the Rochester Institute of Technology, pursued further graduate studies at Bradley University, and later immersed himself in art history, restoration, identification, and art law at New York University. There, he contributed to panels on Holocaust-looted art alongside major museum authorities, blending scholarship with cultural preservation.
Farkas’s training has been as wide-ranging as it has been deep. He mastered painting, printmaking, lithography, woodcuts, serigraphy, design, typography, and pottery, but it was color—its aura, energy, and symbolic resonance—that became his signature. “My artwork speaks the language of color, emotions, feelings, auras, energies, spirituality, and flowers,” he writes. His lifelong exploration of symbolism even led to the creation of a Dictionary on the Language and Meaning of Flowers, bridging visual art with poetry and cultural history.
As a professor and later dean at institutions across Maryland, Connecticut, and New York, Farkas shaped generations of artists. He curated exhibitions that brought figures such as John Taylor Arms, Josef Albers, Robert Motherwell, and Willem de Kooning to new audiences—one New York Times critic called it “the coup of the century.” His own art has been widely shown, with sixteen solo exhibitions and more than eighty group shows, including the Silvermine Art of the Northeast, the Museum of Modern European Art in Barcelona, and an upcoming appearance at the Venice Biennale of Architecture and Art (2025). His work has graced Times Square and entered museum collections, praised by critics for its kinship to Matisse but with “color all his own.”
Farkas describes his art as an invitation: symbols, shapes, and colors arranged to engage both eye and mind, encouraging viewers to let simple forms open pathways into memory, emotion, and self-reflection. “Each viewer is invited to take these images and let them flow into their own inner self,” he explains. His subject matter—symbols, color, and the energy of creation—seeks to elevate consciousness, prompting deeper examinations of self, the universe, and even the supernatural.
Beyond the studio, Farkas has been a force in the art world’s organizational landscape, serving as president, founder, and advisor to numerous associations, as well as a juror for major exhibitions. He has spoken at museums including the Met, the Louvre, the Prado, and the Guggenheim, urging audiences to see anew. A self-described Renaissance man, he also tends orchards and vineyards, makes wine, preserves food, and devotes himself to charitable works through Freemasonry.
“Inspiration comes from the essence of life itself,” Farkas says—whether in Churchill’s resolve, Chalamet’s artistry, or the energy of people striving toward greatness. His works are not only visual objects but vessels of connection: art that speaks “the language and color to the viewer, creating art from the unseen—or what is not seen but felt.”
