Discipline: Visual Art

Boris Margo

Discipline: Visual Art
Region: Lido Beach, NY
MacDowell Fellowships: 1955
Boris Margo was a Ukrainian painter who received his American citizenship the 1940s. Best known as a painter of surrealist imagery. He enrolled at the Polytechnik of Art at Odessa, and received a grant to study at the Futemas (Workshop for the Art of the Future) in Moscow. A second grant enabled him to study the work of the old masters in the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad and to attend Pavel Filonov's Analytical School of Art in 1927. In 1928 Margo received a certificate from the Polytechnik and immigrated to Montreal, where he worked as a muralist for a year. Moving to New York City in 1930, he studied at the Roerich Museum and two years later began teaching there. He began experimenting with celluloid and acetone in his printmaking and was also an early user of the decalomania technique in oil painting. Margo founded a Creative Art Seminar (later called Artists Gallery) in Orlando, Florida, and a year later established a similar venture in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Margo's first solo exhibition was at the Artists Gallery in New York City. Other important shows were held at the Brooklyn Museum, the Tweed Gallery at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, and the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery in New York in 1993.

Studios

Star

Boris Margo worked in the Star studio.

Funded by Alpha Chi Omega, a national fraternity founded in 1885, Star Studio — built in 1911–1912 — was the first studio given to the residency by an outside organization. To this day, Alpha Chi sorority pledges learn the story of Star Studio and its role in supporting American arts and letters. Beginning as a nicely proportioned…

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