Allan D’Arcangelo was an American painter and printmaker, born in Buffalo, New York in 1930. From 1957 to 1959, D’Arcangelo studied painting in Mexico City under the G.I. Bill with the modernist artist and critic John Golding. D’Arcangelo returned to New York in 1959, and by 1963, he established his notoriety as a Pop artist with his first solo exhibition in New York’s Fischbach Gallery where he showed his acrylic paintings of American highways and industrial landscapes. Throughout the 1960s, he continued to show and in 1971 joined Marlborough Gallery.

During D’Arcangelo’s five-decade career, the artist remained true to his unique interpretation of the modern American landscape, creating iconic, large-scale paintings of road signs, highways, and airplanes. Many of his works display deep perspectival vistas in a simplified, flat plane, the view as seen from the driver’s seat as one zooms along the seemingly never-ending American highway in most any state. Next came a series entitled Barriers, in which cropped, abstracted imagery of road barriers were superimposed over the on-point perspectival highway vistas.

D'Arcangelo also taught at prestigious institutions throughout his career such as Cornell, Brooklyn College, and the School of Visual Arts. In 1987-1988, D’Arcangelo received a Guggenheim Fellowship. By his death in 1998, D’Arcangelo was the subject of many solo exhibitions at such influential institutions as the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (Buffalo), and the Institute of Contemporary Art (Chicago), as well as in several group shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), the Hirshhorn Museum (Washington D.C.), and the Museum of Modern Art (New York).

His work is in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum (New York); the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York); the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis); the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris); and the Museum Ludwig (Cologne).