Art Since 1950

Leo Amino came to the United States in 1929 to attend college, first at San Mateo Junior College and then New York University. In 1937 he began studying sculpture under Chaim Gross at the American Artists School in New York, where he was particularly interested in direct carving into wood and other materials. He was deeply immersed in the discourses of Surrealism, and he sought to capture and represent the interrelated forms of nature and the human unconscious. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor he joined a group of fellow Japanese-American artists in denouncing Imperial Japan and declaring their loyalty to the United States, serving as a translator in the United States Navy during World War II.

After the war Amino became associated with the group of Abstract Expressionist sculptors in New York, fusing his interest in abstract Surrealism with an interest in new materials, in particular the plastic resins that had come into wide use as substitutes for scarce metals during the war. He also became a teacher, teaching first at the summer session at the famed Black Mountain College before becoming an instructor at Cooper Union in New York, where he taught for over twenty years.

This sculpture is a prime example of his mature work, blending his skill at carving with his interest in natural forms. The long, thin, attenuated nature of the work is somewhat at odds with the title, which implies a solid and muscular physicality. Particularly striking is his use of negative space, which provides the sculpture with a light and airy quality.

Part of a generation of artists who came of age during the peak of Abstract Expressionism in the United States, Richard Anuszkiewicz eschewed the painterly, gestural style of that movement while embracing its interest in all-over compositions executed in large scale with bright acrylic paints. He was heavily influenced by his mentor Josef Albers, with whom the studied at Yale University, embracing the older artist’s interest in the relationships between colors, especially when rendered in precise, geometric shapes. Anuszkiewicz took up printmaking in the early 1960s, and like many artists of his generation originally viewed it as a means of reproducing his paintings in smaller and more accessible formats. He quickly realized the possibilities for further color experimentation inherent in lithography and silkscreen, however, and embraced printmaking as a core part of his artistic practice.

This print, one of a series of Reflections executed in 1979, is the result of a particularly fruitful period of experimentation Anuszkiewicz began in the mid-1970s. Silkscreen—in which pigment is forced through a mesh screen onto paper or other substrate—allowed him to make particularly large prints, especially when printed onto Masonite, a sturdy type of composite wood. Anusckiewicz began printing these works as many as four times, creating thick buildups of color. These objects, with their size and paint-like surfaces, approach the status of painting-print hybrids, creating hard-edged yet luminous surfaces that minimize their own objecthood, instead emphasizing the environmental impact of all that color.

Peggy Bacon, born to artist parents, followed in their footsteps by attending the Art Students League in New York during its heyday, where she studied with George Bellows, John Sloan, and other American realists. Though she trained as a painter, her earliest work was in drypoint, a printmaking medium in which the painter scratches a design directly on a metal plate with a specialized needle. During the 1920s and 1930s she turned to oil pastels, using them to execute a series of caricatures of her contemporaries in the New York art and intellectual worlds. These pastels, which demonstrate her flair for witty exaggeration, brought her a great deal of fame as they were published in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and other widely read magazines. She was also a prolific illustrator of books.

 After about 1945, Bacon began to return to painting, working mostly in gouache in the 1940s and 1950s before returning to oils in her last years. Lamentable Lunch is a fine example of her gouache work, which turned from caricature to subtler—though still wittily ironic—portraits of everyday Americans. This painting demonstrates her mastery of the medium, a kind of opaque watercolor, as she uses her sweeping brushstrokes and fine eye for color to show an office worker eating a hurried meal of coffee, donut, and jelly sandwich, seemingly crammed into a café’s coat room. Bacon’s eye for everyday detail and sly sense of humor remained a constant throughout her career.

With her organic, carefully orchestrated sculptures, Rina Banerjee reveals a migration of ideas and cultural symbols. She interrogates historic objects— where they come from and the stories they can tell—in her distinctive works. In conceiving this work, the artist focused on domestic slavery. A Victorian birdcage, shaped like a large home, forms a central part of the composition. Birdcages reoccur across Bannerjee's diverse works. Here, the cage remains open, giving a sense of flight; the captive has fled bondage. Various meanings are assigned to objects by their creators and their owners. Banerjee ponders the value of goods and their perceived worth. Here, the prominent orange feathers were purchased from a website promising “authentic Asian goods,” while the large and whimsical gourds were grown locally in Florida and purchased on the land where they were harvested. In this work, Banerjee navigates the tension between the local and the global, and the notion of authenticity is explored and deconstructed. While the artist is interested in the movement of goods and people, her sculptures, like this one, testify to a migration of ideas as well. This work in particular is significant in her oeuvre not only for the ideas it imparts, but for its noteworthy presentations.

Leonard Baskin was in many ways a man out of step with his times. Raised in a religious Jewish household in New Jersey and Brooklyn, Baskin was possessed throughout his career with a sense of the potential for apocalyptic doom latent in the human condition. Though he first came to prominence during the time of Abstract Expressionism, when artists eschewed the figurative and embraced new techniques and synthetic media, Baskin was a resolute traditionalist. Unlike many artists of his generation, he trained in Europe as a sculptor and printmaker, and preferred working with ancient materials like wood, copper, and ink over the bright acrylics embraced by his contemporaries.

