Artists

Paul Claude Gardère was a Haitian mixed-media artist who received artistic training at The Art Student’s League of New York (1960-63) and graduated from 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, maintained his primary residence in Brooklyn, NY, and became an American citizen in 1991.​

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 collection of un-exhibited works. He remains a well-respected, yet lesser known American artist of Haitian origin in the canons of global contemporary art.