Biography

Auseklis Ozols is the founder, director and senior instructor at the New Orleans Academy of Fine Arts. He emigrated from Latvia, surviving ordeals in the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau as well as avoiding the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which would oppress his homeland.

After the horrors of World War II, he arrived in the New York area and devoted himself to the representation of beauty. He graduated from the oldest and most prestigious museum school in America, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, with highest honors. He also holds a B.F.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.F.A. from Temple University. He has been recognized with numerous pries from the National Academy of Design, the Museum of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and the New Orleans Museum of Art, which granted him the prestigious Delgado Society Award (with the museum purchase of a painting). His work is represented in multiple museums, university and government collections in the United States and abroad.

Ozols is one of the few living artists to have mastered each of the genres of landscape, still life, figure and portrait. His recent work expresses meditations on rebirth through the language of flora indigenous to New Orleans and the search for beauty in the changing landscape of the region.

Auseklis Ozols' has broadly influenced the artistic community of New Orleans is broad through his thirty plus years as an active painter, educator and highly sought after lecturer. His live demonstrations of classical technique echo the virtues of disciplines and approaches to art considered sacred during the Renaissance but largely forgotten today. His consistent contributions to the visual arts in New Orleans have given birth to an undeniable Realist movement in this city, concurrent with the Realist renaissance in other historic American art communities such as Philadelphia and New York.