In his drawings and prints Baskin often created grotesque human and human-animal hybrids, often diseased or in states of decay, a reflection of his preoccupation with the potential in humanity for moral decay. This ink drawing depicts a massive, distended rat, the dark washes of ink bleeding over the sketchily outlined form. The blackness overwhelms the tiny head, blotting out the creature’s eyes and blurring the line between life and death. Moving away from the head, the ink smears first to gray and then to white, which stands out against the creamy beige of the paper. This transition from black to white suggests something of a Manichean struggle between light and darkness, good and evil.

Internationally-renowned American artist, Jean-Michel Basquiat, defined his career through his works in painting and print. He often drew inspiration from his personal Puerto Rican and Haitian heritage. At the age of eight, Basquiat was hit by a car and suffered from several broken bones and internal injuries. While he was healing, his mother gave him the medical textbook Gray’s Anatomy.  This period of trauma and recovery had a lasting effect on the artist, and the anatomical drawings found within the textbook served as early references for Basquiat’s later works. This work builds on that influence while it simultaneously recalls Leonardo da Vinci’s human anatomy studies. Basquiat’s work is often associated with the Neo-Expressionism art movement, in which the importance of the human figure was reasserted into the canon of contemporary art with a focus on emotion and subjectivity.

Romare Bearden experienced the Great Migration—the decades-long movement of African Americans from the Jim Crow South to Northern cities—at a young age, when he moved with his parents from Charlotte, North Carolina to Harlem in New York City. During his childhood he spent time in Pittsburgh and the suburbs of Baltimore, two additional centers of Black life, but otherwise was a lifelong New Yorker. Nonetheless, he made frequent visits to Charlotte and other areas of the South to visit family, and the Black culture of the South informs much of his artistic production. 

Bearden’s best known works blend Cubist collage practices with imagery taken from African and African Diaspora art and culture, and his collages and related works frequently feature conjur (Bearden’s preferred spelling) women, privileged members of the community who used African magical and ritual techniques passed down through the generation. For Bearden, conjur women symbolized and called forth a cultural space uninflected by racism, segregation, and other forms of prejudice. This lithograph, which draws much of its imagery from a collage and silkscreen of the same name, calls forth that tradition while also celebrating the beauty and fecundity of the South.

Romare Bearden was a successful member of the New York art world from the 1930s to the early 1960s, when he first adopted the collage aesthetic for which he is known today. Early in his career he worked in a figurative style influenced by Mexican Muralism before moving towards abstraction during the heyday of Abstract Expressionism. He always felt a tension between his intense interest in the history of art and his desire to make work that was politically and socially relevant to his experience as an African American living in the United States. Inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, he began to experiment with collage, which proved to be the perfect medium to unite these two interests. Collage was important to Cubism and Dada, two avant-garde movements with explicitly social consciences, and it gave him a new vocabulary with which to depict both the joyous and sorrowful elements of the Black experience in the United States.

These lithographs, published in 1971 as part of a collaboration with Shorewood Publishers in New York, are all based on foundational collage works shown at his 1971 Museum of Modern Art exhibition. As with most of his printmaking practice, Bearden worked closely with Shorewood’s master printmaker, first using transfer paper to put the image onto a metal lithography plate, then putting in color and details by hand. After printing, he carefully reviewed each proof, returning to Shorewood to make changes until he was satisfied with the finished product. The result was a print that retained some of the handmade qualities and imagery of the collages while also standing alone as an original work of art. The name of the portfolio—Ritual Bayou—thus indicates the centrality of both African American cultural life and the process of iteration in Bearden’s work.

From his early street photography made in Harlem, New York City, to his iconic portraits of high-school students, Dawoud Bey creates emotive pictures of humanity. Bey’s pictures inspect and reflect upon the notion of place, which is a central thread in the Birmingham Project, of which the work here is a part. On the morning of September 15, 1963, four African American girls were killed when Ku Klux Klan members bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Later that same day, two African American boys were killed in separate incidents as a result of racial violence. To recognize these horrific tragedies on their 50^th anniversary, Bey created a series of diptychs of residents of the city. He identified young people who were the ages of the victims and then found adults who were approximately the ages those victims would have been if they had lived. He juxtaposes the adults and youth in black-and-white photographs taken in the Bethel Baptist Church in the city's Collegeville neighborhood, chosen for its role in the Civil Rights Movement, and in the Birmingham Museum of Art. The subjects here, as they do across the entire series, look directly at the viewer, an exchange of gaze that heightens the emotional intensity of the work. Though photographed separately, they are paired together through their individual yet parallel poses. Separated across generations, they are united in their resilience and recognition of the terror and tragedy of September 15, 1963.

Luis Camnitzer is a provocative thinker and artist. He makes work in myriad forms, choosing the format that he believes achieves his message or intent in the most direct manner. Like other conceptual artists, Camnitzer embraces the idea over the material manifestation of his creative practice.

