Jeff Litchfield is a visual artist who lives and works between El Paso, Rome, and New York.
He grew up in the desert — New Mexico and West Texas — and spent years trying to escape it. It took three decades elsewhere, watching the New York art world remake itself through the '80s and '90s and traveling through Europe, to understand what he'd left behind.
The desert wasn't desolate. It was clarifying.
He came back to it on purpose.
ROME
Litchfield studied painting at the University of Texas at Austin under Robert Yarber, with Peter Saul as a formative influence. In 1985, he sold his largest painting and his truck and moved to Rome. Using the city as a base, he worked through 3,000 years of Etruscan and Roman ruins, returned to the Vatican a dozen times, and made day trips to Florence and the Tuscan hill towns. He kept company with American architects and the French Prix de Rome scholars at the Villa Medici — where Galileo was confined during his trial — and lived the Grand Tour on a shoestring budget for a year.
NEW YORK
Back in New York, he settled in Williamsburg, Brooklyn — long before the neighborhood became what it is now — and stayed nearly seventeen years. He showed in group exhibitions at White Columns, 303 Gallery, Greenberg Wilson, and PS122; worked as studio assistant to sculptor John Newman; and was included in The New Era Space (1991), the Collins & Milazzo / Robert Gober survey that introduced Litchfield alongside Tony Feher, Robert Beck, and many others.
Those years were spent deep inside the institutional machinery of the New York art world: installing Richard Prince's Hoods and Matthew Barney's first exhibitions at Barbara Gladstone Gallery, and working at Paula Cooper Gallery, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Chase Manhattan Bank Art Program, the Mark Rothko Estate, Crozier Fine Arts, and Robert Miller Gallery. His view of art history is direct: the way to know it is to hold it in your hands and look.
At the height of the dot-com boom, Litchfield was Head of Production at a major web firm, overseeing art and programming departments for clients including Condé Nast Traveler, Cherry Coke, MTV, Clairol, and The Bank of New York. When the industry collapsed in 2001,
he turned fully back to painting.
EL PASO
After September 11, he returned to El Paso. He co-founded FORUM Arts & Culture — a 10,000-square-foot nonprofit exhibition and studio space in a former fire station — and curated its inaugural season. He has since curated exhibitions at the El Paso International Airport and El Paso City Hall, and has shown his work in New York, Amsterdam, Buenos Aires, Austin,
San Antonio, Houston, Dallas, and El Paso.
He paints full time in his El Paso studio. His current work focuses on the landscape of erosion — terrain that has been worn down, carved up, and left exposed by brutally indifferent forces.
You can contact him below.
Litchfield’s Art Resume