ALEXANDER PURVES
Sketchbooks: Traveling

21 March – 18 April, 2026

Opening Reception:
Saturday, 21 March, 4-6 pm

Alexander Purves Biography:

Alexander Purves graduated from Yale College in 1958 and following a three-year tour in the US Army, received a Master’s Degree from the School of Architecture in 1965. Following ten years as an architect with Davis, Brody & Associates in New York City he moved to New Haven in 1976 to join the faculty of the School of Architecture and to open his own practice. While in New York he worked primarily on middle income housing. His architectural design work in New Haven includes the Cushing Whitney Medical Library and the renovation of the Hope Building, both for the Yale School of Medicine and executed in collaboration with Allan Dehar Associates. Having coordinated and taught design studios at all levels in the School of Architecture, Purves currently restricts his teaching to “Introduction to Architecture”, an undergraduate course open to any student in the University. For fourteen years he led an intensive drawing seminar in Rome for graduate architecture students. Purves has lectured widely and has led a number of Yale Educational Travel programs in Italy, France and the British Isles as well as Eastern Europe, the Turkish coast, Egypt and Japan.

Purves’s watercolors have been included in many group shows. Major exhibitions of his work have been held at the Blue Mountain Gallery in New York City (2006, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2021, 2024), and at the Washington (CT) Art Association (1987, 1992, 2003). In 2013 the Whitney Humanities Center mounted a show of his Roman sketches, and in 2002 his travel drawings were exhibited at the Hunter College Leubsdorf Gallery in a show entitled “On Site”. The Yale School of Architecture displayed a selection of his watercolors together with his travel sketchbooks in a 2024 show entitled “On Looking”.

Sales & Insurance: 
WAA will retain a 40% commission on all works sold. 
Work will be insured while on the premises.