Timelanguage derives from a new body of work that includes rigorous consideration of the notion of time. The series of prints begins and ends with blank pages. The made up, composite term “timelanguage” unfolds across the successive prints, which evolve from a light gray to a final black image. Since the end and the beginning are a different color, but similar in composition, cyclical time as well as linear time become paramount here. Moreover, time is ephemeral and elusive. While modern society may feel governed by time, encapsulating the notion of time as a single entity remains a perplexing task.

Elizabeth Catlett was known for sculptures that reflected both African American and Mexican identities. Catlett’s influences include the works of the Harlem and Chicago Renaissances, as well as modern and African art. Naima exemplifies the artist’s balance between the figurative and the abstract, potentially stemming from the influence of her mentor, modernist sculptor Ossip Zadkine (1888–1967). Catlett challenged Zadkine’s abstraction with her background in African art, blending her knowledge of the two to convey the essence of the subject without extraneous detail, but also without losing accessibility, as she created art to be consumed by everyday African American people. In keeping with this, she rejected the idea of the modernist “international figure,” instead creating a form that elicits sympathy from her viewers. Naima was inspired by her own granddaughter, Naima Mora, after she visited Catlett’s home in Mexico to study Spanish. Naima’s elongated profile fits within Catlett’s existing work, which draws from the cultural significance of the head in African art. In Yoruba figure sculpture, the head is the most vital part of a person. It is regarded as the epicenter of one’s individuality, sensory experience, nourishment, and wisdom. Just as Catlett wishes to portray the essence of her granddaughter, the head portrays the essence of human personality and the source of life in Yoruban culture, not only in the present, but also for the future.

This print was a result of the trip Charlot took to Tempe, Arizona to execute a mural at Arizona State University. As he did with his study of Mexican and Hawai’ian culture, Charlot rigorously prepared, reading an 1884 book—illustrated with chromolithographs—called The Snake Dance of the Moquis of Arizona by J. G. Bourke. While he was in Arizona he saw a group of Hopi perform the dance, executing the print with master lithographer Lynton Kistler in Los Angeles on his way back to Hawai’i. Charlot had hoped to sell copies of this print to Arizona State students for $5, but few were interested. As a result, Kistler estimates that only about 35 of the intended edition of 250 were ever printed.

One of the twentieth century’s most singular artists, Joseph Cornell developed a highly personal aesthetic and metaphysical vocabulary that was informed by his travels around New York City, his Christian Science faith, his encounters with Surrealism and other avant-garde art, and his interest in nature, time, astronomy, and a number of other subjects. A careful and at times obsessive collector, Cornell spent his entire life gathering materials in New York’s junk shops, categorizing them by subject matter in the voluminous files he kept in his Queens home. Over the course of his long and productive career Cornell produced dozens of collages and assemblages—the latter of which are frequently known as Cornell Boxes—out of these files, as well as several films.

This work, dating from near the end of his life, was created to benefit the charity Phoenix House, a nationwide drug treatment and prevention organization that primarily focused on treating children, adolescents, and families. Cornell—a lifelong lover of children—was moved to help the organization after he met a pair of teenaged addicts. Heliography is an early form of photographic printing, and its use reflects Cornell’s interest in Victorian motifs and technologies. The print’s combination of circles reflects his interest in both astronomy and time, the latter of which is also conjured by the reproduction of the iconic Big Ben. The title, Untitled (Derby Hat) is not clearly referenced anywhere in the print, contributing to its haunting, dreamlike qualities, which are further emphasized by the almost haphazard way in which the various elements seem to be joined together.

Earl Cunningham lived a long and interesting life, working as a tinkerer and itinerant peddler, a seaman in the coastal lumber trade, a harbor pilot, and a chicken farmer before settling down in Fort Augustine as the proprietor of the Over Fork Gallery, a combination antique shop and museum of his own paintings. With a goal to paint one thousand canvases, he is known to have painted over four hundred before his death at the age of 84. He rarely sold them, only doing so when absolutely necessary, and hoped to create a unified vision of the United States based on his travels, experiences, and interests. Cunningham, who was entirely self-taught, is frequently classified as a folk artist or memory painter. Though little is known about the exact genesis of his interest in art, he seems to have been inspired by Anna Mary Robertson “Grandma” Moses, as well as the lithographic company Currier & Ives and the French Fauves. This mix of influences suggests that Cunningham was thoughtful and deliberate about his art, though he existed outside of the educational and studio system that largely governed modern art in the twentieth century.

Cunningham rarely dated his works, but this one is likely from the early 1960s, when his work turned increasingly to depictions of the Everglades, the Seminole, and other Florida subjects. The luminous blue water and golden yellow plants are hallmarks of Cunningham’s, inspired by Fauvism but also by his habit of buying discounted paints, using them economically across many different works. The two figures in canoes in the foreground evoke the Seminole, but also Cunningham’s personal history. He was gifted a cedar canoe as a thank-you for his timely intervention to save the Grace, J.P. Morgan’s yacht during a storm. This blending of personal and national themes is typical for the artist.

