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Archie Rand’s The Seventeen: Iron Flock is a multi-canvas mural depicting seventeen biblical women that encourages conversation about the diverse roles women play in Jewish history and religion. Rand sees Iron Flock as “a grouping of Jewish heroes who are women, appearing in an underreported story that should have a painted monument sampling the collective.”

Produced for the sixth Jerusalem Biennale, themed “Iron Flock” (Tzon Barzel in Hebrew), in the Spring of 2024, Rand draws on this phrase from the Mishnah that declares the inalienable assets that women bring to a marriage. A more contemporary interpretation views women themselves as assets to the Jewish people, and it is this praise that inspired Rand’s paintings.

Mining Midrash and Apocrypha, Rand fleshed out stories about lesser-known biblical figures to be viewed in concert with the readily recognizable. He presents the women in intriguing new ways amid a kaleidoscope of imagery derived from myriad sources. These include comics and pulp magazines, children’s book illustrations, and classic American and Italian films, among other unlikely visual precedents.

Instead of providing text to clarify the visual, he leaves it to the viewer to parse out the works’ meanings, in a shift from his previous body of work. Rand intends for viewers to be pulled into the loosely painted canvases on their own terms. The only textual allusion is a tiny label nearly hidden within each canvas, which nods to the subject matter and provides the title of each painting. Coated over with clear matte gel, those labels are placed a little off-center to, as Rand puts it, “add extra electricity to the works.”

Rand began by drawing the compositions and then activating them with color. Subtly suggesting Rembrandt’s lighting effects with a yellow glaze, intermingled with a vivid palette inspired by the early 20th-century Fauve artists, Rand harnessed these stylistic contradictions in an act of improvisational freedom. Such freedom of expression is inherent to Judaism’s spirit of tradition and change, and connects the style and subject of Iron Flock to Rand’s larger program of Jewish art.

Iron Flock continues Rand’s 40-year artistic enterprise exploring the Bible and Jewish texts in serialized paintings that are conceptually informed by twentieth-century culture. His prodigious productivity interpreting biblical subjects in the context of the secularized 21st-century art world has established him as a figure admired for relentlessly and consistently creating interest in postmodern art in Jewish subject matter.

Rand has had over 100 solo exhibitions and been included in more than 200 group exhibitions. His work can be found in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, and Victoria and Albert Museum in London, among many others.

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