Michael
Hafftka

Michael Hafftka born in 1953 on
Riverside Drive in Manhattan. Shortly after I was four, my family moved to the Marble Hill section of the Bronx. My father, Simon Hafftka, and mother, Eva Hershko, were refugees from Europe and survivors of the Holocaust. My father and his cousin Alexander Hafftka were the only survivors of a large family whose great uncle was Dr. Waldemar Mordecai Haffkine (the scientist who developed the vaccine for Cholera). Much of my understanding of the world came from my perception of my parents’ wartime experiences. A strong desire for freedom was among the host of determining factors and experiences that later brought to bear on my becoming an artist.
Hafftka’s art is in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Carnegie Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, Marion Koogler McNay Art Museum, and other museums in the United States and around the world. In 1986 his work was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, NY. Housatonic Museum of Art, Connecticut, mounted a major retrospective of his large paintings in 2005 with a monograph by Professor Sam Hunter, curator of the Jewish Museum. Yeshiva University Museum at the Center For Jewish History presented a comprehensive show of old and new works in 2009. Hafftka’s series of Kabbalah Zohar paintings were shown at the Mizel Center for the Arts, Denver, Colorado in 2010. Chapman University, Orange, CA, mounted a solo show of Hafftka Aleph-Bet, which is in the Phyllis and Ross Escalette Permanent Collection, in 2012. Hafftka has been collaborating with poets and writers, most notably William Gass and Tom Sleigh, which were published in The Yale Review and Blackbird. Hafftka’s work has been written about extensively by art historian and curator Professor Sam Hunter, Princeton, and John Caldwell NYT critic and SFMOMA curator.
In 2021 Hafftka joined the digital art world and has become a leading artist in that community.