Faculty Exhibition Features Professor Bert Yarborough

Colby-Sawyer will celebrate recent works by faculty members in the Fine and Performing Arts Department at the annual Faculty Art Exhibition. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, Feb. 1, from 5 to 7 p.m. at the William H. and Sonja Carlson Davidow '56 Fine Art Gallery in the Center for Art + Design. Following the reception, the exhibition will remain open through Saturday, May 5. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

The exhibition will showcase painting, drawing, sculpture, ceramics, photography and graphic design by Fine Arts faculty including Professor Loretta Barnett, Professor Jon Keenan, Assistant Professor and Technical Director Mike Lovell, Associate Professor and Chair of Fine and Performing Arts Hilary Walrod, as well as adjunct faculty members Nick Gaffney, Rachel Gross, Farah Rizvi-Doyle ’05 and Nancy Sepe.

This year’s featured artist is Sonja Carlson Davidow ‘56 Endowed Chair for the Fine and Performing Arts Professor Bert Yarborough, who is leaving academia at the end of the spring semester to return to his studio practice. Professor Yarborough has taught painting and drawing for more than 20 years at Colby-Sawyer. He has been director of the Marian Graves Mugar Art Gallery for the last five years and the director of the William H. and Sonja Carlson Davidow ’56 Art Gallery since its opening this fall. His retrospective, "Mini-Retro: Court No Horning," spans his career from 1969 to 2018 and features small works, sketchbooks and studio ephemera.

The title of Professor Yarborough’s retrospective was inspired by the Nigerian expression he came to know during a Fulbright fellowship in sculpture in Nigeria. (Signs read “Court No Horning” to prohibit noise from car horns outside of public buildings.) “That Fulbright was life-changing in the sense that I was introduced to a third-world culture and immersed in a tribal, cultural world while being exposed to amazing work, places and people,” Professor Yarborough said. “It was a seminal artistic experience that has continued to resonate through my work.”

In addition to his experience in Nigeria, Professor Yarborough was a resident fellow and Visual Arts program coordinator for the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Mass., where he serves as chair of its Visual Committee. He has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in sculpture, two grants from the New Hampshire Council on the Arts, and recently, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation awarded him a visual arts residency fellowship to Umbria, Italy.

“My many years in the landscape of the Province Lands National Seashore, and most recently my trips to Italy, have strongly flavored my work, and my attempts to merge these different artistic languages are ongoing,” Professor Yarborough said.

The retrospective will include works by other artists. “I wanted to include work by some of my friends, artists with whom I have collaborated, as well as postcards, photographs and other materials I have on my studio walls,” Professor Yarborough said. “It is an edited history that incorporates my work and examples of images, objects and work by others that has influenced and inspired me through the years.”

A Vermont resident, Professor Yarborough earned a degree in architecture from Clemson University and an M.A. and M.F.A. in photography from the University of Iowa. He is represented by McGowan Fine Arts in Concord, N.H., and was a founding member of artSTRAND Gallery of Provincetown, Mass.