The artist Richard Yarde was born in Boston in 1939. His parents were from Barbados—his father a machinist and his mom a seamstress—and as he once said, “There were patterns everywhere.” He took local art classes and eventually earned a masters in Fine Arts. As a young man, Yarde created large colorful paintings inspired by Black photographers and European Post-Impressionists. He drew portraits of Black leaders (Paul Robeson, Malcolm X) and of fellow citizens in Roxbury, his neighborhood in Boston. During the last decades of his life Yarde dealt with serious health issues; he began to paint fragmented watercolors that contained themes of healing and integration. Yarde died in 2011. His watercolors are the focus of this show, which includes 30 remarkable portraits of Black life. —E.C.