The Art Renewal Center® (ARC)

The Art Renewal Center® (ARC) is a United States-based 501(c)(3) non-profit educational foundation founded in 1999 by Frederick C. Ross, dedicated to leading the global revival of realism in the visual arts. ARC's core mission is to promote a return to skill-based training, standards, and excellence in the visual arts, upholding the rich artistic heritage of 2,500 years of accumulated knowledge in traditional, realistic image-making, and providing responsible scholarly opposition to the Modernist art establishment's rejection of technique, standards, and timeless aesthetic values.

In terms of academic resources, ARC hosts the world's largest online museum dedicated to representational art, featuring tens of thousands of high-resolution images spanning the Old Masters, 19th-century academic painters, and 21st-century contemporary realists, alongside an encyclopedic online art reference library of historical texts, artist biographies, scholarly essays, and technical studies — serving as an authoritative resource for scholars, educators, artists, and collectors worldwide.

ARC is also the world's foremost and only vetting and accreditation service for representational art schools, rigorously evaluating curricula and the quality of both teacher and student work before conferring the ARC Approved School™ designation. The organisation further administers an annual scholarship programme distributing over $30,000 each year to students attending ARC Approved Schools.

The ARC Salon Competition is ARC's flagship initiative and the largest and most prestigious international competition for realist artists in the world today, encompassing eleven categories across painting, sculpture, and drawing, with thousands of entries from artists across more than one hundred countries in each edition. The live exhibition of winning and finalist works has been presented at prestigious venues including Sotheby's New York, Sotheby's Los Angeles, the European Museum of Modern Art (MEAM) in Barcelona, and the Salmagundi Club. ARC Co-Chair and Chief Operating Officer Kara Lysandra Ross serves as a juror for the Le Venezie International Watercolor Festival and has established a dedicated nomination award for the current edition.