Joellyn Duesberry

American painter Joellyn T. Duesberry (1944-2016) used the landscape, both rural and urban, as her muse. Born and raised in Virginia, Duesberry studied fine art at Smith College, graduating Phi Beta Kappa with honors, and went on to earn her MFA at the New York University of Fine Art.
 
The first half of her career was spent in the East painting everything from gritty cityscapes to jewel-toned landscapes. In the city, she attended evening drawing session, often painting and drawing one of her favorite models, the young singer and dancer who went by the name “Madonna.”
 
A key turning point in Duesberry’s career came in 1986 when she won a National Endowment for the Arts grant that enabled her to study with Richard Diebenkorn. The week she spent working with him prompted her to leave New York City and move to Colorado. Of her work, Diebenkorn remarked that it was landscape masquerading as abstraction or, perhaps, abstraction masquerading as landscape. And so, midcareer, she embraced the sculptural, geometric spaces of the West.
 
Duesberry’s work can be found in more than 80 public collections including the Denver Art Museum, the Smithsonian, the Phoenix Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Colorado Springs Fine Art Museum, and Yale University. She had more than 50 solo exhibitions in her lifetime, won numerous awards, honors, residencies, and major grants. The monograph “Elevated Perspective, the Paintings of Joellyn Duesberry,” was published in cooperation with the Colorado Springs Fine Art Center to accompany a major retrospective, in 2011. For more information about Duesberry, please visit https://www.joellynduesberry.com/.