By Joellyn Duesberry
Located in Surfside, FL
Joellyn T Duesberry
Wall on Wharf Street, #513, New Orleans, LA
1976. Oil on linen
Dimensions: (Frame) H 50.5" x W 66.5". sight size 50 x 66"
Hand signed and titled verso
Joellyn Toler Duesberry (1944 – 2016) was a plein air landscape artist who worked in oils.
Joellyn Duesberry
American Landscape Painter Bridging Realism and Abstraction
Joellyn Toler Duesberry (1944–2016) was an American landscape, Plein Air, painter working primarily in oil, celebrated for canvases that hold realism and abstraction in deliberate tension. Born in Richmond, Virginia, on June 30, 1944, Duesberry developed an early, formative connection to the land growing up in rural Virginia, seeking out woods, creeks, and lakes as places of solitary refuge and sketching from childhood. Though she went on to earn two advanced degrees — graduating with highest honors from Smith College in 1966, followed by an MFA from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University — Duesberry is considered a self-taught painter, developing her singular style largely outside the classroom.
Mentorship Under Richard Diebenkorn
The defining turning point in Duesberry's development came in 1986, when she received an Individual Painting Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to study with the celebrated Bay Area painter Richard Diebenkorn. Though Diebenkorn's influence on her work was conceptual rather than stylistic, Duesberry often cited him as her most significant mentor, crediting him with instilling three ideas that shaped the rest of her career: that the abstract and the real are indistinguishable in painting, that the modernist exploration of all poles of expression should be pursued without timidity, and that an artist's compositional instincts are rooted in deep, often unconscious memory. Diebenkorn also encouraged Duesberry to take up monotype printmaking, a medium she embraced with passion and continued to exhibit alongside her paintings for the rest of her career, working for many years with Denver's Open Press. It was this period of study that prompted her move from Manhattan's Bowery to Colorado in 1985.
Exhibition History
Duesberry began exhibiting in New York City in 1979, eventually mounting ten solo exhibitions there, and was later represented by Tatistcheff Gallery and Graham Modern in New York, as well as Broschofsky Galleries in Ketchum, Idaho, among roughly seven galleries coast to coast. Major retrospectives followed at the Denver Art Museum (Joellyn Duesberry: Three Decades of Paint, January 2006) and the Century Association in New York, as well as a fifty-year retrospective at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, accompanied by the monograph Elevated Perspective (2011). In 1997, she received the Benjamin Altman Landscape Prize from the National Academy of Design, and from 1998 to 1999 she held a World Views residency with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, painting from studio space in the World Trade Center's North Tower — an experience that gave her body of work a lasting connection to Ground Zero following September 11, 2001.
Style and Legacy
Critics and dealers alike have noted that Duesberry's contemporary canvases echo the modernist masters John Marin and Milton Avery, sharing their bold color and their instinct for finding underlying geometric structure within the observed landscape. Her plein air practice took her across the American Northeast and West, particularly Colorado and New Mexico, as well as Italy and France, and she maintained a decades-long connection to the Colorado art scene after moving to Denver in 1985. In 2005, PBS produced a documentary on her life and work, Joellyn Duesberry: Dialogue with the Artist. She died on August 5, 2016, at age 72, following a long struggle with cancer. Her work is held today in the permanent collections of the Denver Art Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, the Smith College Museum of Art, the Yale University Art Gallery, and the Jundt Art Museum at Gonzaga University, among others.
Keywords: Joellyn Duesberry, American landscape painter, Richard Diebenkorn student, plein air painting, Colorado landscape art, Denver Art Museum collection, National Academy of Design Altman Prize, monotype printmaking, John Marin Milton Avery influence, World Trade Center painter, September 11 Memorial Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art collection, contemporary American realism, abstraction and landscape painting
She said that her paintings echo the work of John Marin and Milton Avery.
In 2005, a PBS documentary was made of Joellyn Duesberry's life, work, and creative process titled Joellyn Duesberry: Dialogue with the Artist.
Her works are held by institutions such as Metropolitan Museum of Art and Smith College Museum of Art.
Publications
1998: A Covenant of Seasons: Monotypes by Joellyn T. Duesberry, Poetry by Pattiann Rogers,
2011: Elevated Perspective: The Paintings of Joellyn Duesberry,
SELECT SOLO EXHIBITIONS
Elevated Perspective: The Paintings of Joellyn Duesberry, Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center
Joellyn Duesberry: A Passion for the Land, Leslie Levy Fine Art, Inc., Scottsdale, AZ
Joellyn Duesberry: A Passion for Western Land, William Havu Gallery, Denver, CO
Joellyn Duesberry Monotypes: Hidden Treasures, William Havu Gallery, Denver, CO
Joellyn Duesberry: Solace on Safari, Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe, NM
Tremaine Gallery, The Hotchkiss School, Lakeville, CT.
Recent Monotypes, James Graham & Sons, Madison Avenue, New York, NY
Joellyn Duesberry: Monotypes, Lizan-Tops Gallery, Easthampton, NY
The Garden Paintings, Robischon Gallery, Denver, CO
Joellyn Duesberry: Paintings, Tavelli Gallery, Aspen, CO
Joellyn Duesberry, Graham Modern, Madison Avenue, New York, NY
Joellyn Duesberry: Paintings and Monotypes, Carol Siple Gallery, Denver, CO
Joellyn Duesberry, Tatistcheff Gallery, New York, NY
SELECT GROUP EXHIBITIONS
Significant Women Artists, Curtis Arts & Humanities Center, Greenwood Village, CO
Finding Abstraction, Gallery 1261, Denver, CO
Rocks on Paper, Katharina Rich Perlow Gallery, New York, NY
Summer Landscape Show, Greenhut Gallery, Portland, ME
Defining the West: 200 Years of American Imagery, Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe, NM
Roots, Landing Gallery, Rockland, ME
Annual Professional Painters’ Exhibition, The Century Association, New York, NY
Glory of Landscapes, Pelham Art Centre, New York, NY
Salon du Musee, Featured Artist, Salon d Arts at Gallery 1261, Denver, CO
Small Works, Gallery 1261, Denver, CO
The Urban Myth, Vision of the City, Sullivan Goss, An American Gallery, Santa Barbara, CA
The Art of Printmaking, paying homage to Open Press,Archer Concept Group,Denver,CO
Twenty Years: Paintings: Joellyn Duesberry, Bunny Harvey...
Category
1970s Contemporary Art by Medium: Linen
