Long marginalized by their community and
overlooked by the art market, African American abstractionists are finally
coming into the spotlight
Text | Hilarie M. Sheets for ARTnews
Published | June 4, 2014
“Donald
Judd didn’t have to explain himself. Why do I have to?” asks Jennie C. Jones,
an African American abstract painter who has grappled with the issue of how her
work can or should reflect her race. “Fred Sandback can make this beautiful
line and not have to have it literally be a metaphor for his cultural
identity.”
Jones, 45,
sidestepped the debates around multiculturalism that were raging when she was
in school in the 1980s and gravitated toward Minimalism. Yet over the last
decade, she has forged a conceptual link in her work between the histories of
abstraction and of modern jazz in America—“black guys in the 1950s taking jazz
into the concert hall and making it this bluesy hybrid with Bach,” as she puts
it.
In her
recent show at Sikkema Jenkins in New York, an atonal sound environment
accompanied her monochromatic paintings that had acoustic panels attached to
the canvases. Strips of fluorescent color painted on the edges of the canvases
bounced off the white walls and created a sense of movement, rhythm, and
vibration. “This art and music juncture,” she says, “gave me the permission to
point to something in the room that said, ‘I didn’t fall out of the sky.’”
The
contributions of African American artists to the inventions of abstract
painting have historically been overlooked, or else fraught with the kind of
questions faced by Jones. “Generations of black abstract painters never seem to
be celebrated,” says Valerie Cassel Oliver, senior curator at the Contemporary
Arts Museum Houston, where she recently organized “Black in the Abstract,” a
two-part exhibition that focused on the history of African American painters
working in abstraction. She placed younger artists, including Jones, Shinique
Smith, and Angel Otero, in dialogue with members of the older generation, such
as Felrath Hines, Alma Thomas, and Romare Bearden, who were producing seminal
works in the 1960s.
“You find
these artists being marginalized on both ends of the spectrum,” Cassel Oliver
continues. “There was this manifesto with the Black Arts Movement that you did
work that reflected the beauty of that community in no uncertain terms,” she
says, referring to a group that coalesced in the 1960s to promote social and
political engagement in art and literature. “Oftentimes abstract painting is
not as celebrated as more figurative work by the black community. From the
mainstream art world, it’s just the sense of not being preoccupied with what
black artists are doing, period.”
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