Click on the article for an overview.

An excerpt;

Abstract painting, with its focus on formal subtleties, color and more subliminal messaging, may not have tidily fit into this narrative of freedom and revolution, yet it was a vital component of the era. The origins of Black abstract painting can be traced back to Norman Lewis, who started out as a social realist painter before World War II — 1940’s “The Dispossessed (Family),” in which a recently evicted family, trying to comfort one another while surrounded by the detritus of their middle-class possessions, is among the saddest artworks of the 20th century — before entering increasingly abstract realms in subsequent decades.

See below "The Dispossessed (Family)" and also "Untitled".

Click on the right for the writer's perspective regarding the previous article.

An excerpt:

"In the 1960s, there was an expectation that African-American artists make work that engaged explicitly with the civil rights struggle or that was explicitly invested in racial uplift. To a certain extent, this is still true today. Figurative painting and art that’s very direct in its social critique has dominated the conversation for a few years, and for good reason. But I wanted to know how artists who worked in less representative modes dealt with that expectation".

Click on the right image for an overview.

An excerpt:

"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".

Click on the image on the right to read a brief introduction of Norman Lewis and view his work.

An excerpt:

"Norman Lewis was an African-American artist of Bermudian descent known for his incisive depictions of contemporary society and poetic abstractions.

“I wanted to be above criticism so that my work didn’t have to be discussed in terms of the fact that I’m black,” he once said."

Click on the right to view some of the work of Norman Lewis.

An excerpt:

"After the war, Lewis abandoned his belief that realistic art could ever play a significant role in reshaping the culture. He said, “I used to paint Negroes being dispossessed; discrimination, and slowly I became aware of the fact that this didn't move anybody, it didn't make things better.” He dedicated himself instead to a lifelong exploration of the more universal aspects of aesthetics, mobilizing the power of color, line, texture, and form to bring people together in a visual space of contemplation and transcendence."

Click on the image on the right to find out more about the work by this artist. Images of six works by Lewis which illustrate Lewis' transition from realism to abstraction are below.

Click on the right to read a brief intro to Sam Gilliam and view his work in different exhibitions. One of his works,' Green April', 1969, is pictured below.

"Gilliam painted Red April by pouring and splattering acrylic pigments (some thinned-out, some thick and intense) onto a raw canvas he placed on the floor. Gilliam folded the canvas like an accordion and let the paint dry for a while. He intended for some of the pigment to remain wet so that when he unfolded the canvas, it would pull off and adhere to the canvas on top of it. Gilliam then stretched the canvas on beveled stretchers, so it would appear to be coming out of the wall."

(From WIKIART)

Click on the right for an overview of tje work of Sam Gilliam.

An excerpt :

"As an African-American artist caught in the maelstrom of the civil rights movement, Sam Gilliam received fierce criticism because his abstract paintings did not address black culture.

"It's much more exciting to think about Titian and Tintoretto," the soft-spoken artist explained. "For different reasons, there's concern for 'African-American art,' but when you try to turn politics into art, you are going to get into trouble.

Click on the right for a most recent review of the work of Ssm Gilliam.

An excerpt:

"Born in Tupelo, Mississippi, in 1933, Gilliam moved to D.C. in 1962 and became affiliated with the Washington Color School, a group of color-field painters such as Gene Davis and Morris Louis. A series of formal breakthroughs would eventually result in his now iconic Drape paintings, which expanded upon the tropes of Abstract Expressionism in an entirely new way."

View below six works by Sam Gilliam from 1971 to now.

# 6. Dia Beacon (ongoing)

A quote from Sam Gilliam

“I can build according to any space I exist in. No work is ever shown the same way again. So it goes from unit to environment and I work with the unique object plus its environmental possibilities,” Gilliam says. “The object is finite but the possibilities that extend through the object are infinite. I am an adventurer.”

