Harry I Naar of Lawrenceville, professor of fine arts and director of the Rider University Art Gallery, has been selected one of six New Jersey Print and Paper Fellows for 2005 at the Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper (RCIPP). The six fellows were chosen by a distinguished committee of curators from Philadelphia, New Jersey, and New York and from more than 200 submissions.

Since 1986, 112 New Jersey artists have been in residence in the New Jersey Print and Paper Fellowship Program, which has been partially supported by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.  The heart of it is its residencies. Each artist is in residence for two weeks, receives an   honorarium, is provided with all materials, and receives the resulting editions of handmade paper or print projects. 

The artists are chosen via a competitive process. The selection committee chooses ten to 12 artists  on the basis of excellence. Members of the committee have included Faye Hirsch, associate editor of Art in America and former editor, Art on Paper; Rocio Aranda Alvarado, associate curator, Jersey City Museum; David Kiehl, curator of prints, Whitney Museum of American Art; and Faith Ringgold, artist. The staff of the RCIPP makes the final selection of six, taking into consideration the appropriateness of the artist’s style and ideas for printmaking and papermaking.        

At the completion of the grant, a fellowship exhibition will take place at Rutgers University’s Mason Gross School of the Arts Galleries.

Naar has taught at Rider since 1980.  Listed in Who’s Who in Art, Naar’s paintings, drawings, watercolors and prints have been shown nationally and internationally in venues such as the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC, the Boca Raton Museum of Art, the New Jersey State Museum, The Trenton City Museum, and The USSR Artist Union Gallery in Moscow. His work is also included in many public and private collections such as the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers, the Morris Museum of Arts and Sciences in Morristown, the New Jersey State Museum in Trenton, the Johnson and Johnson Corporate Center in New Brunswick and at Bristol-Myers Squibb in Princeton.

Naar received a bachelor’s of fine arts degree from Philadelphia College of Art (now known as The University of the Arts) and a Master of fine arts degree from Indiana University. He has also studied with noted French painter Jean Hélion in Paris.