Sidney Hurwitz was born in 1932 in Worcester, MA. He graduated from Brandeis University in 1956 with a bachelor of fine arts and from Boston University in 1959 with a master of fine arts. Hurwitz attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1954, where he first learned to paint fresco. Years later, he was asked to teach fresco at the Skowhegan school where he was a resident faculty from 1966 to 1968 and in 1977. Later in his career, Hurwitz taught art at Wellesley College before going on to teach for over thirty years at Boston University. Two years after his summer at the Skowhegan school, in 1956, Hurwitz was selected to contribute frescoes for the South Solon Meeting House. Hurwitz’s two panels on the East wall frame the center fresco by Ashley Bryan. Bryan and Hurwitz worked on their frescoes the same summer and became close friends, often picnicking behind the meeting house on their lunch breaks. Printmaking became Hurwitz’s medium of choice. On a Fulbright scholarship at the University of Freiburg in Germany, Hurwitz began to study printmaking more intensively. In 1973, on a sabbatical leave in London, Hurwitz drew inspiration from Victorian urban architecture. His work today centers around industrial imagery, such as bridges and factories, in urban settings and consists mainly of hand-colored aquatint etchings. Hurwitz’s work is in the collections of museums and institutions worldwide and he is a member of the National Academy of Design.
—Emma Baker
- Cummings, Mildred H. South Solon: The Story of a Meeting House. South Solon, Maine: South Solon Historical Society, 1959.
- Stewart & Stewart. “Sidney Hurwitz.”