The Collection

Tom Slaughter was an American artist, designer, and illustrator known for boldly colored paintings and prints that explored contemporary urban life and the simple pleasures of everyday objects through pure fields of color and graphic line. His work, often compared to that of Stuart Davis, Fernand Léger, and Roy Lichtenstein, blurred the boundary between fine art and commercial design.

Slaughter's career took off in the 1980s after he was discovered by influential curator Henry Geldzahler, who praised the "quality of freshness" and "the familiar world re-seen" in Slaughter's work. Over his career he had more than thirty solo exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Vancouver, Germany, and Japan, and worked as a printmaker in close collaboration with Durham Press for twenty-five years. Slaughter often referred to recurring subjects — sunglasses, bikes, boats, water towers — as his personal "icons," reducing them to their essential forms across paintings, prints, and illustration.

In addition to his fine art practice, Slaughter illustrated numerous children's books, translated into multiple languages, and worked for a decade as Art Director for the New Victory Theater. His prints are held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Slaughter lived and worked in New York City until his death on October 24, 2014.