The Outside From Within: Envisioning Forest and Sea

The Rider University Art Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of drawings, water colors, and prints by Harry I. Naar, professor of Fine Arts at Rider University’s Westminster College of the Arts, entitled “The Outside From Within: Envisioning Forest and Sea” Thursday, March 8 through Sunday, April 15. An opening reception is scheduled for Thursday, March 8 from 5 to 7 p.m.

On Thursday, March 22 at 7 p.m. Judith K. Brodsky, distinguished professor emerita and founding director of the Brodsky Center for Innovative Print and Paper at Rutgers University, will have a conversation with Professor Naar in the gallery followed by audience questions and answers.

“Harry I. Naar’s art work consists of landscapes that enable the viewer to experience a visual excitement beyond the depiction of the scene, through an appreciation of pure marks of ink and watercolor,” Brodsky wrote in the exhibit catalog. “These powerful, inventive, highly skilled drawings … are very much of the 21st century. Provocative and poetic, they propel our encounter with the dualities of fantasy and reality, interior and exterior worlds, domesticity and sexuality, and representation and abstraction that are emblematic of film, television and fiction in the early 21st century.”

Born in New Brunswick, N.J., Naar received his BFA from the Philadelphia College of Art (now University of the Arts) and his MFA from Indiana University. Since 1980 he has been professor of Fine Art, director of the Rider University Art Gallery and curator of the collection for Rider University’s Westminster College of the Arts. He has exhibited in numerous one-person and group shows throughout the country in such venues as The Corcoran Museum of Art, The Canton Art Institute, The High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Boca Raton Museum of Art, The New Jersey State Museum and the USSR Artists Union Gallery in Moscow.

His work is included in numerous public and private collections, including The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Museum at Vassar College; The New Jersey State Museum; The Newark Art Museum; The Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University; The Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts in Lyme, Ct.; Johnson and Johnson Corporation; Bristol Myers Squibb; the American Council on Education in Washington, D.C. and Capital Health Systems in Hopewell, N.J.

In 2009, he was one of 30 artists selected by The American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York for inclusion in its Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts. The Academy also awarded him the Hassam, Speicher, Betts and Symons Fund Purchase Award.

Admission to all events is free. The Rider University Art Gallery is in the Bart Luedeke Center on the Rider University campus, 2083 Lawrenceville Road, in Lawrenceville, N.J. For further information call 609-895-5588 or the go to www.rider.edu/arts.