Ray Elman Exhibition of Portraits at Williams McCall Gallery
Friday, 04/26/2013, 06:00 pm – 09:00 pm
Williams McCall Gallery
110 Washington Avenue, CU-3,
Miami Beach, Florida 33139
Webpage Link

The Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery has acquired several large scale Elman portraits. Most recently, it acquired Elman’s portraits of Pulitzer Prize recipient Jhumpa Lahiri and U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky. These acquisitions join Elman’s portraits of Pulitzer Prize recipients Alan Dugan and Stanley Kunitz in the museum’s permanent collection. Elman’s 1991 portrait of poet Stanley Kunitz standing in his beloved garden following its devastation by Hurricane Bob is included in a current exhibition at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery titled Poetic Likeness: Modern American Poets. That exhibition continues until April 28, 2013.

Elman has made over 200 paintings in this series of notable talents such as Norman Mailer, Robert Motherwell, Douglas Huebler, Justin Kaplan, Joel Meyerowitz, Annie Dillard, Mark Strand, Sebastian Junger, Alec Wilkinson, E.J. Kahn, Jr., Varujan Boghosian, Al Jaffee, Lee Falk, Elise Asher, Anne Bernays, and Ruth Reichl. The dimensions of most works are either 60 x 43 inches or 40 x 30 inches.

Elman has maintained a studio on the tip of Cape Cod in the Provincetown Art Colony since 1970. In 1989, after a half-lifetime of making only abstract art, he started portraying the Provincetown Art community at leisure – what people do when they are not working – the fabric of life that draws people back every year. Now a full-time Miami Beach resident, Elman has turned his focus to portraying the people and culture of Miami.