Featured Artist this week: Dawoud Bey

Dawoud Bey began his career in 1975 as a photographer and has since been shown in numerous institutions worldwide. Currently there is an exhibition of his series "Class Pictures" traveling around the country. "Class Pictures" is a series of photographs of high school students with accompanying statements by each student, which reveal Bey's uncanny ability to gain the trust of his subject, and portray their true selves. Dawoud Bey’s teenage subjects defy stereotypes of American youth during this complicated age. For Class Pictures, Bey photographed young people from all parts of the economic, racial and ethnic spectrum in both public and private high schools in Detroit; Lawrence and Andover, Massachusetts; Orlando; San Francisco; and New York City. Bey spent two to three weeks in each school. The resulting 40 color portraits are arresting both compositionally and psychologically.

"Class Pictures" has already been to nine venues including: Addison Gallery of American Art, Aperture Gallery, Weatherspoon Art Museum, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Contemporary Art Museum in Baltimore, Milwaukee Art Museum, Kresge Art Museum at Michigan State University, Emory University: Visual Arts Gallery, and is currently being shown at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia.

Dawoud will be giving a lecture on his work such as the "Class Pictures" Series Tuesday, November 2nd from 2-4pm in the MassArt Tower Auditorium, which will be open to the public.

Dawoud Bey, Sarah, 2003

Dawoud Bey's Harlem, USA Series (1975-1979) will be on view at The Studio Museum Harlem from November 11 - January 2, 2011. Visit their website for more information: Studio Museum Harlem

From October 5 - January 2, 2011 "Class Pictures will be on view at the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art at the University of Florida, Gainesville. The exhibition is made possible in part by the Harn Program Endowment. Aperture, a not-for-profit organization devoted to photography and the visual arts, has organized this traveling exhibition and produced the accompanying publication. In addition to these compelling individual portraits, this exhibition also features Four Stories, a ten-minute video Bey made of students in Detroit. The larger-than-life projection image with uncomfortably intimate, close-up images of four Detroit students talking about their lives, complements and contrasts the more classically composed still photographs and gives a different perspective on Bey’s work and how we read and understand his young subjects. 



Also view “Dawoud Bey: First-Year Florida Project” featuring up to 20 photographs of 40 UF students. Over an intense two-week artist residency in July, Bey made portraits of pairs of UF First-Year Florida students. They were from diverse backgrounds with different interests, but have been brought together by the commonality of their entrance into UF as the class of 2014. Each of the portraits is accompanied by a brief text written by the students about their hopes, dreams and fears as they embark on this important transition in their lives.

Dawoud Bey began his career as a photographer in 1975 with a series of photographs, “Harlem, USA,” that were later exhibited in his first one-person exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1979. He has since had numerous exhibitions worldwide, at such institutions as the Art Institute of Chicago, the Barbican Centre in London, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, GA, the National Portrait Gallery in London, and the Whitney Museum of American Art among many others. The Walker Art Center organized a mid-career survey of his work, “Dawoud Bey: Portraits 1975-1995,” that traveled to institutions throughout the United States and Europe. A major publication of the same title was also published in conjunction with that exhibition. “Class Pictures: Photographs by Dawoud Bey was published by Aperture in 2007. A traveling exhibition of this work toured to museum throughout the country from 2007 - 2011. In 2008 he completed “Character Project,” commissioned by USA Network and published by Chronicle Books in 2009.

Dawoud Bey, DeMarco, 2003

Bey’s works are included in the permanent collections of numerous museums, both in the United States and abroad, including the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, NY, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and other museums world wide. He has been honored with numerous fellowships over the course of his long career, including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2002) and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (1991).

His critical writings have appeared in publications throughout Europe and the United States, including High Times Hard Times: New York Painting, 1967- 1975, The Van DerZee Studio , David Hammons: Been There Done That            . He has curated a wide range of exhibitions at museums and institutions as well, including the Addison Gallery of American Art, Weatherspoon Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Wadsworth Atheneum, GASP (Gallery Artists Studio Projects) and the Hyde Park Art Center. His short form essays appear in a regular blog called “What’s Going On?” (www.whatsgoingon-dawoudbeysblog.blogspot.com)

Dawoud Bey holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from Yale University School of Art, and is currently Distinguished College Artist and Associate Professor of Art at Columbia College Chicago, where he has taught since 1998.

Featured Artist: John Goodman

John Goodman, Tremont Street 4x, 1978

Our most recent show with John Goodman was a group show, "Boston Combat Zone: 1968 - 1978" this past February with Roswell Angier and Jerry Berndt.  The show featured photographs by Goodman from early in his career, and was extremely well received both within the Boston community and beyond.  The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is opening a new show, Exposed next week, which will be running through April 17th, 2011 and features a photograph from the Combat Zone series.

