Retrospective of Yvonne Jacquette's Art From On High, Open At Stanford University Through April 21, Begins National Tour

Business Wire, March 27, 2002

Arts and Entertainment Writers

STANFORD, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 27, 2002

The Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University presents the first retrospective of the work of East Coast artist Yvonne Jacquette through April 21. The exhibition, "Aerial Muse: The Art of Yvonne Jacquette," includes 43 paintings, drawings, and prints illustrating the development of the aerial view artist's landscape from 1975 to the present. "Aerial Muse," which is organized by the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, will travel to the following museums after it closes at Stanford: Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine (July 17-October 12, 2002); Utah Museum of Fine Arts in Salt Lake City (November 11, 2002-January 12, 2003); and Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, New York (February 7-May 4, 2003).

For the last 30 years, Jacquette (b. 1934) has represented the diverse places and spaces of the contemporary landscape. Jacquette has pursued a novel approach to picture making, discovering in the aerial vantage a modern perspective and fresh visual vocabulary. Jacquette has scrutinized a broad range of American regions and topographies, coast to coast and border to border -- from Maine and the Northeast to California and Oregon, from Minneapolis and Chicago to Texas -- as well as Tokyo and Hong Kong in the Far East. Drawing from the elevated position of high-rise buildings, commercial jets, and private airplanes, Jacquette has produced both daylight and nighttime views of cities and towns, factories and farmlands, and power plants, pastures, and woodlands.

Yet Jacquette is more than a recorder of the contemporary landscape: she is its interpreter and visionary. Her works combine elements of abstraction and representation, pattern and grid, surface and illusion, and observation, imagination, and memory. Whether she is hovering vertiginously above city streets and highways, floating serenely over the countryside, or soaring above towns, harbors, and monuments, Jacquette examines the relationships between the man-made and the natural, urban and rural, agrarian and industrial, and the worlds of power, labor, and leisure.

Diverse sources such as Impressionism, Pointillism, Precisionism, Abstract Expressionism, and Asian art have inspired Jacquette's paintings and works on paper. Photography, film, textile design, and other media have influenced her approach. However, her vision is highly personal, and her works are not categorized easily.

Over the course of her career, she has produced magical works that charm by their directness and dazzle by their color, light, and brushstroke. Her compositions take risks with perspective and employ devices such as rotation, repetition, and reversal, yet remain believable. Jacquette loves paradoxes and ironies and exploits them in her work. To achieve this goal she embraces a variety of contradictory tendencies -- her art is sophisticated and childlike, earthbound and heavenly, comic and grave, and ordinary and heroic. Careful scrutiny of her paintings and works on paper reveals several layers of interpretation.

The exhibition is accompanied by videos documenting Jacquette's career and a comprehensive 172-page catalogue co-published by Hudson Hills Press. The exhibition catalogue features essays by art critics Bill Berkson and Vincent Katz as well as the Cantor Arts Center's curator of modern and contemporary art Hilarie Faberman, the show's organizer. These essays consider Jacquette's career and her association with artists such as her colleagues Alex Katz, Red Grooms, Rudy Burckhardt, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, and Rackstraw Downes, who influenced her career. The catalogue includes more than 40 color plates and 100 black-and-white illustrations, a chronology, a bibliography, and a catalogue raisonne of more than 50 prints produced by Jacquette since the 1970s.

Works for this exhibition come from the Cantor Arts Center's collection as well as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Gallery, and important corporate and private collectors. The exhibition is made possible by the Cantor Arts Center's Contemporary Collectors Circle, Cowles Charitable Trust, and the Richard Florsheim Art Fund.

The Cantor Arts Center is open Wednesday-Sunday, 11 a.m.-5 p.m., Thursday until 8 p.m. Admission is free. Docents give free tours of "Aerial Muse" on Thursdays at 12:15 p.m. and Sundays at 2 and 3:15 p.m. through April 21. Tours do not require a reservation. To request tours for large groups, call 650/723-3469. The Center is located on the Stanford University campus off Palm Drive, at Lomita Drive and Museum Way. Call 650/723-4177 or visit the Center's web site at http://ccva.stanford.edu for directions or information about other free tours and exhibitions in the Center's 24 other galleries.