The Estate of Carroll Cloar is represented
exclusively by David Lusk Gallery, Memphis.

Click image for slideshow

Visions of Time: Exploring the Art of Carroll Cloar offers museums and their audiences the chance to reassess the work of an artist who through the 1960s had paintings acquired by the Hirshhorn Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and by private collectors like Nelson Rockefeller and John D. Rockefeller III.

Carroll Cloar was born in 1913 near a farming community in Earle, Arkansas.  After studies at the Southwestern College in Memphis, (today Rhodes College), and the Memphis Academy of Art, Cloar relocated to New York City in the late 1930s. In New York, he continued his studies at the Art Students League, concentrating on drawing and lithography. The winner of an Edward McDowell Scholarship in 1940, Cloar traveled to Mexico to expand his artistic study. In 1946 a Guggenheim Fellowship again took him to Mexico and also to South America. His first artistic debut in New York came in the late 1940s with an exhibition at Edith Halpert’s Downtown Gallery.

Cloar's idiosyncratic vision first attracted national attention in 1948 when his print Great Half-Uncle Ike won a purchase award at the Brooklyn Museum's Second National Print Annual and his series of folk-inspired lithographs (“Backwoods Boyhood”) appeared in LIFE Magazine. He was pegged as one of a “New Crop of Painting Proteges” at Edith Halpert’s Downtown Gallery in LIFE in 1952.

Puzzlingly enough, Cloar’s national eminence faded in the late 1960s. Despite his lasting popularity among a few collectors, Cloar’s work in national collections remains largely unseen. Visions of Time: Exploring the Art of Carroll Cloar offers a renewed glimpse into 40 works (paintings and works on paper) by this early master.  Focusing on pieces from before 1965, this exhibition guides audiences through the artist’s memories of the rural South.