Tom Knechtel

Faculty, Undergraduate Fine Art

Biography

Tom Knechtel received his MFA and BFA from the California Institute of the Arts and began teaching art history in 1981. He joined ArtCenter in 1995 and became full-time in 2002, teaching in both the Fine Art and Illustration programs.

“Our students establish a fluid sense of themselves as artists first, medium-specific second,” says Knechtel. “Many of our students make film, paintings, sculpture and digital art interchangeably and simultaneously, depending on the idea they want to embody.”

His work was represented in On Wanting to Grow Horns: The Little Theatre of Tom Knechtel, a mid-career survey that traveled the country in 2002. In addition to numerous solo and group exhibitions since 1975, his work is in the public collections of the Berardo Collection, Sintra Museum of Modern Art, Portugal; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Orange County Museum of Art, California; and Long Beach Museum of Art, California. Among his awards and fellowships are the MacDowell Colony fellowship, the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant, the City of Los Angeles Individual Artist Fellowship and the California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists.

Knechtel is in preparation for three shows that open in the fall of 2016, including I Stand in the Mess of My Self at Marc Selwyn Fine Art in Beverly Hills.