TAWA at 45
The Exhibition
Mel Leipzig
Shirley Turner, Senator; and her Daughter
acrylic on canvas, 2023; 36h” x 36w”; Courtesy of the Mel Leipzig Trust
Mel Leipzig was one of the original TAWA members and was instrumental in working on several key events for many years. He was a professor at Mercer County Community College from 1966-2013, where he taught painting and art history. Painting in acrylic paint on large canvases, Leipzig is known for painting artists and influential and everyday people from the Trenton area. He paints directly on the canvas and uses a bold range of color and combines various representations of the environment that is associated with the person or persons he is portraying.
Leipzig received a Fulbright Grant to Paris (1958-59), a Louis Comfort Tiffany Award (1959-60), and four grants for painting from the New Jersey Council on the Arts (1982, 1986, 1992, 2002). In 1980 he was the first recipient of the Mercer County Community College Distinguished Teacher Award, Gold Medal, and in 1996 was one of the last individual artists to receive a grant in painting from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2000 and 2002 he received awards for his paintings from the National Academy, NYC. His works are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Academy Museum, and the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York City. In New Jersey his paintings are in the collections of the New Jersey State Museum, the Montclair Art Museum, the Morris Museum, the Noyes Museum, the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Museum at Rutgers, and the Jersey City Museum. In 2003 the American Academy of Arts and Letters purchased his painting, “Bernarda Shahn” and donated it to the Springville Museum of Art in Utah. In Pennsylvania his paintings are in the collections of the Woodmere Art Museum and the Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania, which purchased his painting “Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.” In Provincetown, MA his painting “Selena Triff” is in the collection of the Provincetown Art Association and Museum.