Areas of research/creative activities: Mural painter, History of Mexican mural painting, public art, history of the modern public mural, post-1945
Born in Zimbabwe, Desmond Rochfort was brought up and educated in the United Kingdom; A graduate of both the Royal Academy of Art, as well as the Royal College of Art in London, he was trained initially as a painter at the Byam Shaw School of Art in London and then at the Royal Academy Schools at the Royal Academy of Art in London.
During his time in Britain before moving to Canada in 1990 he became one of Britain's leading public mural artists, and executed a number of the most important and well known mural commissions painted in Britain during that period.
In 1986 he received his PhD from the Royal College of Art in London for his pioneering research, conducted in Mexico and the United States, on the history of the Mexican Mural movement, and in particular for his work on the Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros.
Acknowledged as one of the leading international scholars outside of Mexico on the History of Mexican Mural Painting, Desmond Rochfort has traveled and conducted research throughout Mexico and the United States for the last 25 years on the History of the Mexican mural movement. His articles and books have been published in Europe, as well as the United States, Mexico and Australia. Translated into Spanish and Italian, his signature book, Mexican Muralists: Orozco. Rivera. Siqueiros, is now in its fifth printing and is widely used as required reading and as a textbook for Latin American cultural studies courses in Universities in the United States.. In September 2004 the Tsingua University in Press in Beijing published the Chinese translation and edition of the book. And in November 2006 he was invited by the Rockefeller Centre for Latin American Studies at Harvard University to deliver the Leventritt Lecture.
While living in the United Kingdom, Professor Rochfort curated, or was principle advisor and consultant to several major international exhibitions of Mexican Art held in the United Kingdom, including the first retrospective exhibition in Britain, held at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford of the Mexican muralist Jose Clemente Orozco in 1981, the landmark retrospective of Diego Rivera held at the Haywood Gallery in London 1987, as well as the exhibition of the work of Siqueiros held at the Whitechapel Gallery in London in 1997. He was also the principle advisor and consultant for the 1987 BBC Arena series TV documentary on the life and work of Diego Rivera. And most recently he was guest curator, consultant and advisor to the exhibition Viva Mexico! featuring the work of Diego Rivera held at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary in 2003
His research interest in the history of the Mexican mural movement has now been extended to include the wider arena of the modern public mural in general, in particular those movements and examples of the art form that have arisen from or are associated with radical or revolutionary political movements and social transformations.
Other recent notable exhibitions which he has curated and directed, include Lines of Site: Ideas Forms and Materialities an exhibition of printmaking from the graduate printmaking program of the Department of Art and Design at the University of Alberta, which was sponsored by Canadian Airlines and exhibited in London and Tokyo in 1998.
During his time in Britain, Desmond Rochfort taught at the Chelsea School of Art in London where be became the Director of the school's graduate program in Public Art and Design. In 1990 he moved to Canada to take up the position of Professor and Chairman of the Department of Art and Design at the University of Alberta. While at the University of Alberta he pioneered and introduced in collaboration with the Faculties of Engineering, Science and Business and Arts, a unique design degree that combined throughout the four-year length of the design degree, alternative "pathways" of intensive study for Design students in disciplines now intimately connected to Design practice, such as Computing Science, Engineering, Business and Marketing and the Social Sciences of Cognitive Psychology, Sociology and Anthropology.
In 1999 Desmond Rochfort accepted the position of President of the Alberta College of Art and Design.
In 2005 he took up the position of head at the School of Fine Arts, at the University of Canterbury, in Christchurch, New Zealand.
In October 2006, Professor Rochfort received an honorary professorship from Xianyang University in central China, where he had been invited by the Foreign Affairs Department of the city of Xianyang to deliver a series of lectures, advise and consult on an international collaborative mural project involving students and staff from the university's School of Art and Design.
