Robert Joseph Horvitz – 50th Reunion Essay

Robert Joseph Horvitz

Slavikova 11

Prague, 120 00 Czech Republic

horvitz@volny.cz

fixed: +420 222 967 456, mobile: +420 775 024 705

Spouse(s): Biljana Horvitz (1993 to present)

Child(ren): Alexandar (1994) and Leon (2001)

Education: Yale 1969

Career: Two tracks: visual art (esp. drawing) and wireless communications

College: Davenport

Five hundred words is not a lot to cover 50 years of life: 10 words per year.

I majored in art at Yale, winning a Carnegie Teaching Fellowship in my senior year, so I stayed for a year after graduation to be a teaching assistant in Yale’s Art Department. Then I taught art at Phillips and Abbot Academies in Andover, Massachusetts, but left after a year to concentrate on drawing fulltime. I had two solo shows in 1972, at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and the Akron Art Institute. I started writing for Artforum in 1973 but quit in 1977 to protest the publisher’s firing of the editors. In 1974 I started teaching media history and contemporary art at the Rhode Island School of Design. After quitting Artforum, I became art editor of CoEvolution Quarterly, a magazine started by Stewart Brand of Whole Earth Catalog fame. I worked with Stewart and his team until 1991 when I moved to Prague, but that’s getting ahead of the story.

I taught at Yale again in the spring of 1979, a college seminar on contemporary art. My contract was about to be renewed when my mother’s fight against cancer deteriorated and I took care of her until she died in 1981. During that period, I was able to visit Bulgaria for four months as field curator of the first US government sponsored exhibition of contemporary art to visit that country. A life-changing experience, I brought a shortwave radio with me and saw how much it meant to the Bulgarians to have access to unfiltered news—and how much Americans needed that kind of access, too. So when I got home, I threw myself into shortwave broadcasting, learning all I could about radio physics and technology and the policy issues that determine who gets to use which frequencies for what purposes. “Spectrum politics” became my beat as I started reporting regularly for Radio Netherlands’ World Service. Meanwhile, my contributions to Whole Earth’s magazines expanded from artists’ portfolios to radio.

As communism started to sputter in the late 1980s, I was hired by Internews, a nonprofit using modern communications to reduce political tensions, to help reform radio and TV broadcasting in post-communist countries. George Soros then hired Internews to help his foundations assist new broadcasters in Eastern Europe with training, equipment grants, program exchanges, etc. To do that work I moved to Prague in 1991 (where I still live) and after a few years switched from broadcast development to expanding Internet access in the region. I married an architect from Serbia and we had two sons. Now I’m producing studies for the European Commission on radio spectrum policy and last year advised the Republic of Georgia on harmonizing their radio laws with European norms to facilitate accession. I still draw (and teach drawing at Prague’s Anglo-American University). I will show my work at the San Francisco Art Institute as part of the Whole Earth Catalog’s 50th anniversary celebration in October 2018.