Ray Pierotti, artist/composer
About Ray Pierotti
Ray is a full-time studio artist, composer, educator and curator. Born in Bountiful, Utah he has degrees from La Sorbonne and the University of Utah. He began his professional career in New York City where he maintained a full time artist studio in SOHO and served as curator and assistant to the Director of The Contemporary Craft Museum (1963-1969) (now known as the Museum of Arts & Design) and as Director of Regional Programming for The American Craft Council (1969-1976). He left New York when invited to direct the Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts and appointed professor of design at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (1976-1978). He subsequently founded the Sawtooth School of Visual Arts in North Carolina (www.sawtooth.org) (1980-87) and was invited to Georgia in 1987 to revitalize the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts & Sciences (www.hambidge.org) and also help develop and direct the Atlanta Museum of Design (1987-1992). He leads workshops in his unusual multi-layering/multi-medium process, curates exhibitions and serves on numerous arts related boards in the USA and abroad. He is catalogued in the Archives of American Art and in Outstanding Artists & Designers of the 20th Century. Over 800 individual works are included in over 220 corporate, private and public collections throughout North and South America, Europe and the Far East. In addition to maintaining his full time studio, he with his life partner, founded The Center for Arts & Rehabilitative Energies, a non-profit private foundation (www.shellmancenter.wordpress.com) (2012-present). He has had numerous solo exhibitions in museums and private galleries. His most recent one-person exhibition was at the Albany Museum of Art (www.albanymuseum.org) (2015). Over the past 20 years he has developed an art form he calls ‘pictumsonus”. As an artist/composer he has produced suite-like works that utilize both hands-on and digitized artistic applications. His earlier works can be viewed on www.raypierotti.com.