Heart-Pumping Art

by Wrexie Bardaglio

The artist in his studio

High-energy artist Mitchell Schorr '94 makes high-energy public art in a high- energy city.

"I paint life," says Mitchell Schorr '94, "in every aspect, from violence to happy days, from abstract to figurative." And he does, producing works about the World Trade Center attacks and other violent acts, pieces that spoof our obsession with pornography, and works about places, like Cuba, that intrigue him.

"I am focused," says Schorr, "but focused on 25 things at a time. I use thick paint, layering it on, and it doesn't dry that fast. I don't have time to let each painting dry, so I get more going. The way I work is part of the growth of my style. If I like what I am doing, I'll take it into several other series."

When the World Trade Center attacks occurred, Schorr had been working on a series using photographs from national and international newspapers that depicted violent incidents. As he and his father watched the attacks from a window on the 51st floor of a nearby building, a television in the room depicted the horror in real-time as well, an experience he describes as surreal. His cathartic paintings of firemen struggling through dense smoke, buildings exploding, and flags flying from bridges and overpasses have become part of Schorr's work on the violence that he recognizes as so much a part of life.

"YMCA," from the Freeze Frames series	"A Day at the Races," a mural in New York City's Sarah D. Roosevelt Park

But violence is not Schorr's only theme. His work is influenced by music and film, everyday events, and cultural concerns. "I did a series called Porn Star for the 2001 Winter Music Conference in Miami," he says. "I noticed that Internet magazines would put a red dot or a blue circle or something on a nude body part, to blur it in some way. I found it amusing because it only served to make the picture kind of dirtier than it really was. So I started painting pictures of women and men and putting red stars all over their private parts, and used ads that said 'barely legal' and plastered stars all over them, just to underscore how goofy our attitudes about pornography really are."

Schorr has produced several large commissioned projects at various sites around New York, his hometown. "Because I grew up here, I was always going to come back. I love the pump, the heart of the city," he says. "When I lived in Ithaca and even in Florence, everything just sort of stopped at 1:00 a.m. I knew I needed the energy of New York City."

New York has fueled Schorr's work, and in turn the city has benefited from his art. An early experience, Schorr recalls, led to his abiding interest in public art. "Once when I was six or seven, my mom was taking me to a birthday party and we were down in the subway. I remember being absolutely mesmerized by the graffiti all over. But in the next couple of decades the city wiped it all out, and they wiped out all the murals as well. So when I came back I went in search of making public art again, making images that would fit the environment."

Like a method actor, Schorr has been known to live the role of his subjects by immersing himself in the space where the art is going to live. In 1999 the city commissioned him to do a large mural with a sports theme. Three walls of varying heights provided the canvas. "When I saw the space for the first time," Schorr says, "I was reminded of grandstands. I took a ton of pictures and went home to think about it. One night I had a dream about Belmont Park, and when I woke up I started drawing horses. I hadn't ever drawn horses before, but I went to the site every day and started running back and forth among the three walls to get the feeling of the motion of horses running. I was able to convince the city that I could do this mural of horses at the racetrack. From far away the mural looks like one piece, but then as you walk towards it, it appears that the horses are running. I had taken a course in animation at Ithaca College, and it really helped me here."

Schorr painted his first large outdoor mural for the city in 1996, in a rundown area where not much was happening except drug dealing on the corners. "While I was working on the project," he remembers, "the neighbors thanked me and brought me coffee and food. Even though it was just a piece of artwork that they saw as they walked to work, it mattered."

What mattered to him most was that his art was being shared with the community. "One of my friends said, 'More people are seeing your mural painted on a building wall in their neighborhood than some old master's painting hanging in a museum.' I'm not creating art just for rich patrons," he continues, "and I feel like sometimes a museum is intimidating and keeps people out."

Schorr has mounted numerous solo exhibitions in New York and Miami. He has had pieces in many group exhibitions in galleries in New York City; Ocean Beach, New York; Ithaca (including the College's Handwerker Gallery); Florence; and Stratton, Vermont. In addition to commissioned pieces for the city of New York, his work has been purchased by Pfizer. He has artwork as well in the collection of the New England Museum for Contemporary Art in Brooklyn, Connecticut.

Schorr studied at the Carnegie Mellon School of Art in Pittsburgh and the Lorenzo de Medici Italian Institute of Art in Florence. After receiving his degree in art from Ithaca College, he spent a year at the New York Academy of Art. Schorr's passion for his art includes a passion to share it with others. He loves to have people visit him in his studio or at his exhibitions. His CubanVisions show opened on a rainy, humid night and featured a Cuban band and rum drinks, evoking the very place itself. Schorr remembers when a passerby peeked in but hesitated to enter. " 'Come on in,' I said. The guy paused and then said to me, 'But I can't buy anything.' I told him, 'That's okay -- come on in, and maybe this will put a smile on your face.' I don't really care about people buying. I'm trying to create an atmosphere where people can hang out, chill out, and see art happen."

For this confident, high-energy New York artist, living in the place that inspires him, the assertion that he "paints life" resonates with the way life happens in New York City -- and the way he lives his own.