Aaron Collier is a visual artist living in New Orleans. He teaches drawing and painting at Tulane University as an Associate Professor. Solo exhibitions of his work have occurred at the New Gallery, Octavia Gallery, Cole Pratt Gallery, and Staple Goods, an artist-run gallery in the St. Claude Avenue Arts District of New Orleans where he is a member. Aaron has participated in group exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Center and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans. Additionally, his work has been featured in New American Paintings and is represented in such collections as the New Orleans Museum of Art, Iberia Bank, and the Boston Medical Center. He has been awarded artist residencies by the Ragdale Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans, ISCP in Brooklyn, and Open Ateliers Zuidoost in Amsterdam. While his paintings are mostly composed of varying expanses of color and little recognizable imagery, Collier doesn’t claim to be a purely abstract artist; in other words, he doesn’t wish for there to be a complete divorce between his imagery and the world. Aaron has taught drawing and painting at Tulane since the fall of 2006. His classes are aimed at providing the drawing and painting student with an expansive vocabulary in communicating their personal concerns, posing formal elements as the gateway to conceptual considerations of the work. Aaron’s personal work traffics more in glimpse, suggestion, or fragment than in chronicle, consonant with daily experience and our understanding of the world. His paintings aim to communicate the beauty found in what is incomplete.