The first time Imogen Cunningham photographed the transcendental painter Morris Graves was in 1950 on the grounds of his private retreat outside Seattle. An introspective portrait study of Graves who as a conscientious-objector had refused to enter the military during World War II resulted in his imprisonment, Cunningham’s photograph is considered a classic portrait. The photographer commented about the image, “Many people think it’s the only portrait I’ve made. You know, he’s never said whether he like it or not.”

Nearly twenty years later, in 1969, Cunningham sought out the reclusive Graves to include him in her venture After Ninety, a project about old age. He turned her down. She was persistent and several years later, in 1973, he agreed to have her photograph him, musing, “How can anyone refuse a 90-year old like Imogen anything?” Cunningham was 90 and Graves 63.

As a college student, Imogen studied chemistry and worked in the botany department of the University of Washington. She became interested in photography in 1905 working with a 4 x 5 camera ordered through a mail-order correspondence school. Gertrude Käsebier’s 1907 article published in The Craftsman inspired her. Cunningham worked in the Seattle studio of Edward S. Curtis, a chronicler of Amerindians, for two years beginning in 1907, learning the fine points of platinum printing and retouching of negatives. Following a fellowship to Dresden, Germany where she studied with a photo chemist, viewed the International Photographic Exhibition and artwork at museums, she opened a portrait studio in 1910 upon her return to Seattle.

Throughout her career that spanned 70 years Cunningham featured portraiture and images of the body including nudes, however she is most well known for the photographs emanating from her affiliation with the California formalists group F/64 that included photographers Edward Weston and Ansel Adams. The name derived from the f-stop on the camera that provided the sharpest focus and depth of field. Inspired by these associations Cunningham developed her early style—close-ups photographs of industrial complexes, botanical plants and flowers—calla lilies and magnolias blossoms. Ten of these photographic studies debuted in the exhibition Film und Foto featuring works by American and European artists held in Stuttgart, Germany in 1929.

Willem de Kooning, one of America’s most influential twentieth century artists, was a first-generation Abstract Expressionist. Abstract Expressionism radically changed the way in which people thought about art, as artists began creating spontaneous, expressive, and emotional works. Improvisation in the artistic process produced a dynamism and energy seen in the use of gestural brushstrokes and bright, acidic colors. While his contemporaries moved away from representational imagery, de Kooning favored figural abstraction. The female nude was a recurring subject matter for the artist, and this work is emblematic of De Kooning’s artistic practice. He gained recognition in the artworld for his “Women” series created from 1950-1953, which comprised of six oil paintings titled Woman I through Woman VI. In his later work, Two Women, de Kooning depicts the female form with dynamic, expressive linework that emphasizes the movement and physicality of the figures.

Jim Dine first achieved recognition as part of the avant-garde Downtown scene in New York, experimenting with painting while also authoring and participating in Happenings at Judson Gallery and other artist-initiated, alternative art spaces in the Greenwich and East Village neighborhoods of Manhattan. Feeling out of place in the increasingly formalist and abstract avant-garde during the 1960s heyday of Minimalism, Dine moved, first to London—where he studied the work of Old Masters and temporarily abandoned painting in favor of drawing—and then to rural Vermont. During the 1970s he focused in particular on his printmaking, working in a variety of different print media, including lithography, etching, aquatint, woodcut, and a number of combinations thereof. Frequently working with master printmakers on both sides of the Atlantic, Dine began to push the limits of the medium, using not only traditional printmaker’s tools but also innovative ones, including power tools he purchased at hardware stores.

This print, which is notably large for an etching, highlights several of the features of Dine’s prolific printmaking practice. The image of the bathrobe reoccurs in his work from the 1960s to the 1990s, along with images of tools and other everyday objects. These repetitions caused Dine to be lumped in with the Pop Art movement, a connection he strenuously denies. Instead of the hard, shiny artifice of Pop, Dine sees these images as deeply personal, akin to self-portraits through the objects he holds close. Like many of his other prints, Dine released this one in a very small edition, in this case only 17. He frequently painted or otherwise altered individual prints, making them more like monoprints or even paintings than traditional examples of the medium.

This print is the first in a series of twenty-five portraits of Dine’s wife Nancy, executed in collaboration with the legendary Parisian master printmaker Aldo Commelynck, who worked with Pablo Picasso among other artists. Dine describes Commelynck as one of his best friends in the world, and their collaboration resulted in a moving multifaceted portrait of Nancy Dine. Dine’s printmaking of the mid-1970s to the early 1980s was heavily invested in portraiture, especially of Nancy and himself, as well as a sharp linearity that contrasts with the voluptuous Expressionism of both earlier and later works on paper. The tangled tousle of Nancy’s hair, in which the artist seems to have rendered each individual strand, is reminiscent of his earlier studies of human hair, while the smudges of pigment that help delineate the contours of her face seem almost like Dine’s handprints on the plate.

As he developed the Nancy Outside series, which he referred to as his “etching symphony” Dine continually returned to this first image, reworking and repurposing the same plate as he continued to experiment with the technical limits of the printmaking medium. His desire to push etching as far as it could go was inspired by his love of German Expressionists, who similarly explored the possibilities of print.

