Carol Haerer: The White Paintings

The Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and Sculpture Garden is pleased to present Sheldon Solo: Carol Haerer, The White Paintings, an exhibition featuring Carol Haerer\u27s white paintings of the mid to late 1960s. This exhibition is the most recent installment of the Sheldon Solo exhibition series, a series established in 1988 to feature the work of important American artists within the context of the Sheldon Gallery\u27s nationally recognized collection of 20th-century American Art. A midwestern native who attended Doane College and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Carol Haerer studied in Paris on a Fulbright Fellowship in 1955, and after receiving an M.F.A. from the University of California-Berkeley, she moved to New York. It was in New York where she began to paint intensely subtle white paintings which received considerable critical attention in the late sixties, in part because they seemed to offer a way out of what was perceived by many in the art world to be the straightjacket of Minimalism. But the critical attention they received in the sixties has rarely been noted by art historians, who have tended to evaluate painting or sculpture from this period by the theoretical standards of Minimalism. But as minimal as Haerer\u27s paintings appear at first blush, they are images, even atmospheres, but not objects. This exhibition offers an opportunity for our audience actually to experience these paintings as they were intended to be viewed, as an aesthetic environment. We would like to thank Dr. Charles Eldredge, Hall Distinguished Professor of American Art at the University of Kansas and former Director of the National Museum of American Art in Washington, DC for writing the essay for this publication