Email
Print
FeedBaroway: Big Apple bound
Malcolm Baroway at his home in Eastmoor.
Jeffry Konczal
A New York City art show will mark a milestone in Malcolm Baroway’s surprising second act. The group exhibition with several other emerging artists (scheduled for later this year at Manhattan’s Agora Gallery) will introduce the retired Ohio State University communications director’s vivid paintings to the most important art market in the world. In fact, the process already has begun, with the gallery offering several of Baroway’s pieces for sale via its website at up to $6,000 a pop.
Moreover, the show is a homecoming for Baroway, a New York native. Growing up in Queens, he was selected based on his artistic talents to attend New York’s prestigious High School of Music and Art. But his parents decided the two-hour commute on bus and subway was too much for a 13-year-old boy to handle and sent him to his neighborhood school instead.
After high school and college, Baroway focused on writing and public relations, working in both the private and public sectors. His artistic gifts lay dormant until the 1970s, when he started to take art classes again at Ohio Wesleyan, his then employer. He continued with more classes at CCAD later on, but didn’t begin painting seriously until about a dozen years ago, right before he retired from Ohio State, where he served under three presidents during his two-decade career and wrote a university-sanctioned book about Gordon Gee’s first tenure.
His initial shows were at the Ohio State Faculty Club and the Roy G Biv Gallery (a gig he got when a gallery board member saw one of his paintings on display at a friend’s house). His greatest champion has been Short North gallery owner Sharon Weiss, who saw his Roy G Biv show and has been promoting his work since. Baroway estimates he’s sold at least 160 paintings, with galleries in Boulder, Colorado, and Asheville, North Carolina, displaying his work.
The great European post-impressionists (Van Gogh, Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso) influence his paintings, Baroway says. “A lot of my stuff comes out of my memories and my mind, as opposed to painting a landscape by standing out there and looking at it,” he says.
At 74, he finds amusement at being considered a “newly discovered artist,” but he’s excited about the possibilities the New York show might mean toward his second career. “It’s important, if you’re trying to get a name beyond Columbus,” he says.