Emory Douglas, who moved to San Francisco when he was eight, grew up in the segregated neighborhood of the Fillmore, where, like many African Americans of his generation, he was a frequent target of police harassment. At the age of twenty-one he enrolled in graphic design classes at City College in the city, and soon fell into the orbit of the playwright Amiri Baraka, who was undertaking a two-month artists’ residency at San Francisco State. Douglas designed sets for the writer, who introduced him to the crowd at the Black House, a cultural center at which he was staying during the residency. These residents included the actor and activist Danny Glover, as well as Eldridge Cleaver, who would become one of the founders of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, along with Bobby Seale and Huey Newton, who were frequent visitors to the Black House.

Douglas participated in several of the early Black Panther Party actions, including a 1967 armed demonstration at the California State House in Sacramento, after which he and most of the other Panthers were arrested. In aftermath of that event, as well as the murder of an unarmed teenager named Denzil Dowell by police in the East Bay city of North Richmond, the Panthers began to publish The Black Panther, a weekly underground newspaper which would come to have a circulation of over 100,000. Douglas soon took charge of the newspaper’s design and layout, and was named the BPP’s Minister of Culture, holding both roles until the early 1980s. At The Black Panther he adopted a style that blended the aesthetics of commercial art with leftist propaganda posters from Vietnam, Cuba, and the Middle East, using the newspaper and posters like these—based on images from the paper’s back page—to spread the BPP’s revolutionary message of Black self-reliance and self-defense.

Audrey Flack’s long career has closely followed the contours of the history of American art since the 1950s. She began her career working in the Abstract Expressionist tradition, making paintings that combined the movement’s thick impasto and all-over abstraction. Towards the end of the 1950s she began to feel that Abstract Expressionism was unable to meet the social and political needs of the moment, embarking on further study of anatomy and the Old Masters, in particular the Spanish Baroque. Her best-known works are in an intensely photorealist style that combines the hard-edged, plasticky look of Pop Art and advertising imagery with the dense detail and witty allusions of the vanitas still-life tradition.

More recently, Flack has begun to explore sculpture, in particular monumentally scaled sculptures of women that blend classical iconography with her signature hyper-realism. This portrait bust is a scaled-down version of a larger work, part of a massive public commission for the city of Rock Hill, South Carolina. Part of the Gateway, a new business district, the four heroically-scaled female Civitas figures pay tribute to the city’s history—in particular the textile industry—and the virtues of industry and knowledge it seeks to inculcate. Flack, who is self-taught in sculpture, has characterized it as both “New Millennium Neo-Classicism” and post-postmodernism, remarking on the latter term that “The irony and cynicism in postmodernism comes right out of Pop Art. And there’s no cynicism in my work.” Instead, she presents a sincere image of civic strength and virtue buttressed by a similar strength she identifies in female figures from the past, both historical and mythological.

Born in Tupelo Mississippi, Sam Gilliam grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, attending the University of Louisville for both undergraduate and graduate school. He did not become an abstract painter until the 1960s, when he moved to Washington, D.C. There he became aware of the Washington Color School, a group of painters including Helen Frankenthaler and Kenneth Noland, who had been experimenting with pouring heavily diluted acrylic paints on raw, unprimed canvases. This process results in luminous admixtures of swirling color, with the weave of the canvas visible through the painted surface. 

Blue and Red (And Again) dates from a turning point in Gilliam’s career.  In 1967—the year this painting was created—Gilliam’s soak-stain abstractions took a new direction, as he began to crumple, hang, or otherwise distort the physical surfaces of his canvases as they dried, creating new splotches, swirls, and similar effects. He also frequently began to incorporate touches of metallic and other bright paints in his work, as can be seen in the metallic blue droplets which stipple the surface of this painting. He stretched many of these paintings on beveled-edged stretches which gave them a greater volume than standard paintings. These experiments with three-dimensionality would result in 1968 in the series he called the Drape paintings. Eschewing stretchers entirely, these works are suspended from gallery ceilings and walls, and can be hung to complement any given exhibition space, rather than existing in fixed configurations.

Sam Gilliam’s rise to prominence in the art world (he represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 1972) coincided with the rise of the interrelated Black Power and Black Arts Movements. Both movements were skeptical of visual abstraction, preferring artworks which they believed spoke directly to the Black experience in America. This excluded Gilliam and his fellow Black abstract artists, even though many of them considered both their lives and their artworks as engaged in the same struggles for freedom and equality. Gilliam participated in the 1963 March on Washington, and always considered his abstract work inextricably bound up with his blackness. He has commented on his work’s relationship to jazz—both a quintessentially abstract art form and a quintessentially Black one—as well as to the flowing rivers of the American South, particularly in his hometown of Louisville, Kentucky. He views his own insistence on abstraction as an activist gesture, a refusal to allow the imperfections and injustices of the wider world to impinge upon his artistic vision. 

