Press Releases

April 5, 2004

Special Reception and Talk With Helen Harrison on Thursday, April 15
Art Critic To Speak on the Works of Abstract Expressionist Herman Cherry at 5 p.m.

Contact:
Patricia Conway
631-287-8313

Southampton, NY - Art critic Helen Harrison will speak about artist Herman Cherry's later works at a special reception slated for Thursday, April 15 at 5 p.m. in the Southampton College Avram Gallery. Cherry's paintings are on view in the Gallery until April 30.

Helen Harrison and Regina Cherry in front of Herman Cherry's painting, Fan 1989-1900.

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."

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.

Cherry who passed away in 1992 at the age of 83, was active on the national art scene for more than sixty years. Highly esteemed within the artist communities of New York City and the East End of Long Island, he was a contemporary of the vanguard Abstract Expressionists, including Jackson Pollock, Willem deKooning and Franz Kline.

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 several corporate collections. 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 the current show at Avram.

The talk is sponsored by the John P. McGrath Fund of Long Island University. Call Gallery Director Beth Giles for more information, (631) 287-8234.