Overview
Fred Duignan

"After many years of harnessing technique, pursuing picturing, following trends and restating history, I now acquiesce in a secondary role, within my purpose, to the painting's becoming what it wishes to. Painting is an experience based on the belief in my hand as a channel of the expression hidden in the materials that is unleased by painting itself in alignment with my life's deep psychological underpinnings."

                                  - FRED DUIGNAN, Introduction to Slide Puzzle · The Last Environmental Game, Grid of 15 paintings, 2021

Originally from northern New Jersey, Fred Duignan, recieved a BFA and Graduate Certificate from University of California, Santa Cruz (1981, 82). He hastened back to New York City, where he dove into the East Village and New York Art Scene of the 1980's-90's. He had extensive solo shows and a role in many group exhibitions in NYC (Fashion Moda, 10th Street Gallery, Bill Bace, Blum Hellman, Asian American Arts Center, Grace Hartigan, AOT); in NJ (Farleigh Dickenson University, Paterson Museum); regionally (at the Stamford Museum; Mothership, Woodstock, NY; Green Kill, Kingston, NY); and abroad (Helsinki,Finland; Seoul, Korea). He wrote art criticism for Cover Magazine, NYC and for the NJ Herald and News and was for a number of years Curator of Contemporary Art at the Paterson Museum. All his life Duignan was an accomplished poet and wrote vivid poetry to accompany many of his art series, and in one case the poem was literally a part of his imagery in diptych form.

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Virtual exhibition
Fred Duignan
Paterson was a cauldron for Fred Duignan’s art and life. He was brought up in nearby industrial Carlstadt and suburban Rutherford. After a few years in California, he became a resident in the Paterson artist housing for two significant decades of his creative life (1984-2003). While doing odd jobs to support his art, he become a generator of the local art scene as Executive Director of the Essex-Phoenix Artists Association (’87-88), art writer [Cover Magazine (NYC, ’88-90) and the NJ Herald (‘97)] and Curator of Contemporary Art of the Paterson Museum (1992-97). All of this rooted him in Paterson’s original arts creation within the radically changing industrial place of his time. Three modalities in Duignan’s paintings tell us much about this place. First were abstracted black silhouetted images of the beauty and decay of the old silk, locomotive, aircraft engine, and firearms mills of the period, with tilted walls, empty windows, and angled energies against haunting skies and the crashing force of the Falls. Second were 10 portraits of his fellow artists and poets of the mills-- expressive, wrought, dark and light, giving off presence and fraught commitment. Most individuals were from Paterson and environs. These artists and writers went out into the community and beyond as photographers, teachers, mural painters, and local characters. A creative scene had developed and had its long-lasting effect. Third is the example of Duignan’s own art imbued with the cross-currents of this place over the whole of his career--struggles of inner and outer darkness, vivid color, overlays of living paint, found symbols, and fragmented figuration that thematically speak of chaos and transcendence of that chaos.