Gilliam, a longtime teacher at the Corcoran School of Art, Maryland Institute College of Art, and Carnegie Mellon University, has long referenced other artists in his work, including both historical painters and contemporaries. This silkscreen is inspired by and dedicated to fellow African American artist Chakaiah Booker, whose wearable found-object sculptures build upon the abstract legacy of Gilliam’s Drapes and work by other Black abstract artists The print’s intricately crumpled forms and skeins of color lend it a complex delicacy, while its irregular shape speaks to the kinetic dynamism of both artists’ work.

Ramiro Gomez was born in San Bernardino, California in 1986 and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. Across different media, Gomez makes visible the too-often invisible physical effort of construction laborers, landscapers, nannies, and other unrecognized workers. In this work, he takes a glossy magazine page and inserts the labor that remains absent in the constructed image of domestic life as depicted in advertising, home décor, and fashion magazines. The thinness of the page and the torn edges emphasize the tangible quality of the forms and reinforce the experience of flipping through the pages of a magazine like Architectural Digest and ripping out a page of interest.

The artist began with magazine interventions as a result of his own experiences as a nanny and the labor of his parents who immigrated from Mexico. His ghostly figures appear in posh surroundings, as exemplified by this pool scene. His work resonates beyond Southern California. Gomez explains: “What I am painting about isn’t anything new—it’s in fact very familiar, immediately recognizable to everyone without getting lost in translation. Labor is everywhere, the cast is different, but the role is the same.” The artist’s work recognizes laborers working in Los Angeles and beyond, and in doing so fills a void in visual culture and popular consciousness.

Felrath Hines moved to New York City in 1946 after studying and working in Indianapolis and Chicago. In New York he was at the epicenter of the American art world’s embrace of the gestural, painterly visual language of Abstract Expressionism. He moved even closer to the center of that world when he began an apprenticeship at the workshop of master framer Robert M. Kulicke, whose spare, modern frames were preferred by Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, and other Abstract Expressionists. This initial experience with the technical aspects of modern art led him to a career in art conservation, which he practiced first as owner of his own conservation company and then as Chief Conservator at the National Portrait Gallery starting in 1972. In fact, conservation was his primary career until 1984, when he retired as the Chief Conservator at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.

Around the time of his move from New York to Washington, D.C. in 1972, Hines’s work shifted from an Abstract Expressionist style to a more geometric Hard Edge abstraction, mirroring a shift in the broader art world around that time. This undated watercolor, despite the seemingly gestural mode of application of pigment, likely dates from around that time or later. In it, Hines lays his colors next to and on top of one another, exploring the ways in which they contrast, mingle, and overlap as they soak into the paper, informing a future composition utilizing his preferred precise, orderly composition.

This work dates from the height of Hines’s Abstract Expressionist period, though it also presages his shift to a more geometric form of abstraction in the 1970s. In it, he lays swirls of paint on top and beside one another in a thick impasto, exploring the rhythmic variations in color and texture the technique produces. At the same time, the area of this experimentation lays in a tight bound, surrounded by a whitish-blue framing element that contains and limits this Abstract Expressionist riot, suggesting his future interest in tightly controlled forms.

Hines’s work of this period indicates his deep engagement with the broader art world, as does his participation in Spiral, a group of African American artists who originally came together in 1963 to participate in the March on Washington. Meeting in the Manhattan studio of Romare Bearden, the artists discussed issues related to African Americans in the art world as well as their differing approaches to art making. The group had one exhibition before disbanding in 1965, though the many of the artists who participated regard it as an important and formative moment in their careers. Other than with Spiral, Hines mostly refused to exhibit in works dedicated to African American artists, arguing that the work of artists working in wildly different styles should not be considered together simply because they shared a racial identity. This refusal—plus his move from New York to Washington, D.C. in 1972—may have kept him from achieving as much recognition as he otherwise might, but his prolific late-career output and an increasing art world appreciation for Black abstract artists has done much to correct that historical oversight.

Wolf Kahn lived an eventful life. Born in Stuttgart and raised in Frankfurt, he narrowly escaped Nazi Germany as part of the famed Kindertransport of Jewish children to the United Kingdom in the last months before the start of World War II. He eventually rejoined his father and other siblings in New York, where he graduated from the city’s High School of Music and Art alongside fellow future artist Allan Kaprow. Upon his discharge from the Navy he enrolled at the New School, but found he yearned to study art. He thus used his GI Bill benefits to study at the famed painting school of fellow German immigrant Hans Hofmann. Kahn quickly absorbed the master’s abstract principles while never abandoning his own commitment to painting the world around him. In addition to Hofmann, the witty, erudite Kahn—who earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Chicago in a single year of study—was attracted to the work of a number of other European modernists, including Chaim Soutine and Pierre Bonnard.

