From Rembrandt Inspired Cyberart in MoMA to Cryptoart NFT

Just as cyber artworks have found their homes in museums worldwide since the 1980’s, crypto artworks will be entering museum collections worldwide in the future.

As an artist whose digital artwork is in the MoMA collection, it will be meaningful for the museum to also have my Rembrandt inspired NFT in its collection. The image below shows me in period garb launching a Rembrandt inspired cyberangel from Rembrandt’s studio in Rembrandt House Museum in Amsterdam flying to MoMA. 

The Museum of Modern Art added my experimental digital multimedia artwork Jacob’s Dream: Digitized Homage to Rembrandt to its collection in 1987 after its being exhibited in “The Artist and the Computer” exhibition at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. I had created it when I was simultaneously Chairman of Fine Arts at Pratt Institute and Research Fellow at MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies.

Mrs. Alfred R. Stern, Chairman of the Committee on Prints and Illustrated Books, wrote on adding my 1986 experimental digital multimedia artwork Jacob’s Dream: “The members of the committee were pleased to accept this computer-assisted etching of Rembrandt’s imagery. As an example of the innovative technological experimentation taking place at Pratt Graphic Center, it will be of great interest to students of the development of graphic techniques.”

In addition to my teaching at Pratt and MIT, I am former art professor at Columbia University and professor at universities in Israel.

 My email is melalexenberg@yahoo.com 

MoMA IN THE LIFE OF THE ARTIST MEL ALEXENBERG

MoMA has a special place in my life having been born and educated in New York. Instead of taking the Green Bus to school, I’d often run across Queens Boulevard and take the bus in the opposite direction across the bridge to Fifth Avenue and 53^rd Street to spend the day with Matisses and Picassos. 

When I was head of the art department at Pratt Institute, I invited Francoise Gilot to lecture about her new book Matisse and Picasso: A Friendship in Art. She gave me a copy and wrote in it: "To Mel Alexenberg, who sees angels in computers and computers in Angels. Francoise Gilot."

My first teaching job was as a high school biology teacher at Rhodes School on 54^th Street overlooking the MoMA terrace. (It’s the red brick building in the photo below.) 

My second date with Miriam, who became my wife ten months later, was in the MoMA where I explained to her ideas emerging from modern art. The last museum she had visited was the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam viewing Rembrandts when she was nine years old on her way from Suriname, the Dutch colony in South America where she was born, to live on a farm in Israel.

Victor D’Amico, director of the MoMA’s Children's Museum was my teacher when I was studying for an interdisciplinary doctorate in art and science at NYU. His classes were held at MoMA. Dr. Prabha Sahasrabudha who worked with Victor at MoMA was invited by Indira Gandhi to create a children's museum in India modeled after the MoMA Children's Museum. Prabha was later professor of art education at NYU and head of the committee that granted me my doctorate for my research on the aesthetic experience in creative process in art and science. 

My cyberangel flights in both digital and crypto forms are based on the biblical passage: “He had a vision in a dream. A ladder was standing on the ground, its top reaching up towards heaven as Divine angels were going up and down on it.” (Genesis 28:12) Angels in Jacob’s dream go up from the Land of Israel and go down throughout the world.

Top image: Rembrandt inspired cyberangels arrive from Israel at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in time for lunch at the Terrace Cafe.  The biblical words for angel and food are spelled with the same four Hebrew letters to teach that angels are spiritual messages arising from everyday life. Perhaps there is spiritual significance that museums that offer art also offer food.

Second image: The cyberangels begin their virtual flight from the Israel Museum's Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem, home of ancient Bible scrolls. They gain momentum by going up from the tallest building in Israel, the 91 story Azrieli Spiral Tower in construction in Tel Aviv with the shape of a Bible scroll.

Third image: Cyberangels spiral up from a NASA satellite image of the Land of Israel on a smartphone screen on the cover of Mel Alexenberg’s latest book Through a Bible Lens.  They launch the book throughout the world from the artist/author’s studio in Israel. See praise for the book at Israel365.

Bottom image: This experimental mixed media artwork by Mel Alexenberg was exhibited in the “The Second Emerging Expression Biennial: The Artist and the Computer” exhibition at the Bronx Museum of the Arts in New York in 1987-88. 

It creates a visual dialog between a hand-drawn etching, photoetching, and computer-generated etchings based on a Rembrandt drawing in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art that placed Alexenberg’s print in its collection. It was also acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in 1987.