NEW YORK, NY.- New York City’s famed High School of Art and Design presents an exhibition of paintings by renowned artist and distinguished alumnus Ronnie Landfield entitled Where it All Began celebrating the opening of their stunning new Skidmore Owings and Merrill designed building. The exhibition will take place in the school’s ground floor Kenny Gallery at East 56th and 2nd Ave in Manhattan and will be open to the public Monday through Friday 1-5.

In 1960, at age 13, Ronnie Landfield was in the first class of students to begin their high school studies in what was then the “new” High School of Art and Design which opened that year. Now he is back celebrating a new building for the school which is “where it all began” for him.

Since then Bronx born Landfield has had over 60 solo exhibitions around the world. His work is included in the collections of more than 40 museums and public collections including MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.

His career started at the High School of Art and Design when he helped create a backdrop for a show several dance and theatre students put together at the East Village’s Rodale Theatre. He had his first exhibition of paintings in the basement of the theatre during the run of the show. He was 15 years old.

Landfield who is represented by New York’s Stephen Haller Gallery was the youngest of the youthquake generation of American artists of the 1960s. Considered a part of New York art history, he is included in the New Museum’s Bowery Artist Tribute. During the nearly five decades of his career Ronnie Landfield has stayed true to his course as a painter of soaring veils of color. Louis Zona, Director of the Butler Institute of American Art, wrote: “To stand in front of a Landfield painting is to be transported into a world where color feeds upon color and every inch of the canvas is considered…Ronnie Landfield is, pure and simple, one of the best painters in America.”

New York’s High School of Art and Design is known for having launched the careers of celebrated artists in diverse practices: Eva Hesse, Tony Bennett, Calvin Klein, Art Spiegelman, Harvey Fierstein, Amy Heckerling, Marc Jacobs, Terry Winter and so many others. Ronnie Landfield is proud to return to the school where he started and celebrate another new beginning.