Andrew Raftery

Andrew Stein Raftery (born May 22, 1962, in Goldsboro, North Carolina) is an American artist and educator, known for his paintings, burin engravings, and drawings on fictional and autobiographical narratives of contemporary American life.

Biography In 1984, Raftery earned his B.F.A. degree in painting from Boston University, and took his first intaglio printing class with . In 1988, he completed his M.F.A. degree in printmaking from Yale University. He credits Stanley William Hayter and his proteges in Atelier 17 as an influence, and the collection of Charles Randall Dean as a guide, before its acquisition by the Library of Congress. Raftery helped contribute to the 2009 publishing of the RISD Museum exhibition catalog, The Brilliant Line: Following the Early Modern Engraver, 1480-1650 alongside Emily J. Peters and Evelyn Lincoln (of Brown University). His major works in this period were the portfolios Suit Shopping (2000–2002) and Open House (2004–2008).

In 2009, he was elected as an academic member of the National Academy in New York City. From that year until 2012, Raftery assisted in research at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the wear of engraved copper plates through printing, necessary for more confident dating of historical prints; this required using a traditional hammered copper plate and lozenge-shaped burin for the first time in his career.

Awards Raftery has earned many awards including the Fritz Eichenberg Fellowship in printmaking, narrative engraving project from the Rhode Island State Council for the arts in 2001, Louis Comfort Tiffany Award in 2003, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2008. British Museum, London, United Kingdom; Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.; Fleming Museum of Art at the University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont, U.S.; Fogg Museum at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York, U.S.; Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas, U.S.;