Press Releases

March 8, 2004

Paintings by Herman Cherry at College's Avram Gallery
Exhibit Curated by Regina Cherry; Special Reception with Art Critic Helen Harrison

Contact:
Patricia Conway
631-287-8313

Southampton, NY -Works by Herman Cherry, a contemporary of the vanguard Abstract Expressionists, will be on display in the Southampton College Avram Gallery from March 23 to April 30. Regina Cherry will serve as curator and art reviewer Helen Harrison will speak about his work at a special reception slated for Thursday, April 15 at 5 p.m.

Cherry, who passed away in 1992 at the age of 83, was active on the national art scene for more than sixty years. He was a contemporary of the vanguard Abstract Expressionists, including Jackson Pollock, Willem deKooning and Franz Kline, with whom he debated esthetics and other topics at New York's famed Cedar Tavern and The Artists' Club. In his early years, he trained with Thomas Hart Benton and Stanton McDonald Wright, traveled to Mexico to study murals, to Italy and France to study the works of contemporary artists, and continued on to Brazil, Peru and Spain.

He lived in Woodstock, NY, from 1945 to 1951 with members of the Art Students League. In 1976 he was invited to be a visiting lecturer in Germany, where he met Regina Kremer, a painter, who moved to New York where they later married.

Cherry's work is, amongst others, included in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Solomon Guggenheim Museum, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Worchester Museum, and the corporate collections of Pepsico, AT&T and IBM. He has emerged as one of the most gifted colorists whose complex repertoire includes a synthesis of line and tone, and form and gesture, which are evident in the later works selected by Regina Cherry for this show.

Harrison, director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in East Hampton and an art reviewer and feature writer for the Long Island section of the New York Times, has organized several exhibitions, one of which featured Cherry's work: "Paintings on Paper, Martha's Vineyard, 1956" for the Pollock-Krasner House in 2002. She will present a slide lecture on his later works.

Harrison once described Cherry as a "painter's painter," a term she said implied that ordinary mortals will neither like nor understand what he is up to. "It does him no disservice to acknowledge that, over the years, his most appreciative audience has been his fellow artists, partly because only a colleague would be fully aware of the intensity of his struggle with the purest problems of painting," she said in a 1984 "Arts" magazine article. "That he has now succeeded in resolving many of those issues in a manner that expands our consciousness of paint's possibilities, while appealing directly to the senses, belies any danger that he will remain of interest only to the specialist."

This event will afford the public access to this under-recognized artist, who is highly esteemed within the artist communities of New York City and the East End of Long Island.

The gallery is open weekdays from 12 to 5 p.m. or by appointment. Call Director Beth Giles for more information, (631) 287-8234.