Randall Lavender
Randall Lavender (born 1956) is a nationally and internationally exhibited American artist, writer, educator, and arts administrator who has worked in Los Angeles since the early 1980s. He led Otis College of Art and Design during 2019 and 2020, after holding academic leadership positions there for 15 years. His paintings and sculptures are included in numerous public and private collections. Life and education Lavender was born and raised in Southern California. His father was novelist and musical composer William Lavender; his grandfather was Viennese émigré composer and USC music professor Ernest Kanitz. Lavender studied art at the Riverside, California, Art Museum and at John W. North High School in Riverside, California. He attended California State University, Fullerton, where he studied ceramics and glassblowing with sculptor Jerry Rothman, earning a B.A. in Art in 1979. He completed an M.F.A. in Sculpture in 1981 at Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California, under mentor Roland Reiss. After graduate school, Lavender and his fellow student, sculptor John Frame, joined with architectural designer Eve Steele and artist/building contractor Lynn Roylance to develop a 14,000sf artists-in-residence project in the part of downtown Los Angeles that became known as the "L.A. art colony." In 1981, Lavender moved