ED ROTHFARB

JUNE 13 - JULY 12, 2026

Ed Rothfarb is an artist and art historian currently working on large-scale drawings exploring architecture, landscape and mapping, both real and imaginary. He employs a paper substrate composed of digital prints of the artist’s drawings depicting patterning in South Asian architecture. He then draws anew on this printed surface using pastel chalk and pencil. The patterning — sometimes revealed, sometimes obscured —- provides an under-structure to work with and against, setting up a complex dialectic pervading the finished drawing.

He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston / Tufts University and his M.A. and Ph.D degrees from The University of California, Los Angeles. Rothfarb’s work as an artist and art historian has been supported by fellowships from the Massachusetts Artists Foundation as well as the Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities, The Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts, the Saint-Gaudens Memorial Fellowship, The Pollock Krasner Foundation, the Penny McCall Foundation and the Asian Cultural Council Art and Religion Fellowship. He has two publications, In the Land of the Taj Mahal (Henry Holt, 1998) and Orchha and Beyond: Design at the Court of Bir Singh Dev Bundela (Marg Foundation, 2012) and has contributed to a third, Bundi Fort: A Rajput World (Marg, 2016) with an essay on early 17th-century wall painting.