Randall Schmit
American Artist, primarily Painter and Collagist (born 1955)
Randall Schmit (born 1955) is a contemporary American artist of Luxembourger and first-generation Dutch descent, working primarily in painting.
Biography
Visual artist Randall Schmit was born in Newark, New Jersey, and grew up along the Mississippi River in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. After initial studies in architecture at Texas A&M University, Schmit began to paint, and was Studio Assistant to abstract colorist, Ray Parker (painter) during the late-seventies and early eighties in New York.
Schmit's calligraphic and buoyant abstractions first came to public attention in New York in the 1980s, where he exhibited extensively in the East Village, Manhattan. His first solo exhibition in New York was held in 1982 at Betty Cuningham Gallery on Prince Street in Soho; later exhibitions of the artist's work were held in East Village venues such as José Freire's fiction/nonfiction (solo exhibition, 1987), the Pyramid Club (1986), and Virtual Garrison (1985). Schmit's paintings were characterised as "loud, cartoonish" by critic Michael Brenson during this period.
Recent solo exhibitions have been in Hudson, New York at the David Bruner Gallery (2010) and at McDaris Fine Art (2013), both on Warren Street; and a (2014) solo exhibition in Woodstock, NY, at the Woodstock Artists Association Museum (W.A.A.M.) on Tinker Street.
The artist has lived and worked in the Hudson Valley of New York since the early 2000s.
Influences
In addition to the obvious influences of Surrealism and the mature New York School found in the studio of Schmit's mentor, Ray Parker—a colleague of Abstract Expressionists Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Michael Goldberg and others—the graphic influence of comics and contemporary 1980s East Village Graffiti artists is also seen in Schmit's early work.
According to museum curator Lowery Stokes Sims, Schmit has been "fascinated with cartoons, which have been a starting point in his early work, and has incorporated comic imagery into his work" since at least the early 1980s.
“Randall Schmit” enters the record as american Artist, primarily Painter and Collagist (born 1955). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Randall, Schmit and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16186883. VIAF identifies the subject as 68704547. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1955, 1982, 1987 and 1986.
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This entry incorporates text from “Randall Schmit” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.