January 18, 2011 | LaGuardia Community College
Long Island City, NY—In celebration of African American Heritage Month, LaGuardia Community College is hosting an art exhibition featuring 18 watercolor paintings of Richard Yarde, one of America’s great watercolorists, from February 2 through the 26th.
The exhibition features two of Mr. Yarde’s collections. One of the collections, “Picturing a People,” comprises nine of the artist’s early watercolors of African-American heroes who rose to fame in the decades leading up to and through the Civil Rights era, including Martin Luther King, Jr., Paul Robeson, Josephine Baker, Sweet Daddy Grace and Bessie Smith.
The other nine watercolor paintings are from his Savoy Ballroom Series, which celebrates the Harlem-based institution and its patrons who transcended the racial and social divides of their day. The Savoy Ballroom, which opened in 1926, was a mecca for the big bands and an incubator for such dances as the Lindy Hop, the Flying Charleston and the Jitterbug Jive.
The large-scale paintings will be on display in the E-building (fifth floor) at 31-10 Thomson Avenue, Long Island City. For more information, please call (718) 482-5985. There will be a reception, which is open to the public, on February 2 from 5:30 p.m. to 7 p.m.
The 72-year-old artist shares the distinction of being one of the country’s most accomplished watercolorists with such well-known artists as Winslow Homer and Edward Hopper. In 1996, The Boston Globe journalist Christine Temin wrote, Yarde, “has become one of the great American watercolorists of the 20th century as much a master of the medium as Homer was in the 19th century.”
These early works on display on the College all share elements that have become his signature—irregularly shaped rectangles of monochrome color that are stitched together to define form and space. For example, Mr. Yarde’s large-scale watercolor of Josephine Baker, with its layered backgrounds of irregular yellow and richly textured browns and the use of the white of the paper as a formal art element, is an example of his characteristic aesthetic vocabulary.
Mr. Yarde explained his process. “I start with the idea for an image which will resonate strongly in me. I construct it from a fragment of the whole. Because many of my images grow so large, I often work flat on the floor. I establish a palette, often from the memory of a color in a dream. I arbitrarily apply an irregular rectangle of color and then I respond to that until the surface is covered. The grid of irregular rectangles is really my main vocabulary. I try to get the negative space to read as positive space. I come back in later and paint figurative elements. Working this way gives me a lot of flexibility.”
In 1977 when several of his watercolor paintings from this African American heroes series were exhibited at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer wrote, “…there is no doubt of his mastery here. In this medium at least, he is completely in control. Watercolor requires precision of feeling and touch, and Mr. Yarde has it. And this medium also elicits his real powers of pictorial invention.”
His paintings hang in the permanent collections of nearly three dozen art institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Smithsonian Institute, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.
Mr. Yarde, who was born in Boston to emigrant parents from Barbados, West Indies, began using watercolors at the age of seven while attending art classes at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. He received his BFA and MFA from Boston University. He has taught at a number of prestigious universities in New England, and is presently teaching at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.
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Located in Long Island City, Queens in New York City, LaGuardia Community College, part of the City University of New York, is a nationally recognized leader among community colleges. Founded in 1971, the College is recognized as an innovator in educating students who are under prepared for college work and/or are not primary English speakers. A catalyst for development in western Queens and beyond, LaGuardia serves New Yorkers and immigrants from 153 countries through over 50 majors and certificate programs, enabling career advancement and transfer to four-year colleges at twice the national average. Visit www.laguardia.edu to learn more.
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