Michael Hafftka (American, b. 1953) is a figurative expressionist painter based in New York City whose work is held in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Brooklyn Museum, among others.,After fifty years as a painter, he turned to Web3 and uploaded roughly half his archive to the AI platform Hugging Face as training data.
He was born in Manhattan to Simon Hafftka and Eva Hershko, Holocaust survivors who had fled Europe, and was raised in the Bronx.,His first one-person show was at Art Galaxy, and his work was subsequently shown by New York galleries including the Rosa Esman Gallery, the Aberbach Gallery, the Mary Ryan Gallery and the DiLaurenti Gallery.The Housatonic Museum of Art mounted a retrospective of his large paintings in 2005, with a monograph by Sam Hunter, curator of the Jewish Museum.In 2009 the Yeshiva University Museum presented the solo show “I of the Storm”.He has also collaborated with poets and writers, notably William Gass and Tom Sleigh, in work published in The Yale Review.
His paintings, which he has described as “the record of a mind over time”, explore the inner life.His Kabbalah-inspired Zohar Works were shown at the Mizel Center for the Arts in Denver in 2010, and in 2012 Chapman University in California mounted a solo show of his Hebrew-alphabet series Hafftka Aleph-Bet, which entered the university's Phyllis and Ross Escalette Permanent Collection.He designed book covers for Urizen Books, including several novels by Michael Brodsky, and illustrated his own short-story collection Conscious/Unconscious, published by Six Gallery Press in 2007.
He has made work for Meme Lab, a 6529 project, including Memes Dream, minted in May 2024, and contributed Cypherpunk to the 2024 online exhibition “Whispers and Closed Doors”.,,He has framed the Hugging Face upload as “a new kind of catalogue raisonné”, a living record of his work made available for noncommercial AI experimentation. “I decided that I could best use my work as a huge dataset, because so many artists are reluctant to collaborate with AI, but I like the idea of doing that”, he said, calling artists' fears about copyright and usage rights naive.In 2025 his work was shown at Art Dubai through Plan X Gallery's digital program.
