Mel Pekarsky  Mel (Melvin H.) Pekarsky (born September 18, 1934 in Chicago, Illinois) is an American artist and art educator. He is best known for his paintings and drawings of the desert, and is recognized by art critic Donald Kuspit as "one of the most significant contemporary landscape artists." A professor of art at the State University of New York at Stony Brook for forty years, Pekarsky's work has been shown by the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Fogg Museum of Art at Harvard University, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Butler Institute of American Art, among many other venues. The son of Inda Levin and Abe Pekarsky, who owned a haberdashery, he attended public school in Gary, Indiana. While in high school, he studied weekends at the Saturday School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he began his undergraduate studies in 1951, transferring the following year to Northwestern University, where he received his B.A. in Studio Art in 1955. He completed his M.A. in Art History there in 1956, writing his thesis on "The Drawings of Jean-Francois Millet", while teaching studio art at Northwestern's Chicago campus. Pekarsky moved to New York City in 1956, joining the staff of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, then under the directorship of James Johnson Sweeney. He also began PhD studies at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts in the fall of 1956, but was soon called up to military service, serving in the US Army Combat Engineers. During this period he spent time training in Texas mesa country, his "first face-to-face meeting with the southwest desert." Returning to Chicago after military service, he was asked to start the Art Department at Kendall College in Evanston, IL. During this period (1960–1967), Pekarsky showed with the Devorah Sheman and John L. Hunt Galleries, with "Artists of Chicago and Vicinity" at the Art Institute of Chicago, among other venues, and in Exhibition Momentum, from which work was selected by the US Information Agency to travel in an exhibition of American art in France and Germany. During this period he also worked as an illustrator, and produced a number of children's books ("The Curious Cow", "The Little Red Hen", and others) before returning to New York in the fall of 1967, accepting an appointment as assistant dean at the School of Visual Arts.