BRATTLEBORO — After several successes in theater in high school, Scot Borofsky, a member of Brattleboro Union High School's class of 1975, started out studying theater in college.
He didn't like the environment and ended up quitting school.
“I was in a lot of plays after Fiddler on the Roof, but I left the theater pretty early on. It isn't the thing that defines me as a person,” he said.
After studying at Brandeis University with Peter Grippe, a well-known American Abstract Sculptor whose works can be found in museums around the country, Scot graduated from Rhode Island School of Design in 1981.
The following year he received the Max Beckmann scholarship, and was granted an art studio at the Brooklyn Museum.
“That took me down to NYC, where I moved into the East Village. In 1982, I got involved in the Street Art Movement. Over three years, I created around 30 outdoor murals, actually site specific installations, and I got a lot of work from that. That moved me into bigger galleries like Mokotoff Gallery and also into private collections,” said Borofsky.
He said after the stock market crash of 1987, “I left the city, met a Vietnamese woman and had two children. I've lived in Brattleboro for the last 19 years.”
Borofsky has provided his Brattleboro fans opportunities to see his work over the years, recently at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center in 2007, and on Flat Street, where he did the mural work that Arlene Distler reviewed in The Commons in 2007.
“I planned that mural for five years, and because of the building in the area, it lasted only about eight months,” he said sadly.
More recently, Borofsky has been working on murals in the lobby of the Barber building.
“I started with the murals 15 years ago, but they were getting old and also the lobby itself was being redone,” he said. “I made two murals in there, two of the most involved pieces of public art I've done. All the marble and oak were restored, and so I restored the murals too. I worked on them for a year and a half. We keep it open during Gallery Walk each month for viewing. ”
Meanwhile, Borofsky's art continues to be shown around the United States and the world. From The Museum of Oaxaca, Mexico, to the Arkansas Art Center, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, Borofsky is a well known artist who quietly continues to create beautiful, thoughtful paintings in his hometown.
Donna Borofsky, his mother, says Scot told her while he was painting the Barber Building murals, “I did Fiddler on the Roof for my grandfather, to remember him, and I'm doing the Barber Building murals so that my father will be remembered. His father told him he was proud of him for that.”