This work dates from Kahn’s comfortable and productive middle age. His palette lightened considerably in the late 1950s, under the influence of his wife, the late abstract painter Emily Mason. He also discovered pastel, which he came to consider the medium upon which all of his other art was based. From the 1970s he heavily invested himself in exploring the landscapes around his and Mason’s farm in North Brattleboro, Vermont, occasionally venturing elsewhere to work on a commission. This depiction of the Delaware River likely came on such an occasion. Kahn—who remained active as a painter well into his eighties—was particularly taken with bright orange, which he called “one of those really good attention-grabbing colors,” using it to blend the landscape tradition with Hofmann-inflected formalism, all during a period when the art world had largely abandoned painting and other traditional mediums in favor of performance art and other conceptual paradigms. In this work Kahn abandons any attempt at representational color, blending bright orange, white, and acidic yellow in a way that calls forth the strong, active line and brushstroke of his Abstract Expressionist peers.

Jasper Johns is one of the most influential artists of the late twentieth century. Getting his start as a painter, Johns is widely credited with helping to inaugurate the art world’s transition from the heroic autobiographical orientation of Abstract Expressionism to the more conceptual currents represented by Pop, Minimalism, and other, later movements. By using familiar, even rote, motifs like targets and American flags in his early paintings, he was able to decouple the painting’s physical nature from its meaning, exploring the way different mediums and materials changed the look and feel of the works. Beginning in the early 1960s he began to work closely with a variety of printmaking techniques, beginning with lithography and expanding to include etching and silkscreen. Printmaking allowed him to further expand his exploration of technique, structure, and process.

This silkscreen dates from the decade—roughly spanning 1972 to 1983—when Johns’s work shifted from his recognizable symbols into full abstraction. Known as his crosshatch period for the series of marks (which don’t actually ever cross) that fill the surfaces of his paintings and prints—which Johns claims to have gathered from a design painted on a car he saw in Manhattan—this era of Johns’s work saw him continually reworking this pattern, often in carefully limited palettes of primary or secondary colors. Though this and similar works may seem chaotic and random, they actually are the product of careful and systematic planning, and careful examination of the marks reveals complex, almost indecipherable patterns. The addition of the newsprint underneath the secondary colors of orange, violet, and green recalls Johns’s ongoing fascination with the medium, which he had collaged into his paintings as early as the mid-1950s.

This silkscreen print, a late-career collaboration between the American painter Jacob Lawrence and the Washington, D.C. master printer Lou Stovall, depicts the violent first moments of the outbreak of the famed slave revolt on the Spanish slave ship La Amistad. This action, after which the ship was captured by the United States, eventually resulted in the slaves earning their freedom and returning to Sierra Leone. The revolt and subsequent trial were an instant sensation, galvanizing the nascent abolition movement in the United States and remaining a potent symbol of Black resistance to oppression over the intervening decades.

Lawrence is one of America’s best-known modern artists, as well as a luminary of the Harlem Renaissance. Inspired by historians like W.E.B. Du Bois, whose work he read at the famed Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the 135^th Street Branch of the New York Public Library, Lawrence embarked in the late 1930s and early 1940s on several series depicting important figures and events in Black history, including Toussaint L’Ouverture, Harriet Tubman, and the Great Migration. Working in gouache, a kind of opaque watercolor, he used his mastery of Cubist approaches to form and color to bring the visual tenets of high modernism together with his didactic approach to history. In this print that mastery is on full display, as the twisting figures fight, swinging long curved knives in the desperate struggle for freedom. The roiling waters of the Atlantic Ocean along the bottom of the image serve as a grim reminder of the price of failure.

This work demonstrates Doris Leeper’s ardent commitment to geometric abstraction. While she originally chose representational imagery and practiced with paint in an expressionist manner, her mature approach, as evidenced here, was minimal and exhibited a commitment to hard edges. Although this small-scale work serves as an excellent example of her abstract compositions, much of Leeper’s works, both sculptures and paintings, were large in scale. The flat and thin application of paint is typical of her painting; moreover, the intense red and pink hues present here are not uncommon in her work. She employed a varied palette but was actively engaged with bright colors.

Despite being raised in North Carolina, Doris (known as “Doc”) Leeper, who moved to Florida in 1958, is now considered to be one of state’s most significant artists. She exhibited throughout the state and some of her works can be seen in public spaces today such as the Orlando International Airport, the campus of the University of Central Florida, and at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, of which she was a co-founder. Leeper was further supported in the region by several corporations that acquired her work. The Museum possesses 50 works by Leeper in its permanent collection, ranging from early pieces that reveal her expressive approach to representational art, to her more recognized and dedicated Minimalist aesthetic. In addition to paintings, prints, and assemblages, the museum houses some sculptural work, including maquettes made in anticipation of public art projects.

The sources for many of Whitfield Lovell’s figurative drawings come from found photographs. He collects objects and serves as an archivist, and he transforms historic photographs of black Americans into his own highly recognizable visual art form of wood constructions. Here, a woman’s stately elegance is reinforced by her high collar, long sleeves, and the bustle of her dress. The source image for this drawing is likely a studio portrait. Lovell’s hand renders the woman’s figure and the creases and draping of her dress in a highly naturalistic manner.