Click on the right to read about the processes of Sam Gilliam's painting

An excerpt:

"He had experimented with the color and space effects of folding and rolling small watercolors for several years, then “. . . the idea just occurred to me as I was finding with the watercolors, . . . why not just remove the support, why don’t I use the form, let the form. This in the sense of trying to believe in the materials or the kind of tool that I actually use and let them excite the kinds of possibilities, and not to get too mental, you know, about what’s really going on. Just to sort of sit back and observe what you’re doing as much as you can, you know—just work and let things go. So that I got this whole kind of idea of really sitting back and looking at curtains . . . and with the one here [one of the large Carousels] of actually going to the top [of the painting] and kind of breaking the frame and [thus] getting into the shape. Suddenly I felt myself constructing kinds of traverse rods and actually hanging the paintings, so that all these problems of trying to structure and of letting them move and create the kind of forms I really wanted [could be worked out that way]."

Click on right to learn more about this sale.

An excerpt:

"Joining the rarefied $100 million-plus club in a salesroom punctuated by periodic gasps from the crowd, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s powerful 1982 painting of a skull brought $110.5 million at Sotheby’s, to become the sixth most expensive work ever sold at auction. Only 10 other works have broken the $100 million mark.

“He’s now in the same league as Francis Bacon and Pablo Picasso,” said the dealer Jeffrey Deitch, an expert on Basquiat."

Click on the right for an overview of the life and work of Jean-Michel Basquiat.

The Introduction

"In 1985, the New York Times Magazine featured a shoeless Jean-Michel Basquiat on its cover. Titled “New Art, New Money,” the piece it ran with was ostensibly about the artist, but its focus was really the vague concept of the “art star”—a celebrity who not only made a lot of money (largely unheard of), but who didn’t care if others knew how much money they made (terribly uncool). Art stars, the article said, went to the Midtown New York hotspot Mr. Chow, a trendy watering hole that doubled as a place to be seen and a place to have a drink. That made Basquiat quite unlike Jackson Pollock and his contemporaries, whose clubhouse, the West Village Cedar Tavern, was described as “grubby” and anonymous."

View below Basquiat's work.

An excerpt:

"The show, “Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure,” features more than 200 artworks and artifacts from the artist’s estate — 177 of which have never been exhibited before — in a 15,000-square-foot space ​​designed by the architect David Adjaye. Providing perhaps the most detailed personal portrait to date of Basquiat’s development, the show comes at a time when the artist’s market value continues to soar and his themes of race and self-identity have become especially resonant. (The mayor’s office is to proclaim Saturday, the show’s opening, Jean-Michel Basquiat Day.)"

Click on the right for an overview of the work of Alma W. Thomas.

An excerpt:

"Alma W. Thomas: Everything Is Beautiful will demonstrate how Thomas’ artistic practices extended to every facet of her life, from community service and teaching to gardening and dress. Unlike a traditional retrospective, the exhibition will be organized around multiple themes from Thomas’ life and career. These themes include the context of her Washington Color School cohort, the creative communities connected to her time at Howard University and the protests against museums that failed to represent women and artists of color."

"Alma Woodsey Thomas developed her signature abstract painting style in her late 70s, after spending more than three decades teaching art in a Washington, D.C., junior high school. Characterized by brightly colored, lozenge-shaped brushstrokes arranged in long bands or dense, puzzle-like patterns, the style broke significantly with Thomas’s earlier realistic paintings. For all their apparent spontaneity, paintings like Iris, Tulips, Jonquils, and Crocuses reflect deliberate planning by Thomas. She often created watercolor sketches and used free-hand pencil marks on the canvas as a guide, some of which are still visible.

Thomas knew of her contemporaries Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and Sam Gilliam who formed the Washington Color School movement, and they shared her interest in the optical effects of color. Yet Thomas’s paintings are distinct in that they were inspired, shaped, and continually refreshed by her direct experience of nature. She studied the hues, patterns, and movement of trees and flowers in her yard and Washington area parks. She was also fascinated by the U.S. space program’s Apollo lunar missions, which presented new paradigms of space and depth that Thomas interpreted in her paintings."

Click on the right to view a number of works by Alma Thomas.

An excerpt:

"Through color, I have sought to concentrate on beauty and happiness, rather than on man’s inhumanity to man", Alma Thomas, 1970

View below three pieces of work by Alma Thomas.