Exposed comes to San Francisco from the Tate Modern in London. SFMOMA Exhibit

Five photographs from that series were recently added to the décor of Towne, a restaurant recently opened by Jasper White and Lydia Shire in the Hynes Convention Center in Boston's Back Bay. Towne Across the street from Towne at the Back Bay Social Club, another recently opened restaurant and bar, are several photographs from Goodman's Times Square Gym Series. BBSC

In an interview from Boston Magazine on December 10th, 2009, John very eloquently talks about his experience in the Combat Zone in the 1970s, when he took the photographs from the series:

"In the early 1970's I had my first photo studio in a skylit kitchen in "the Roof" of the old Bradford Hotel on Tremont Street at the edge of the Combat Zone. I had just completed studying photography with Minor White in Cambridge and was drawn to the relentless energy in urban streets both in Boston and in New York City. I always had a camera at the ready and it seemed as though my presence was for the most part welcomed.

I have always been interested in areas of transition, edge cultures, and the Combat Zone provided me with a window into a world of decadence set against relics, and artifacts of a much older Boston, a city that has always resonated with me.

The streets were energized, chaotic, and the small clubs that ran along Washington Street beckoned patrons with their provocative neon signs. It seems as though in our post Combat Zone era things have relocated to the internet but in 1975 - 1978 when I photographed there, the Combat Zone was in plain view, right out in the streets. It never slept."

After graduating from the University of Wisconsin with a BA in History, John Goodman studied with Minor White in Cambridge from 1972-1974. His work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, and the London Times.  John's photographs are in the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, Boston Public Library, The Fogg Art Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and SF/MoMA. He is on the faculty at the Art Institute of Boston and teaches at the Maine Media Workshops. Joyce Carol Oates reviewing Goodman's monograph The Times Square Gym  states that "John Goodman's camera, is not an instrument of detachment, analysis, or judgment, but an iris of an eye that is our own, dissolving ostensible barriers between object and subject." He is presently working on his next book.

John Goodman has had his work reviewed by several important authors such as this review by Joyce Carol Oates and Mark Feeny's review of the Combat Zone show at Howard Yezerski Gallery from the Boston Globe.

3 Artists featured this week: Rudolf de Crignis, Winston Roeth, Ulrich Wellmann

New show opening this week at Howard Yezerski Gallery!

Winston Roeth

PAINTING: Rudolf de Crignis, Winston Roeth, Ulrich Wellmann


October 15th through Novemember 9th, 2010


Opening Reception: Friday October 15th 6 - 8pm

Howard Yezerski Gallery is pleased to announce the upcoming exhibition PAINTING, which includes work by Rudolf de Crignis, Winston Roeth and Ulrich Wellmann.  The exhibition opens Friday October 15th and runs through November 9th. The three painters featured in the show use color and light as a starting point in their work and succeed in creating paintings that are both complex and unique. Through the development of their various techniques each artist creates a dynamic interplay between light and color, which expresses the inimitable emotions that color can evoke.

In the later part of his career the late artist Rudolf de Crignis focused on an investigation of ultramarine blue and gray, working to uncover the possibilities within these colors. De Crignis' ability to create delicacy through the layering of color is revealed in the ethereal depth created by the penetration of light through the seemingly planar surface of the works. By applying paint with a wide brush and methodically alternating horizontal and vertical brushstrokes with each layer, de Crignis creates an unexpected physical depth in his canvases.

Winston Roeth's personal fascination with color is evident in the reduction of his painting to its central elements of color, light and depth.  He finds depth in his work through the intensity of color, which defies the seemingly two-dimensional space of his geometric grids through the cool texture of the work's uneven surface. Roeth's grids also create a dynamism through the contrast of the intensely saturated panels, evoking a vibrant visual experience for the viewer.

The work of German painter Ulrich Wellmann offers yet another approach to color and its interaction with light and space. Choosing to work with only a few colors for each canvas, Wellman uses those colors to communicate with the viewer by creating energy and dialogue between the colors. The paint itself reveals the way the brush was used, adding another aspect to the movement within the work that seems to be off the canvas and into the space of the viewer.

Ulrich Wellmann

Rudolf de Crignis exhibited work at museums and galleries worldwide during his lifetime and his work has continued to be shown and praised since his death in 2006.  De Crignis has work in many collections both nationally and internationally including the Swiss National Library and the Busch-Reisinger Museum at Harvard University.

Winston Roeth has shown work both nationally and internationally since he began his career.  He has paintings in several public collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Panza Collection at the Palazzo Ducale in Sassualo, Italy and the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University.

