Alexis Rockman:Conflagration

Alexis Rockman (b. 1962) is an artist and environmental activist who began making paintings and works on paper to build environmental awareness in the mid-1980s. Notable solo museum exhibitions include Alexis Rockman: Manifest Destiny at the Brooklyn Museum (2004), which travelled to the Wexner Center for the Arts (2004) and the Rhode Island School of Design and Addison Museum (2005).

In 2010 the Smithsonian American Art Museum held a mid-career survey Alexis Rockman: A Fable for Tomorrow, which toured to The Wexner Center for the Arts. His series of 76 New Mexico Field Drawings was included in Future Shock at SITE Santa Fe (2017-18). Alexis Rockman: The Great Lakes Cycle, a major exhibition of 5 large-scale paintings, eight large scale watercolours and field drawings, toured the Midwest in 2018-20, opening at the Grand Rapids Art Museum and travelling to five other institutions in the Great Lakes region. Alexis Rockman: Shipwrecks, opened at the Peabody Essex Museum (2021) and travelled to Guild Hall (2021), Ackland Art Museum (2022), and Princeton University Art Museum (2022). In May, 2023, The Mystic Seaport Museum presented Alexis Rockman: Oceanus, featuring ten large-scale watercolours and an 8-by-24-foot panoramic painting commissioned by the museum for their permanent collection. Mark Dion and Alexis Rockman: A Journey to Nature’s Underworld was presented at the Bruce Museum, Greenwich, CT in Summer 2023 and will travel to the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, The Tang Teaching Museum and other institutions in 2025.

Rockman’s work is held in the collections of The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Brooklyn Museum; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art; Grand Rapids Art Museum; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; New Orleans Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Smithsonian American Art Museum; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; and Whitney Museum of American Art. He lives and works in Connecticut.