Andrew Lyght

Andrew Lyght (born 1949 in Georgetown, Guyana) is a contemporary player living in Kingston, New York. Lyght is a mixed 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 stone writings found in the interior of Guyana.

Lyght's artistic incorporation and abilities were endorsed in Guyana during his childhood. He began winning art competitions even though a student and was invited as a youthful to study behind Edward Rupert Burrowes, Guyana's leading radical artist, at Queens College Thomas Lands, and next became Burrowes's apprentice. Lyght declared in an interview that Burrowes encouraged him to “make my publicize at home and then depart Guyana and Begin afresh in a other environment.”

After Burrowes's death, and having won all the handy 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 examination 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 get older in Montreal he received several grants from the Canadian Council for the Arts, was keen with Vehicule Art Inc., Canada's first artist-run gallery, and exhibited piece of legislation at Vehicule and supplementary venues including Montreal's Museum of Fine Arts, where he had a solo work 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 play his action in outfit and solo exhibitions nearly 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 avowed that Lyght's work “soars on the arc of a simple line. Mr. Lyght blurs whatever distinctions in the midst of drawing, painting, sculpture, digital photography and installation art. Each iteration of his distinct 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 native 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 in this area 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 show 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.