Andrew Raftery


Andrew Stein Raftery is an American artist and educator, known for his paintings, burin engravings, and drawings on fictional and autobiographical narratives of contemporary American life.

Biography

In 1984 Raftery earned his B.F.A. in painting from Boston University, taking his first intaglio printing class with Sidney Hurwitz. In 1988 he completed his M.F.A. in printmaking from Yale University. He is currently a professor at Rhode Island School of Design teaching in the printmaking and painting departments since 1991. He credits Stanley William Hayter and his proteges in Atelier 17 as an influence, and the collection of Charles Randall Dean as a guide, before its acquisition by the Library of Congress.
In 2004 Raftery's work was featured in Jonathan Weinberg’s book, Male Desire: The Homoerotic in American Art. Raftery helped contribute to the 2009 publishing of the RISD Museum exhibition catalog, The Brilliant Line: Following the Early Modern Engraver, 1480-1650 alongside Emily J. Peters and Evelyn Lincoln. His major works in this period were the portfolios Suit Shopping and Open House.
In 2009 he was elected as an academic member of the National Academy in New York City. From that year until 2012, Raftery assisted in research at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the wear of engraved copper plates through printing, necessary for more confident dating of historical prints; this required using a traditional hammered copper plate and lozenge-shaped burin for the first time in his career.

Awards

Raftery has earned many awards including the Fritz Eichenberg Fellowship in printmaking, narrative engraving project from the Rhode Island State Council for the arts in 2001, Louis Comfort Tiffany Award in 2003, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Award in 2006, John R. Frazier Award for excellence in teaching from RISD in 2007 and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2008.

Collections

His work is included in the public art collections of the select following;