SAN FRANCISCO, January 2007 – This month, Ira Yeager Studios proudly announces the release of a new art catalogue featuring the Native American portraits of artist Ira Yeager. The 123-page catalogue includes 56 full-color images of Yeager’s vivid paintings and two original essays, one by Robert Flynn Johnson, curator in charge of the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

As Johnson describes the work, “Yeager’s paintings are in the tradition of late nineteenth and early twentieth century photographers such as F. Jay Haynes, Frank A. Rinehart and Edwards S. Curtis, who admirably portrayed the Native Americans they photographed with a quiet dignity that continues to be compelling even today.”

The catalogue follows a successful exhibition of Yeager’s Native American portraits from November 2005 and showcases many works from that exhibition as well as his new series and works from noted collectors. The new series, completed by Yeager in the late fall 2006, will be exhibited in 2007 at the Jackson Fall Arts Festival in Jackson, Wyoming.

Trained by such noted artists as Elmer Bischoff and Richard Diebenkorn at the California College of Arts and Crafts as well as the San Francisco School of Fine Arts in the late 1950s, Yeager began his career as part of the Bay Area Figurative moment. During a painting trip to Santa Fe, N.M., in the mid-1960s, Yeager was reacquainted with the Native American as subject, after having been raised in Bellingham, Wash., as an outdoorsman’s son. This theme of American Indian portraiture has continued throughout Yeager’s paintings for the last 40 years and remains as one of his most recognized series of work.

For additional information contact: Brian Fuller, Ira Yeager’s Studio-Napa Valley, 3061 Old Toll Rd. Calistoga, CA, (tel/fax) 707-942-5395 irayeager@aol.com