Gilbert Adam Schoenbrod was born in Chicago on September 3, 1903, to parents from old Russia. His adolescence was split between Chicago and Texas, until 1916, when he moved to New York and attended Stuyvesant High School. After graduating, he attended New York University and majored in biomedicine, while working a diverse variety of jobs.  Schoenbrod tended the land of a New England farm, put in night hours on a shingle factory assembly line, oiled the locomotives in the roundhouse of New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad, and developed his sea legs on coal boats plying the North Atlantic coast and on freighters of South America (he would later take up sailing as a hobby). After completing his undergraduate work, Schoenbrod entered into the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University. While doing his coursework (specifically: mid-cadaver dissection), he came to the realization that his interest in the healthcare field lay on the side of health rather than in the training to use medications and invasive surgeries to “cure” disease. 

 

He left Columbia to explore a different path, one which led him to earning his first Masters degree in painting and sculpture from Yale University.  Equipped with this training, Schoenbrod was hired to draw movie ads for newspapers and design catalogs for Sears Roebuck & Co., among other patrons.  During this time, he met Florence Symington, his future wife and mother to their two sons, David and Jonathan. At the age of 40, Schoenbrod returned to Columbia to earn his second masters, this time in education. While engaged in his studies as well as teaching at the university, Schoenbrod began to study under a master Arabian silversmith, Yussef Najjar, learning the art of lost wax casting. Schoenbrod designed jewelry for Georg Jensen, Sax Fifth Avenue, Lord and Taylor, American House and other fine jewelers of Boston and New York. 

 

In 1949, Schoenbrod relocated to Carmel, California with his family. In this artists haven he opened his first studio, Silver Studio, in the Court of the Golden Bough. By 1956, he had achieved success and material comfort, but now in his fifties, he experienced the negatives of advancing age in the form of arthritis and hypertension. Knowing within himself that there had to be more to life, and still with a passion for health, Schoenbrod knowingly induced a mental breakdown through starvation and overwork.  He saw this period as demonstrating the direct connection between mental health, what we choose to fuel the body with, and stress levels.  

 

He began drawing prior to his hospitalization, but at present none of that work has been catalogued. Those who saw the early work say that his initial style was vastly different; skillful and devoid of the spiritual components that became his signature. In a state of despair, he was committed to Agnews State Hospital in Santa Clara, California where he received electroshock therapy treatments three times a week for five months. During the last treatment he saw a point of light which he later concluded was “the opening into the dimension man has always sought and sometimes calls God.” He was instantly healed, and left the hospital with a new mission; from this point on Schoenbrod left the land of commercial art (closing his jewelry studio) and dedicated his life to explaining his concept of God through writing, painting, drawing, and sculpture (bas relief, metal and wood). 

 

Schoenbrod returned home a changed man. His experience had wiped many of his memories away; the roads looked unfamiliar, his jewelry crafting tools were foreign, and even his wife Florence was initially a stranger. Upon his return, Gilbert engaged himself in a detailed study of health of the mind, body and spirit.  One day, not long after his release, Schoenbrod was guided to follow footprints he encountered on the beach; the trail led him to a man “very well built; very spiritual.”  This man, Richard Talbot, introduced Gilbert to a disciplined excercise regimen which included the practice of yoga and meditation; Schoenbrod became his disciple and the duo worked together for years.  The tools and practices he garnered from his first spiritual teacher were instrumental in the development of what would become Gilbert’s dedicated physical ritual and ultimately his body of art work which was born out of the meditations he routinely engaged in. 

 

Schoenbrod’s new art was channeled from a deep meditative state at 4:30 every morning. As he sat in the pre-dawn stillness with his materials laid out beside him, the images would come; he used his pencils to draw what he inwardly saw. Each of his finished illustrations (drawings, watercolors, bas reliefs, etc) started as a 3” x 5” miniature drawing. During this time Schoenbrod also took up running, fencing, Aikido, and chopped wood daily. On the side of nutrition, Schoenbrod adopted a plant-based diet and developed a supplement he branded “Adam’s Food” to fill in any nutritional gaps created by eliminating animal products. He saw all signs of hypertension and arthritis disappear.  In the years directly following his “rebirth,” it is believed that a Jesus centered Christianity figured as Schoenbrod’s primary faith. Schoenbrod was baptized “Adam” by Father Emeric Doman in 1964; this is how he signed many of his pieces created after this time. Whatever his earlier thoughts on religion, most of his work is reflective of a deeply spiritual rather than religious nature and his view of faith was ultimately highly personal, universalist, and inclusive. 

 

While Adam was a quiet man content to stay in his creative chapel by the sea, he engaged in several public exhibitions of his work while living that sowed the first seeds of his consciousness out into the world. He was hosted by the Triton Museum of Art in San Jose on November 10, 1967; during this show he lectured along with a presentation of his work. He had a one-man exhibition at the de Saiset Museum and Gallery at the University of Santa Clara in 1971. It was at this event that the Smithsonian Institute was introduced to his work and subsequently recorded various paintings, drawings, and writings of his in their permanent archives (Eg. "Reality" and "Weary"—dry point etchings) . In 1972, Schoenbrod published his first text, a book of verse titled "Ecology of the Man Within" and was hosted by The Fireside Gallery in Carmel for a showing of his works. On his 70th birthday in 1973, Adam opened Adam’s Gallery in Carmel with the help of his friend Jean Thomas. This same year his work was featured at The Institute for Noetic Sciences. Schoenbrod’s last art show before he passed was held at the Institute of Noetic Sciences in San Francisco, December 1982. This same year he published for a second time releasing "The Anatomy of God and Man." 

 

The last years of his life were spent at his home on Asilomar Boulevard in Pacific Grove. Still as nimble as a man in his twenties, Schoenbrod spent his time climbing trees, bouncing around on the seaside rocks, giving horseback rides to his granddaughter Rachael, channeling his artwork before sunrise every morning, and continuing to add to his library of written texts. Adam left his body in Monterey, California at the age of 93. He is survived by his two sons, 4 granddaughters (Jamie, Suzanne, Stephanie, and Rachael), and 3 great grandchildren (Steven, Benjamin, and Lily). The collection in he left behind includes 50+ manuscripts filled with his insights and illustrations, 37 bas reliefs, roughly 260 large paintings/drawings framed in custom, built-by-Adam frames, hundreds of smaller works, as well as portfolios full of unframed gems. 

 

Gilbert Adam Schoenbrod used to say, “When the time comes for the work to go out, and if it is to go out, it will go out.” We, his family and custodians of his legacy, believe that time is now.