BERT YARBOROUGH
marked
april 02-may 04, 2022
This exhibit is a selection of works on paper selected from the archives of Yarborough’s
years of art making. All the work in the show is unframed. The size of the works varies.
There is no specific time period or theme to this show. It is a cross section of the mark making
and materiality Yarborough makes in his work.
Years of mark-making in a variety of mediums, across multiple disciplines, that include drawing
and printmaking, have honed Yarborough’s skills and given him the ability to allow engaged
play, chance and accident to have a major role in his work. He continues to let the process
of making, the liquid materials of gouache, ink, watercolor and paint, fuel his curiosity and
guide his search.
Curated by Susie Nielsen of Farm projects, Nielsen made visits to Yarborough’s studio in
Truro going through archival boxes and flat files. “I am sure we only touched the surface,
Bert is prolific. In some ways it doesn’t matter if I saw every piece he ever made, what I am
interested in is Bert’s range and how there is a constant thread through his work and how
that gets transposed.” writes Nielsen.
This project started when Nielsen and Yarborough created a book of his index/codex series;
eighty works on index cards he purchased at a yard sale in Provincetown thirty years ago.
Beginning in 2018, while moving his studio to Truro, he revisited the cards and has spent
the last five years intermittently working on. them. Yarborough and Nielsen compiled the eighty
drawings into one book. Yarborough believes they represent of the span of his mark making.
That began the conversation which became a show.
Bert Yarborough and Farm projects have been working on print and art projects for the last
03 years. Yarborough is represented by Berta Walker Gallery and will have an exhibition of
paintings there this summer.
Bert Yarborough has a degree in Architecture from Clemson University and an MA and MFA
in Photography from the University of Iowa. He held the Sonia C. Davidow ’56 Endowed
Chair in the Fine and Performing Arts at Colby-Sawyer College, New London, NH, where he
also served as the Director of the William and Sonja Carlson Davidow ’56 and Marian Graves
Mugar Art Galleries and taught Drawing and Painting. A former two-year Resident Fellow at
the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA, he served as Visual Arts Program Coordinator
for four years and is now serving as Chairman of the Visual Committee. He has received grants
in Painting and a Fulbright Fellowship to Nigeria, in Sculpture, and a Visual Arts Residency
Fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Umbria, Italy. He lives in Truro, MA.