Max Ferguson was born 1959 in New York City and is an American artist best known for his realistic paintings of vanishing urban scenes in and around New York City. Ferguson did hand-drawn animated films as a teenager, eventually graduating from New York University with a degree in film in 1980. However, while spending a year at an art school in Amsterdam when he was 19, Gerrit Rietveld Academie, his interest switched from film to painting. After only a few months there, the City of Amsterdam purchased one of his works.

Inspired by Edward Hopper, 17th-century Dutch genre painting, and the Old Masters, he produces studied paintings in oil or watercolor on canvas or wooden panels. Equally interested in the iconic and the overlooked, he has immortalized Katz’s Delicatessen and Central Park, as well as shoe repair shops and subway platforms. Ferguson had also created portraits of his father, whom he began painting in 1982 and continues to honor through his art years after his death. Ferguson’s work has been widely exhibited since the 1980s, including public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Arkansas; The British Museum, London; the Museum of the City of New York, and the Albertina Museum, Vienna. He has also exhibited at the Yeshiva University Museum, New York.