Carl Grauer Artist Talk

Carrie Haddad Gallery invites you into the illuminated world of Carl Grauer. Based in Poughkeepsie, Grauer (he/they) is an artist and professor who earned his MFA in medical illustration from the University of Michigan. After decades of exhibiting imaginative oil paintings in London and the Hudson Valley, Grauer had created his most recent body of work, Natural Thresholds, which embodies aspects of grief, renewal, and natural cosmic cycles. This discussion covered all aspects of Grauer's career and practice, led by Brooklyn-based writer Wah-Ming Chang. 

About the Artist: 

Carl Grauer (he/they) is an artist, a painter, and a teacher. Grauer works within the genres of realism, impressionism, surrealism and narrative art. They have an intense interest in portraiture, the figure, queer history, time, the natural world, ritualism, mortality, and the spiritual realm. Born in rural Kansas, Grauer completed their bachelor's degree in Human Biology from the University of Kansas and their MFA in Medical Illustration from the University of Michigan. They spent two years in London studying figurative and portrait painting with several studios and garnered success showing work both nationally and internationally, most notably for the Hudson Valley Artists 2025: Movement exhibition at the Samuel Dorsky Museum, the Wells Art Contemporary Award in the UK, and exhibiting with the Royal Society of Portrait Painters in London. Grauer has also participated in the Constance Saltonstall Artist Residency, Jentel Artist Residency, and the Blue Mountain Artist Residency. Currently, they are working and living in Poughkeepsie, New York and showing with several galleries nationally including Carrie Haddad in Hudson, New York.

About the Facilitator: 

Wah-Ming Chang is a writer based in Brooklyn, New York. She has been awarded grants and fellowships for her fiction from such organizations as Art Omi, Ucross Foundation, and the Saltonstall Foundation, and has received support three times from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her writing has appeared in Joyland, The Brooklyn Rail, and The Kenyon Review, among other publications. Hand, Held, her artist book about her father's art practice, is forthcoming from Bored Wolves. An iteration of Hand, Held was on view in the group exhibition 39 Footnotes at Accent Sisters (New York, 2025).