Paul Gardère


Paul Claude Gardère was a Haitian-born, Brooklyn-based visual artist whose work explored "post-colonial history, cultural hybridization, race, and identity, in and beyond the Haitian diaspora." Gardère's work has been widely exhibited throughout the United States, including at institutions such as the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Figge Art Museum, Lehigh University, Pomona College Museum of Art, and the Jersey City Museum, and is included in a number of prominent institutional collections, including that of Thea Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Brooklyn Museum, the New Orleans Museum of Art, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The Milwaukee Art Museum, the Figge Art Museum, the Columbus Museum, the Beinecke Library at Yale University and the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University.

Education

Gardère studied at the Art Students League of New York from 1960 to 1961, and at Yale University summer school of music and art in 1966. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from Cooper Union School of Art and Architecture in 1967. He earned his Master of Fine Arts degree from Hunter College in 1972. He was an Artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Jamaica Arts Center, Long Island University, and completed a 5-month residency at Monet's Gardens in Giverny, France on a grant from the Lila Acheson Wallace Foundation.

Background

Gardère was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti in 1944. He emigrated to New York City in 1959. While studying at Cooper Union School of Art and Architecture in New York, he developed a personal style that blended "Haitian regionalist ideas, painting styles, and cultural symbols" with "the larger aesthetics of Modern art". His work is heavily informed by "religious and mythological symbolism," which he saw "as a way of metaphysical bridge building between cultures, drawing inspiration from the Old Masters and European Catholicism as well as Haitian regionalism and Vodou."

Select exhibitions