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Paul Claude Gardère (b. 1944 - d. 2011) was a Haitian and American mixed-media artist who received artistic training at The Art Student’s League of New York (1963), and graduated Cooper Union (BFA Painting, 1967) and Hunter College (MFA Painting, 1972). He holds the distinction of being the first Haitian Artist-in-Residence at The Studio Museum in Harlem (1989-90), was awarded a residency at Fondation Claude Monet (1993) and received the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award for Painting in 1998, among other notable achievements. During his 40+ year career, he worked and exhibited in both the United States and Haiti, but maintained his primary residence in Brooklyn, NY.
Exhibiting vast technical and stylistic range, Gardère’s painting and mixed-media discipline realized diverse works and series, all of which investigate the phenomenology of racial and cultural relations (both conflict and syncretism) produced by Western imperialism and transnational migration in his native and adoptive countries. Drawing on history and symbology from Haitian, French, and US American cultures, Gardère’s work unites the national histories that informed his cultural experience and conveys the complex, often paradoxical multiplicities implicit in Afro-Caribbean diaspora identity and the post-colonial immigrant experience. His works simultaneously reflect his own inner tensions as well as the dynamics of power and cultural identity at play in global populations reckoning with histories of exploitation and forced acculturation to Eurocentric systems and values. During his lifetime, Paul Gardère received respected curatorial acclaim, particularly among academics and curators of Latin American and African diasporic art who recognized the thematic and symbolic references running through his work. Works of his reside in numerous institutional and university permanent collections. Despite institutional and curatorial acclaim, his career largely escaped recognition in the for-profit gallery economy of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. His sudden death in 2011 at age 66 left behind a formidable estate of un-exhibited works. He remains a lesser known American artist of Caribbean descent in the canons of Western contemporary art. |
the estate |
The Estate of Paul Gardère is managed by his daughter, Catherine (Cat), to protect the artist’s remaining body of work and promote his artistic legacy. Operating as Paul Gardère Studio out of the artist's studio since the 1970's in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, the estate employs a mission to preserve the artist's archive, to protect and place the artist's remaining inventory, to support cultural scholarship by making his materials available for research, to encourage curatorial challenge of historically dominant and colonialist paradigms, and to enhance dialogue in and about the global Haitian diaspora and Caribbean community. The estate focuses its activity on archive management, exhibition facilitation, institutional acquisitions, selective private sales, and support of rising global talent and historically marginalized and excluded voices in the art world.
To request a studio visit, please email [email protected]. Your inquiry will be personally handled and privately arranged when possible. |