Although born and raised in New York, Paul Brach became one of the most influential educators in Southern California in his role as the first dean at California Institute of the Arts, beginning in 1969. He was responsible for hiring such important faculty members as Allan Kaprow and John Baldessari, setting the conceptual tone for the school for the following decades. Brach himself studied painting at the University of Iowa, where he met his wife, artist Miriam Schapiro. His artwork during that time, and in the years following in New York, fell in line with the expressionist tendencies of his friends Larry Rivers and Robert Rauschenberg. During the 1960s Brach’s artistic explorations took a turn toward the meditative, and their subtle, reductive forms were spectacularly rendered by lithography.