January 12, 2007
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.—Northampton artist Richard Yarde will speak at 4:30 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 8, in Stirn Auditorium at Amherst College, with a reception to follow in the Mead Art Museum. Yarde is one of the artists featured in “Visionary Anatomies,” an exhibition at the Mead created by the National Academy of Sciences and organized for travel by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service. The exhibit continues at the museum through Sunday, March 18.

A professor of fine art at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Yarde creates intensely personal, large scale works in watercolor, a notoriously unforgiving medium that does not easily lend itself to his scale or subject matter. The New York Times praises Yarde for his “expressive concentration and restraint and his virtuosic control of a difficult medium.” His work has been exhibited in Boston, New York and Washington, D.C. and is part of the permanent collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C. and the Museums of Fine Art in Boston and Houston.

“Visionary Anatomies” showcases the work of 11 contemporary artists inspired by human anatomical imagery to express aesthetic, social and cultural ideas. The exhibition of 18 works represents a wide range of media, artistic styles and schools of thought that actively exist in the art world today. The artists featured in the exhibition include Yarde, Stefanie Bürkle, Katherine Du Tiel, Tatiana Garmendia, Joy Garnett, Connie Imboden, Predrag Pajdic, Katherine Sherwood, Frederick Sommer, Mike and Doug Starn and the group (art)n. The talk is free and open to the public.

The Mead Art Museum is open Tuesday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. and Thursday evenings until 9 p.m. Additional information is available on the museum’s Website or by calling the museum at 413/542-2335. Admission and all events are free and open to the public.

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