Paul Gardère: Vantage Points

Paul Gardère: Vantage Points celebrates the life and work of the late Haitian, New York City-based artist and School of Art alumnus Paul Gardère. The retrospective includes more than two dozen works from the artist’s 40+ year career and is currently on view in the Stuyvesant-Fish House through June 6, 2025. This is 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.

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.

Address: Stuyvesant-Fish House, 21 Stuyvesant St, New York, NY 10003. 
Hours: Thursday & Friday, 2–6 p.m. All other times by appointment only: artschool@cooper.edu  

Please note the exhibition will be closed and not available by appointment during President's Day weekend (February 14, 2025 - February 19, 2025) and during Spring Break (April 12, 2025 - April 23, 2025).

Installation images by João Enxuto / The Cooper Union. Works © The Estate of Paul Gardère

  • Founded by inventor, industrialist and philanthropist Peter Cooper in 1859, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art offers education in art, architecture and engineering, as well as courses in the humanities and social sciences.

  • “My feelings, my desires, my hopes, embrace humanity throughout the world,” Peter Cooper proclaimed in a speech in 1853. He looked forward to a time when, “knowledge shall cover the earth as waters cover the great deep.”

  • From its beginnings, Cooper Union was a unique institution, dedicated to founder Peter Cooper's proposition that education is the key not only to personal prosperity but to civic virtue and harmony.

  • Peter Cooper wanted his graduates to acquire the technical mastery and entrepreneurial skills, enrich their intellects and spark their creativity, and develop a sense of social justice that would translate into action.