A new retrospective at The Cooper Union celebrates the life and work of the late Haitian, New York City-based artist Paul Gardère, who graduated from the School of Art in 1967. Installed over two floors of the historic landmark of the Stuyvesant-Fish House, Paul Gardère: Vantage Points includes more than two dozen works from the artist’s 40+ year career. The show is on view through June 6, 2025, marking the first time a Fish House exhibition has offered public hours.

Vantage Points delivers a loosely chronological, condensed version of Gardère's trajectory through a range of styles from the early 1970s to the late 2000s. Throughout this expansive body of paintings, mixed media works, and works on paper, there is a continuous thematic focus on the artist’s Haitian experience and Haitian culture, both in Haiti and in the diaspora. Gardère's work frequently focuses on the legacies of colonialism—often signified by recognizable works and artists from art history—but reconstructed through his own novel approaches with diverse materiality, form, and technique. Vantage Points presents Gardère as an artist simultaneously accessing the world through the differing lenses of his cultural triangulation: as a Haitian in the diaspora; as an American citizen who spent most of his life learning, raising family and even owning land in the US; and as an arguable, if unwilling, porter of French mores as a member of the Catholic, Francophone Haitian class. In his reflections on colonialism and global history, on art making and visual culture, and on his own lived experience, Gardère channeled conflicts in his work, both inner and historical, that remain powerfully affective.

View the exhibition photo gallery.

The retrospective is presented courtesy of the Estate of Paul Gardère with coordination by School of Art Dean Adriana Farmiga and Assistant Dean Yuri Masnyj.