Ulrich Wellmann has shown works in many prominent institutions including the Kunstmuseum in Bonn, Germany, the Galleria Nazionale dell'Umbria in Italy, the Sala de las Alhajas in Madrid, Spain, and the show "Minimalism Then and Now" 2000 at the Berkley Art Museum in Berkley, California.

Robert Feintuch: This week's featured artist!

Robert Feintuch

Robert Feintuch, who lives and works in New York, has shown his work nationally and internationally. He is a Senior Lecturer at Bates College in Maine where he teaches painting drawing and senior thesis courses.  He received his BFA from Cooper Union and his MFA from Yale University School of Art. Feintuch is a recipient of the 2008 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship to Assist Research and Artistic Creation, the Leube Foundation Fellowship in Austria, the Bogliasco Foundation Fellowship in Italy, as well as a Mellon Grant, a National Endowment for the Arts Artist Fellowship. 


Recently Robert Feintuch has changed his New York representation from CRC Gallery to Sonnabend gallery, a notable career move.  Robert Feintuch continues to be represented in Boston by Howard Yezerski Gallery.

Tomorrow night Thursday, October 7at  7:00pm  Feintuch will be giving an Artist's Talk at the School of Visual Arts Amphitheatre, at 209 E. 23^rd Street, on the 3^rd floor.

Cro-Magnon, 2005, oil polymer emulsion and pencil on canvas, 10' x 8'

Feintuch works in polymer emulsion and casein on honeycomb panels which gives his paintings a luminous, fresco-like surface. His unusual self-portraits depict himself caught in ridiculous situations that are reminiscent of cartoons or slapstick. In others he is seen from an unconventionally intimate viewpoint, asleep, with his back turned, exposed and vulnerable. Many of these images could be moments in a narrative sequence selected from quotidian, lived life. But the cropping and the stillness of the compositions, and luminosity of the color and light, make it clear that the images are metaphorically open and psychologically suggestive. These images deal with the transitory nature of experience, that which typically passes unnoticed. But when Feintuch stops it short, it makes for paintings that are simultaneously comic, serious and quietly monumental.

Sunset (3), 2003. Polymer emulsion on honeycomb panel, 34'' x 42.5''

Feintuch’s figurative paintings are part of an intermittent but continuing series of self-portraits that spans about ten years and functions both as autobiography and in broader metaphorical terms. Inspired by images from cartoons, photographs, and films, but firmly rooted in reality, the paintings deal with the transitory nature of experience, that which usually passes unnoticed. The intimate viewpoints and cropping, along with the "stillness of the compositions and the luminosity of color create an ongoing narrative sequence which is at once comic, serious", and quietly monumental. 

Welcome to Howard Yezerski Gallery Blog!

Welcome to Howard Yezerski Gallery Blog!

In our efforts to bring ourselves into the 21st century, Howard Yezerski Gallery has decided to start blogging! We'll be updating several times a week with a new artist and new art work each time. We want our readers to stay informed about the fantastic group of artists that we represent as well as news about events at Howard Yezerski Gallery and around Boston.


Visit our website to learn more about us!



Tonight at 460 Harrison Ave its First Friday with South End Open Studios. All the galleries and studios on Thayer Street will be open until 8pm. Currently at on view through October 12th at Howard Yezerski Gallery is Yana Payusova: Kunstkamera, come in and check it out!

Kunstkamera is a Cabinet of Curiosities museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. Cabinets of Curiosities were collections of objects whose categorical boundaries were yet to be defined. They were used as a way to preserve natural and human curiosities and rarities.  The Kunstkammer was regarded as a microcosm, a memory theater.  In the exhibition, Yana Payusova draws from her own cultural "memory theater" in creating works which give insight into her formative upbringing in the USSR.

Both playful and macabre, the paintings become complex overlapping visual narratives, embedded with symbolic elements. Interested in the cataloguing effect of human memory, and the way in which the mind alters and transforms remembered events, Payusova creates a series that visually combines time, space, memory and imagination in an attempt to recreate the sensations and observations that have shaped both her past and present. 

The artist acts as the curator of her memories: “observing and studying people and personalities… keeping mental notes and drawing sketches. Watching people’s body language and gestures”.

In the paintings these memories are brought back to life to play out “various scenarios, following their own internal logic and desires”.

Yana Payusova was born in 1979 in Leningrad, USSR. Classically trained as a painter at the St. Petersburg Fine Art Lyceé, she later immigrated to the US.   She received her MFA from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2006. Payusova exhibits both nationally and internationally, including recent venues at Galerie Caprice Horn (Berlin, Germany), DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Mimi Ferzt Gallery (New York, NY) and the International Center of Bethlehem (Bethlehem, Palestine).