Gardner was on staff of The New York Times for seven years as a writer-critic and assistant editor of Sunday Arts & Leisure. In Paris, where he lived for over three years, he contributed theatre and film reviews to the Financial Times of London and worked on film projects with director Claude Chabrol, co-scripting Chabrol's Ten Days' Wonder , which starred Orson Welles and Anthony Perkins. He published a William Faulkner portrait published in A Faulkner Perspective for the Franklin Library; Lynn, the memoirs of Royal Ballet star Lynn Seymour; Brooklyn: People and Places, Past and Present, a socio-cultural history of the famous borough; and Louise Bourgeois, a personal journey into the life of the acclaimed sculptor. Writing for a variety of periodicals, Gardner interviewed subjects as diverse as the Beatles, Howard Hawks in Palm Springs, and Leni Riefenstahl in Pöcking, Bayern. A founding board member of the Delaware Theatre Company, Gardner helped launch the state's first regional theatre in Wilmington. He co-produced the Art City series of three contemporary art documentaries featuring artists Brice Marden, Elizabeth Murray, Agnes Martin, and Neil Jenney, among others; and the visual profile, Richard Tuttle: Never Not an Artist. The films have been shown at festivals in Toronto, Montréal, Paris, and Naples, as well as at art museums throughout the world.
Books
Lynn : The Autobiography of Lynn Seymour. London : Granada Publishing Ltd., 1984.
Brooklyn : People and Places, Past and Present. New York : Harry N. Abrams, 1991.
Louise Bourgeois. New York : Rizzoli, 1994.
Selected essays, articles, and other works
"The French They Are a Movie Race", The New York Times, May 18, 1969, https://www.nytimes.com/1969/05/18/archives/the-french-they-are-a-movie-race.html
"My Night with Rohmer", New York, November 8, 1976
"Sometimes, Nothing Succeeds Like a Flop", The New York Times, September 16, 1977, https://www.nytimes.com/1977/01/16/archives/sometimes-nothing-succeeds-like-a-flop-nothing-succeeds-like-some.html
"Think of Leonardo Wielding a Pixel and a Mouse", The New York Times, April 22, 1984, https://www.nytimes.com/1984/04/22/arts/think-of-leonardo-wielding-a-pixel-and-a-mouse.html
"Leni Riefenstahl", Vanity Fair, July 1984, https://archive.vanityfair.com/article/1984/7/leni-riefenstahl
"Chuck Close : Making the Impossible Possible", ArtNews, May 1992
"The Houses That Louise Built", HG, October 1992
"Chamber Music Barges in on the Brooklyn Docks", The Smithsonian, January 1994
"Neil Jenney: Scary Territory", ArtNews, January 1996
"When France Was Home to African-American Artists", The Smithsonian, March 1996, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/when-france-was-home-to-african-american-artists-1-39800769/
"Music to the Eyes", Harper's Bazaar, April 1996
"Carl Van Vechten, Culture Connoisseur", On Paper : The Journal of Prints, Drawings and Photography, May-June 1998
"Auction Signals," ArtNews, October 1998, https://www.artnews.com/issue/october-1998/
"Neil Jenney : The Bad Years 1969-70", Exhibit Catalogue, Gagosian Gallery, New York City, 2001
"Renaissance Men by the Letter", The Nation, July 2, 2001, https://www.thenation.com/article/renaissance-men-letter/
"Richard Tuttle: Odd Man In", ArtNews, April 2004, http://www.artnews.com/2004/04/01/odd-man-in/