September 10, 2026
Yvonne Jacquette’s painted aerial landscapes, often characterized by a sumptuous pointillism, verge on sublime. Karma’s first solo show of the Pittsburgh-born painter, ‘From the Air,’ features work that Jacquette based on her experience flying in planes over the same landscape. A ‘would-be abstractionist’, Jacquette was obsessed with seeing things from unexpected angles: helicopters, skyscrapers, even yoga poses. She first took flight over Maine at the suggestion of the late art critic Peter Schjeldahl, later describing the experience as one of profound vulnerability. Perspective was her great pursuit.
Akin to the 2024–25 Georgia O’Keeffe retrospective ‘My New Yorks’ at the Art Institute of Chicago and High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and Karma’s own 2025 solo show of work by Jane Dickson, ‘Wonder Wheel’, ‘From the Air’ focuses on Jacquette’s cityscapes. Spanning from 1971 to 2016, works on view vary in media and scale. The pastel drawing NY Throgs Neck Bridge (c.1975) juxtaposes the Bronx River separating the once-sparse outer boroughs with coppery land masses, while the oil painting N.Y. Aerial View from Helicopter (Looking East from Hudson Yards Area) II (2011–12), made decades later, is a dizzy, massive triumph that shows Jacquette looking out and down at Manhattan. Near Cooper Square, N.Y. (2016), on the other hand, zooms in on the skinny windows of the namesake tenement buildings. Jacquette’s watercolours may be the most hypnotic of all: the lush Glimpse of Manhattan Day (1988) presents a surprisingly verdant view of New York’s financial district, with the nearby suburbs flattened into a clay-lake desert.
When Jacquette died in 2023, she left behind a map of new perspectives on old landmarks. Her impressionist renderings of Maine’s beaches, farms and forests intermingle with her stark, neon depictions of Northeastern towns and cities overtaken by corporate capitalism, as in Walmart and Other “Big Box” Stores, Augusta, ME II (2006). While most of these vistas don’t render an explicit first-person position, Jacquette considered her stamp indelible. As she joked in a 2008 conversation with The Brooklyn Rail, she tried ‘to keep the ego way in the background, or get rid of it if you can, good luck!’
