MICHAEL MAZUR (1935-2009) was an American painter and printmaker whose lifelong interests pursued a balance between the narrative power of observation and the nonrepresentational expression of gesture. Throughout his five-decade career, he reveled in the physicality of his chosen medium(s), relishing the process of making. With his constructive vocabulary of observation, he deftly captured fleeting moments in nature, human tragedy, and rapture. Broad themes encompassed social documentation, psychological portraiture, and passionate landscapes that moved back and forth aesthetically between figuration and abstraction. Born in New York City in 1935, he attended Horace Mann High School in the Bronx, where he founded an art club whose only other members were cartoonist Ed Koren and the future curator Henry Geldzahler. He also worked as a studio assistant to painter Alan Ullman in Greenwich Village. Mazur studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence and at Amherst, while embarking on a rigorous curriculum with master printmaker and sculptor Leonard Baskin, at Smith College. He received his BFA (1960) and MFA (1961) from Yale School of Art and Architecture in 1961 where he studied with Josef Albers, Naum Gabo, Rico Lebrun, Ab-Ex painter John Schuler, printmaker Gabor Peterdi, and Fairfield Porter among others. In 1961 he opened his first solo exhibition at the Barone Gallery in New York. In 1964, his work was included in “Contemporary Painters and Sculptors as Printmakers,” at The Museum of Modern Art and in 1965, was featured along with Mary Bauermeister, Jim Dine, Robert Morris, Larry Poons, and Tom Wesselmann in “Young Americans: Thirty Artists Under Thirty-Five” at the Whitney Museum. Settling in Cambridge, MA, in 1964, Mazur held several teaching appointments, most notably at the Rhode Island School of Design (‘62-‘65) and Brandeis University (‘66-‘75). His proximity to student unrest of the era and his own political activism made space for the somber tone of works such as the “Closed Ward Series,” “Stoneham Zoo Series” (1976-1979), and his masterful illustrations of “Dante’s Inferno” (1993). In 1970, he was invited along with Jim Dine, Sam Francis, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, and Frank Stella to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale, but declined to participate to protest the government’s involvement in “war, racism, sexism and repression.” Mazur’s work can be found in over 100 museums across the country and abroad, notably including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum, Smithsonian Museum, MFA Boston, Art Institute of Chicago, Los Angeles County Museum, MFA Huston, San Fransico Museum of Modern Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and The British Museum (London). He received awards from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Fellowship. Since 1961, his work has been exhibited in more than 300 solo and group exhibitions around the world, including a major traveling retrospective of prints at the MFA Boston, Zimmerli Museum, Stanford University, and the Minneapolis Institute of Art.