Andy Robert Joins Bard College Faculty as Visiting Artist in Residence

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.—Bard College’s Division of Arts is pleased to announce the appointment of painter Andy Robert as Visiting Artist in Residence in the Studio Arts Program for the fall 2022 semester.

Andy Robert (b. 1984, Les Cayes, Haiti) is a painter who conceptually negotiates abstraction with recognizable imagery; his paintings wrestle between the lyrical and the concrete. In a play of content and form, Robert’s paintings draw from a breadth of historical and personal references, which enjoys the tinkering that comes with painting pictures. Andy Robert lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

“I want my paintings to feel like sketches—quick with the immediacy and intimacy of a rough draft, haptic but thought out in terms of their scale, detail and consideration. As with a thumbnail, my intuitive, beginning impulses, gestural marks of dry-brushing and scraping; of adding and removing of paint and line considered and preserved and valued throughout the painting as it approaches its finish, its resolve.”

Through experimentation he has arrived at a deeply personal and an inventive, deconstructive approach to painting that relies on the premise that images are to be bent and folded, taken apart and put back together again; and a belief that art is a philosophical means to look at and examine things—to question, test ideas, and engage with the world. And that in painting a picture something is being taken apart to put back together; there is an inherent risk in breaking it. 

A diasporic Haitian-American immigrant and painter, Andy Robert views the world critically as a contradiction of mass-communication and increased voicelessness. Interior and contemplative —like the telling of memory or that of a song, his topographical abstractions favor a wandering, poetic ambiguity, and a breaking free that is a strategic opacity abetted by his deconstructive application of paint, mosaic-like accumulations in assemblage, exhaust and come to.  

Recent solo exhibitions include Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2017). Significant group shows include MoMA PS1: Greater New York Exhibition (2021); Duro Olowu: Seeing Chicago, Curated by Duro Olowu, The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL (2020); Dirty Protest: Selections from the Hammer Contemporary Collection, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2019); The Beyond: Georgia O’Keeffe & Contemporary Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR (2018); and We Go as They: Artists in Residence 2016-17, Studio Museum in Harlem (2016 – 2017). 

Robert was a special gift recipient from The Estate of Pierre Guyotat (2021); the recipient of the Benny Andrews Fellowship for the MacDowell Residency in Peterborough, NH (2020); a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant Recipient (2019); and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Roy Lichtenstein Award Recipient (2019). 

He was in residence at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture; Skowhegan, ME (2016); the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY (2016) and the Whitney Independent Study Program, New York (2015). His work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, NY, the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; The Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX; The AstrupFearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, Norway; and The University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Chicago, IL.

Andy Robert was recently named on the artist list for the 2022 edition of the Carnegie International, the United States’ oldest biennial-style show.

About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year, residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in more than 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 13 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 161-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.

This event was last updated on 07-11-2022

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