Yvonne Jacquette

Galaxy of Night Lights (2008)

Yvonne Jacquette was born on December 15, 1934 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and grew up in Stamford, Connecticut. She attended the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence from 1952 to 1955, when she moved to New York City. She continues to live and work in New York City, as well as in Searsmont, Maine.

A flight to San Diego in 1969 sparked Jacquette’s interest in aerial views, after which she began flying in commercial airliners to study cloud formations and weather patterns. She soon started sketching and painting the landscape as seen from above, beginning a process that has developed into a defining element of her art. Her first nocturnal painting with an aerial perspective, East River View At Night (1978), inspired an ongoing exploration of the effects of bright lights, reflections, and indistinct objects set against surrounding darkness.

The city of New York is a special focus of Jacquette’s. In the 1980s and 1990s, she chartered planes from Teterborough Airport in New Jersey to circle the city while she sketched the scene below. She has also worked from the Empire State Building, and, from 1974 through early 2001, often used empty offices or an enclosed deck at the World Trade Center.

Jacquette has painted aerial landscapes across the country, as well as city views in San Francisco, Chicago, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Vancouver, Tokyo, and most recently, New Orleans. After a trip to Hong Kong in 1990, she began incorporating composite viewpoints into her work, realizing that she could better express the city’s many layers of complexity by creating new spatial configurations through multiple perspectives. Since then, she has continued to base her paintings on pastels made from direct observation, while frequently enlivening compositions through heightened color, repetition of certain elements, and manipulation of light, scale, and perspective. As she approached the rendering of space with greater freedom, her paintings became both more inventive and disjunctive, combining aspects of observation, memory, and imagination. 

Jacquette participated in her first group show in New York City in 1962 and has been exhibiting steadily since. In 1965 she had a one-person exhibition at Swarthmore College, PA. In 1983, the St. Louis Art Museum organized her first major museum exhibition. A comprehensive retrospective, Aerial Muse: The Art of Yvonne Jacquette, originated at the Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University, CA in 2002 and traveled to Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, ME; Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City; and the Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, NY. In 2008, the Museum of the City of New York organized Under New York Skies: Nocturnes by Yvonne Jacquette, which was shown concurrently with Street Dance, an exhibition of photography by her late husband, Rudy Burckhardt.

Jacquette’s work is included in the collections of over 40 museums, such as the Brooklyn Museum, NY; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

EDUCATION

  • 1952-56 Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS

  • 2019 Yvonne Jacquette: Daytime New York, DC Moore Gallery, New York, NY

  • 2016 Yvonne Jacquette: Paintings 1981-2016, DC Moore Gallery, New York, NY

  • 2015 Yvonne Jacquette; Aerials, Seraphin Gallery, Philadelphia, PA

  • 2014 Yvonne Jacquette: The High Life, DC Moore Gallery, New York, NY

  • 2010 Yvonne Jacquette, Aerials: Paintings, Prints, Pastels, Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockport, ME

  • Yvonne Jacquette, DC Moore Gallery, New York, NY

  • 2009-10 Yvonne Jacquette: The Complete Woodcuts, 1987 – 2009, Mary Ryan Gallery, New York, NY
    Springfield Art Museum, Springfield, MO

  • 2008 Picturing New York: Nocturnes by Yvonne Jacquette, Museum of the City of New York, New York, NY
    Yvonne Jacquette, DC Moore Gallery, New York, NY

  • 2006 Yvonne Jacquette: Arrivals and Departures, DC Moore Gallery, New York, NY

  • 2005 Yvonne Jacquette: Paintings and Works on Paper, Springfield Art Museum, Springfield, MO

  • 2003 DC Moore Gallery, New York, NY

  • 2002-03 Aerial Muse: The Art of Yvonne Jacquette, Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University, CA; Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, ME; Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City, UT; Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, NY

  • 2000 Yvonne Jacquette - Evening: Chicago and New York, DC Moore Gallery, New York, NY

SELECTED COLLECTIONS

  • The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY

  • American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY

  • The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY

  • Museum of the City of New York, New York, NY

  • Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY

  • Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, ME

  • The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY

  • The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH

  • Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, ME

  • Detroit Institute of Arts Museum, Detroit, MI

  • Farnsworth Museum & Library, Rockland, ME

  • Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY

  • Library of Congress, Washington, DC

  • Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS

  • 2019 Infinite Blue, The Brooklyn Museum of Art, NY

  • Slab City Rendezvous, The Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, ME

  • 2018 New England Now, The Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, VT

  • 2017 The American Dream, Drents Museum, Assen, Netherlands
    Silent Stories: Space as Narrative, Concord Center for the Visual Arts, MA
    Painting the Visible World: American Women Realists, Bernarducci Meisel Gallery, New York, NY
    The American Dream: Pop to the Present, The British Museum, London, United Kingdom
    New York, New York, Nassau County Museum of Art, Roslyn, NY
    Dust on Butterflies’ Wings, A Pastel Invitational, Jerald Melberg Gallery, Charlotte, NC
    Painted Landscapes, Heritage Museums & Gardens, Sandwich, MA

  • 2016 Boundless Nature: Real and Imagined, DC Moore Gallery, New York, NY
    Masterworks on Paper, Portland Museum of Art, ME
    Differing Views: Rackstraw Downes, Richard Estes, Yvonne Jacquette, Andrew Lenaghan and Rod Penner, George Adams Gallery, New York, NY

  • 2015 Edith Schloss (1911-2011): Myths and Mountains, A Retrospective, Sundaram Tagore Gallery, New York, NY
    Maine Collected: Contemporary Selections from the Permanent Collection, Bates Museum of Art, Lewiston, ME
    Multiverse, DC Moore Gallery, New York, NY
    Marks Made: Prints by American Women Artists from the 1960s to the Present, Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, FL

  • 2014 The Annual 2014: Redefining Tradition, National Academy Museum, New York, NY

  • 2013 Impressions: Selections from Stewart & Stewart, 1980 to Present, Ann Arbor Art Center, Ann Arbor, MI
    Maine Women Pioneer Exhibition: Homage, Art Gallery at University of New England, Portland, ME

  • 2012-2013 The Female Gaze: Women Artists Making Their World, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA

  • 2012 Paved Paradise, DC Moore Gallery, New York, NY

  • The Annual: 2012, National Academy Museum & School, New York, NY Forms of Realism, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, PA

  • 2011 Remembering 9/11, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT

  • Island Press: Three Decades of Print Making, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University, St. Louis, MO

  • 2010 Couples: Parallel Journeys, ART in Embassies Exhibition, United States Embassy, Tel Aviv, Israel
    Paintbox Leaves: Autumnal Inspiration, Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, NY
    Oblique/Acute, Brattleboro Museum and Art Center, Brattleboro, VT
    Neither Model nor Muse: Women as Artists, The McNay, San Antonio, TX
    Paintbox Leaves: Autumnal Inspirations, Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, NY

John Danoshereandthere