Richard Alpert (artist)

Richard Alpert (born April 11, 1947) is an American sculptor, abstract filmmaker, and performance artist. He is also known for his work in "Generating Art" and received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Grant in Sculpture in 1979. In 1986 he was nearly killed in a fire that destroyed his studio and much of his artwork.

Career

Education

Richard Alpert was born on April 11, 1947 in Great Neck, New York. He graduated with an undergraduate degree in studio arts from the University of Pittsburgh in 1970, and an MFA in sculpture from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1973.

Career in the 1970s

In the 1970s Alpert's conceptual and performance art included the performance sculpture Strategy for a Dance; the video works Post Time, A Circular Route, The Opacity of Order, and Facture; the article and collection South of the Slot; the printed works Women: On Our Way and Stretch; and the performances Hand Generated Light,Probe,Finger, and Sylph. In 1976 Artweek Magazine described several of these works. They wrote that Hand Generated Light was created by Alpert locking himself in a closet for three hours cranking a manual electrical generator keeping a tiny light aglow on the outside of the door. The magazine described this work, as well as Spent Time, Spent Energy and Sylph by the term "Generating Art", whereby the subject of the work itself was the generation of the art being created. Another of his major works from this period of his career is Sound Sculpture.

Ram Dass

Ram Dass (born Richard Alpert; April 6, 1931) is an American spiritual teacher and the author of the seminal 1971 book Be Here Now. He is known for his personal and professional associations with Timothy Leary at Harvard University in the early 1960s, for his travels to India and his relationship with the Hindu guru Neem Karoli Baba, and for founding the charitable organizations Seva Foundation and Hanuman Foundation. He continues to teach via his website.

Biography

Youth and education

Richard Alpert was born to a Jewish family in Newton, Massachusetts. His father, George Alpert, was a lawyer in Boston, president of the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad, one of the founders of Brandeis University and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, as well as a major fundraiser for Jewish causes. While Richard did have a bar mitzvah, he was "disappointed by its essential hollowness". He considered himself an atheist and did not profess any religion during his early life, describing himself as “inured to religion. I didn’t have one whiff of God until I took psychedelics.”

Richard Alpert (Lost)

Richard Alpert is a fictional character played by Nestor Carbonell in the American ABC television series Lost. Alpert is introduced in a flashback of the character Juliet Burke (Elizabeth Mitchell), where he claims to be a doctor for a bioscience company called Mittelos Bioscience; he is later revealed to be a member of a native island faction called the Others, where he plays a role in the group's hierarchy that has been compared to that of the Panchen Lama in Buddhism by the series' producers. A major facet of the character is his seeming agelessness; he has been seen with a similar physical appearance both in the show's present events in the mid-2000s as well as flashbacks dating as far back as the late-1860s. Richard becomes mortal at the end of the series.

Originally introduced as a guest star in the third season episode "Not in Portland", Alpert reappears throughout the third season, both in flashbacks and present-day island events. In the spring of 2007, shortly before the conclusion of Lost's third season, Carbonell was contracted as a regular on the CBS television series Cane, which jeopardized his future on Lost. Nevertheless, the 2007–2008 Writers Guild of America strike resulted in Cane being cancelled and allowed Carbonell to return for the final three episodes of the fourth season and several in the fifth.

Richard Alpert (disambiguation)

Ram Dass (born 1931), formerly Richard Alpert, is an American contemporary spiritual teacher and author.

Richard Alpert may also refer to: