I recently went to the Baltimore Museum of Art’s exhibition, Generations: A History of Black Abstract Art, which is on view until this January 19, 2020. I highly recommend you go! There are over 28 artists featured, and here are just a few artists that I liked.
Mark Bradford. He uses collage and decollage taking imagery, text, materials and experiences from his home in South Los Angeles. This work has been described as a type of “sacred geometry” that visual represents and celebrates his grandmother’s divine wisdom.
Jack Whitten. I like this piece because it actually reminds me of two of my classmates active brushstrokes. Though influenced by Willem de Kooning, whom he knew, Whitten defined his own dynamic brand of hallucinatory abstract painting. Active in the 60s, his early juxtapose abstraction with surreal figurative imagery.
Charles Gaines. It’s fascinating how many visual artists are influenced by Buddhism, meditation, and Buddhist art, which relies heavily upon a grid system. In an interview on Artforum, he says:
“Through reading—first Henri Focillon’s The Life of Forms in Art and then volumes on Tantric and Buddhist art—I discovered art practices in the world beyond this. I wanted to deal with ideas intellectually and rationally, but from my own perspective as a Westerner. So I looked for tropes, like mathematics, that do not privilege the creative unconscious…. The ego is limiting; we gravitate toward things we know and can’t imagine things we don’t know. Through “systems” I could go where the imagination couldn’t and bring things that otherwise would not be thought about to light. Out of this I began using the grid.
Melvin Edwards. I really liked this sculptural piece because it depicts two sculptures – one that rocks and has “it’s mouth always open,” and one that is more closed and stable. The artist says in an interview of his retrospective at the Nasher Museum of Art: “It’s called A Conversation with Norman Lewis. That’s based on something he used to say: ‘You can’t hear with your mouth open.'” It makes me consider the artists role in both conversing and listening…
MONICA HEISER 