Andrew Lyght

Andrew Lyght (born 1949 in Georgetown, Guyana) is a contemporary player living in Kingston, New York. Lyght is a dirty media artist, often combining drawings, painterly elements, industrial objects, and sculptural wooden assemblages.

Lyght holds Guyanese, Canadian, and U.S. citizenship. Some of his achievement includes references to forms and objects from his childhood in Guyana, such as kites, sails, oil drums, and archaic rock writings found in the interior of Guyana.

Lyght's artistic captivation and abilities were credited in Guyana during his childhood. He began winning art competitions while a student and was invited as a young person to study following Edward Rupert Burrowes, Guyana's leading highly developed artist, at Queens College Thomas Lands, and in imitation of became Burrowes's apprentice. Lyght confirmed in an interview that Burrowes encouraged him to “make my publish at house and then leave Guyana and start afresh in a other environment.”

After Burrowes's death, and having won everything the genial art prizes in Guyana, Lyght went to Canada, where one of his paintings had been exhibited at the Guyana-Barbados Pavilion of Expo 67 in Montreal. In 1969 Lyght won a scholarship to testing at the Sadye Bronfman Centre and became a Canadian citizen. Lyght lived and worked in Montreal until 1977, though he represented Guyana at the São Paulo Art Biennial in 1971. During his times in Montreal he received several grants from the Canadian Council for the Arts, was in action with Vehicule Art Inc., Canada's first artist-run gallery, and exhibited enactment at Vehicule and other venues including Montreal's Museum of Fine Arts, where he had a solo perform in 1974.

In 1977, Lyght moved to New York, where he did a two-year residency at P.S. 1 in Long Island City (now MoMA PS1). Since that time, he has continued to proceed his feint in action and solo exhibitions as regards the world, with his most recent solo exhibition, "Second Nature," in 2020 at Anna Zorina Gallery in New York. He had a retrospective in 2016 at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at the State University of New York, New Paltz, N.Y., for which an exhibition catalogue, “Full Circle,” was published by the SUNY Press. The exhibition was curated by South African independent curator Tumelo Mosaka.

Reviewing Lyght's retrospective at the Dorsky Museum for The New York Times, critic Joyce Beckenstein declared that Lyght's work “soars upon the arc of a simple line. Mr. Lyght blurs all distinctions amongst drawing, painting, sculpture, digital photography and installation art. Each iteration of his Definite style charts the personal odyssey of a naturalized African-American artiste from Guyana ... to Montreal, to Brooklyn, to Europe and, finally, to Kingston, N.Y., the birthplace of America’s first original art movement, the Hudson River School.”

Lyght's other museum installations include "Andrew Lyght: 3-D Paintings" at the Nassau County Museum of Fine Art, Roslyn, N.Y. (1985), for which a catalogue was published by the museum, and "Painting Structure" at Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Mass., in 1983. He was included in the 2010 "Global Africa Project" at the Museum of Arts & Design, New York, an exhibition that was co-curated by Lowery Stokes Sims and explored the impact of African visual culture on contemporary art, craft, and design more or less the world.

Lyght time-honored major grants from the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation in 2010 and the Barnett and Annalee Newman Foundation in 2004.

His feint is held in collections including the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Jewish Museum, New York; the World Bank Art Program, Washington, D.C.; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and the Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Mass.