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Monday, May 9, 2022
Retrospective: The Art & Music of Phoebe Legere * June 3 * Bundy Museum * NPR Interview * Bundy Theater * Amazing Online Auction
Visit PhoebeLegereArt.com to learn more.
Phoebe Legere (Kennebec Abenaki/Cajun) is a versatile painter who works in oils, acrylic, mixed media, resin and egg tempera, creating semi-abstract works inspired by her passion for anatomy and landscape. Legere uses experimental combinations of new and ancient mediums. “Phoebe Legere is a virtuoso. The speed, lyricism & dexterity of her brushstrokes express truly Herculean Creativity,” said Linda Nochlin.
Legere’s line is meticulous, incisive, sensuous, and vibrant. Her works are politically engaged and inspire conversations about women’s issues, diversity, inclusiveness, cultural equity, Native American issues, respect for the environment, and the volatility of consciousness.
Legere’s paintings are deeply contemporary; each painting is a comment on the validity of handmade painting in a world where we are increasingly dominated by machines. “Machine-made, mechanistic art and music have colonized and occupied our minds. The only cure, the only way to restore the health of the Human Soul, is to return to the well spring of all human endeavor: Art and Music,” said Legere.
Further acquaintance with Legere’s biography and the inspirations behind her oeuvre reveal an artist who has deftly marshaled passion, intellectual rigor, and a lifetime of solid discipline in both music & art to create a genuinely original body of work. Legere studied music at Juilliard and art at Vassar College. She holds degrees in art, performance art, and a master’s degree in film scoring.
From a young age, her parents took Phoebe Legere to museums and galleries where her artist mother, a famous Art Director and her father, painter, art teacher and member of the “Boston Expressionists” group, showed her the works of Modern Painters and introduced her to nonrepresentational methods of picturing reality. Her parents both studied with Hans Hoffman in Provincetown. There they met Larry Rivers. Rivers later became Phoebe’s painting teacher, introducing her to all the major New York painters from Robert Rauschenberg to Jasper Johns to Dennis Oppenheim, to Louise Bourgeois, to Donald Judd. As a teenager she had formative friendships with Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, David Bowie, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Beard, Hunter Thompson, Jack Smith and Andy Warhol as well as brilliant illustrator Hilary Knight, with whom she is featured in a 2018 HBO Special.
Legere has a painting studio in Manhattan. She incorporates iconic architectural buildings and threatened landscapes into paintings that also feature human bodies leaping, dancing, and dreaming. She is represented by galleries in multiple cities in the US and has exhibited regularly in various venues throughout the US, EU and Brazil, and has received prestigious art awards in the US and Germany. Her pieces are owned by collectors and museums worldwide.
From her experiences opening for David Bowie on his Sound & Vision tour, to her work as an Underground Movie Star, including her soon to be released starring role, playing herself, as a multi-disciplinary artist in a movie about YADDO, the legendary artist residency. The movie is called “The Masterpiece” directed by internationally acclaimed Brazilian artist Gustavo Von Ha.
Legere’s life experiences, her appetite for truth and beauty, and her extraordinary friendships with the most creative personalities of our time have been synthesized into an art practice of astonishing range and breadth.