In addition to the use of found photography, and the presentation of his drawings on reclaimed wood, the juxtaposition of an object, here a radio, is a common attribute of the artist’s oeuvre. Some of the works he creates with musical instruments play music, while others, like Patience, do not. Lovell avoids literal readings between the objects and the drawings in his work, and instead encourages a visual experience of surprise and heightened intrigue. For example, the cathedral-style radio presented here was popular in the early 1930s and the woman’s dress relates to the late nineteenth century. Despite being from different eras, the work possesses a similar ornamental architecture. His wood forms with found-object juxtapositions yield distinctive tableaux with an “incantatory quality.”

The phrase presented here in pink and green neon is a haunting reminder of the fragility of personal security and of a just society. The statement is attributed to the Protestant pastor Martin Niemöller, who spoke out against Germans who were complicit in the rise of Nazi power and the horrors experienced by Jews and others during World War II. Variations of his original, spoken quote exist. One version cites him follows:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

Patrick Martinez, born and raised in Los Angeles, gleans inspiration from daily life in his city. In the case of this work, driving home from his studio at night he witnessed various businesses' use of neon. The format of Then They Came for Me derives from ATM signage. Neon beckons people to a particular business, and this type of plea for attention functions in a different, though related manner in this piece, within a contemporary context fraught with political and racial tension. Martinez is deeply impacted by issues such as police brutality and immigration legislation, which are important to his family, friends, and community. Moreover, popular culture—from neon signage to hip-hop music, graffiti, and even Pee-Chee school folders—seeps into his work.

Rubén Ortiz-Torres uses the ubiquitous phrase “Tierra y Libertad” (Land and Liberty) which appeared in banners, photographs, and murals related to the Mexican Revolution (1910–20), in a new context with this Minimalist work. A battle cry for the people, this potent slogan became associated with the Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, who fought for agrarian reform. However, more specifically the artist evokes Ricardo Flores Magón here and “the anarchist political slogan hoisted above Tijuana in the early twentieth century.” Flores Magón founded the Mexican Liberal Party (Partido Liberal Mexicano, or PLM) in 1905. Some of his followers led an insurrection in Baja California in 1911 that led them to briefly control cities such as Tijuana and Mexicali. Here, Ortiz-Torres’ title, Toma de Tijuana, refers to that history.

In this work, Ortiz-Torres embraces Minimalism, but through his own distinctive translation of this artistic movement. The bright-red hue of the work emphasizes the bold and direct intention of the original slogan as a political statement that represented the landless people and galvanized the working classes in both rural and urban settings. But the letters do not mimic the boldness of the red. Instead, the viewer perceives the text only as a result of close-looking. The minimal finish of the text emphasizes the unique surface of red and its material properties. The surface also references the Light and Space Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, during which California-based artists placed emphasis on finishes, environment, and perception. He interrogates representations of Mexican identity and as a result produces new forms from which we can reimagine that past and rethink the future.

Artist Faith Ringgold’s practice addresses female independence and racial equality. Ringgold uses various media such as painting, quilting, and literature, and many of her works revolve around themes of African American history and identity. Tar Beach is based on Ringgold’s narrative quilt, inspired by her childhood memories growing up in Harlem, New York. The narrative features the story of Cassie, a young girl who escapes the summer heat of the city by relaxing on the roof of her apartment building, the “beach,” with her family. She fantasizes of leaping off the roof and flying over the city. In this image, Cassie flies above the city and over the George Washington Bridge. This act of flying becomes a metaphor for Cassie’s freedom and contrasts the masculine icon of the bridge.

Lorna Simpson addresses race and gender in ways that resist an exact interpretation of her work. Counting combines compartmentalized images and text within a single composition, a reoccurring approach in the artist’s oeuvre. At the top of this composition, an image of a woman’s clavicle bone appears, a part of the female body that is both fragile and often cited for its beauty. The slight detailing of her neckline enhances her femininity. This gentle ornamentation contrasts with the threat of violence against this particular part of the human body. The image is accompanied by text that makes reference to a schedule, although the significance of the timeframes remains undefined. The various types might reference continual, even dizzying labor. In the middle of the composition, a smokehouse is depicted; both image and text recall colonial plantation history in the United States and suggest the horrors of slavery. In the bottom image, the hair of an African American woman is presented in a circular formation, and the numbers are indicative of its structure. All of the images here relate to either the construction of the built environment or to the assembly of human form. Each of the visual forms possesses political and cultural weight.

Andy Warhol was an American artist celebrated for his production of Pop Art styled works. In many of Warhol’s works, brightly colored images of everyday objects, mass-marketed consumerism, and popular culture icons dominated his aesthetic. Warhol drew his subject matter from various forms of media including television, magazines, and advertisements. This portrait depicts conceptual German artist Joseph Beuys (1921-1986). Warhol and Beuys met in 1979 and were familiar with each other’s work, as they both used new media and transformed traditional objects into art. Beuys created the concept of “social sculpture,” referring to the notion that art is meant to activate the viewer’s creativity based on his own experiences. Warhol prominently displays Beuys in his felt hat and fisherman’s vest, which were both characteristic attributes of the German artist.