Arthur Monroe: The Ancestors Are Humming

18 February - 10 April, 2021 515 West 29th St., New York

If you are a painter, you have to start solving problems. What should the painting have?

Sometimes it’s a combination - a variety of things that you’ve experienced as a person. Other times, it’s quite different from anything you know.

How do you make a painting out of things you don’t know?

These are interesting questions, and you don’t always know what the outcome is going to be. So you are saddled with that horrendous undertaking…without having a conclusion about it.

-Arthur Monroe

Malin Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of paintings by the late

Oakland-based artist Arthur Monroe. The presentation includes nine large-scale paintings drawn from a three-decade span from 1980 to 2011. Monroe travelled within several of the major cultural milieu of the mid-century: the

New York School of Abstract

Arthur Monroe, Untitled, 1980, oil on canvas Expressionism; the literary scene of New York’s East Village; and modern Jazz and Beat circles in New York and the Bay Area. After resettling in Oakland, Monroe showed extensively with key contemporaries from the Bay Area, including Robert Colescott, Joan Brown, Jay DeFeo, Mary

Lovelace O’Neal, Mike Henderson and Raymond Saunders. The Ancestors Are Humming is the

first solo gallery exhibition of Monroe’s work in New York since 1966.

Born in Harlem in 1935, Monroe was educated at the renowned Boy’s High School in the

Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. He was subsequently invited to study at the experimental Brooklyn Museum Art School (BMAS), where his classmates included Marisol and

Robert Smithson, and his teachers included Max Beckmann, William Baziotes and Ben Shahn.

Monroe also studied at the Art Students League and in the studio of Hans Hofmann, who became a key mentor and advocate. Monroe immersed himself within the swirling and cross-cutting currents of the avant-garde of mid-century New York City, forming close friendships with key poets, musicians and artists of the period. Dividing his time between Harlem and the East Village, Monroe developed a circle including saxophonist Charles “Yardbird” Parker; the poet LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka); drummer Max Roach; and pianist Thelonious Monk. He held court at the jazz club The Open

Door and the downtown Cedar Tavern - the epicenter of the New York Abstract Expressionist movement. Among the Abstract Expressionists, Monroe was particularly close to Franz Kline,

Jackson Pollock, and Willem de Kooning, whose studio was just across the hall from his own.

After a stint in the army during the Korean War, Monroe joined the Post-War wave of artists settling in Northern California - landing initially in Big Sur and subsequently migrating to the

North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco. Monroe became a key figure in the Beat and San

Francisco Renaissance movements, befriending luminaries such as Jack Kerouac, Bob

Kaufman and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who became a life-long friend after mounting one of

Arthur Monroe, Untitled, 1980, oil on canvas Monroe’s first shows of paintings at the seminal City Lights bookstore in 1962. One of

Monroe’s key patrons during this period was Dr. Reidar Wennesland, a Norwegian-American physician who had previously treated Edvard Munch and became the leading collector of Bay

Area art during the Beat era. Monroe is the most heavily represented artist in the Wennesland

Collection, which remains on permanent display at the Agder District College and the

Kristiansand Cathedral School in Norway.

During the post-war years, Monroe enjoyed an intermittently peripatetic lifestyle, with intervals spent in West Africa, Central America and South America. He lived for a period in Ajijic Village in Jalisco, where he was immersed in both the local indigenous culture and a community of expatriate artists, writers and musicians. The jazz pioneer Charles Lloyd lived next door and became a close friend for the remainder of Monroe’s life. In 1975, Monroe took over a historic industrial building in East Oakland, the Oakland Cannery, which he converted into a live/work facility for artists, musicians and community-based organizations. The Oakland Cannery became a hub of artistic activity and community activism in East Oakland for nearly four decades, and Monroe resided and maintained a studio in the building until the end of this life.

Monroe spent his later years pursuing his own artistic practice in an intensely personal fashion, while simultaneously working at the Oakland Museum of California, where he served as Chief

Registrar for 30 years. Working in a highly deterministic (and largely private) mode, Monroe painstakingly traced his own artistic trajectory. While continuing to expand upon the visual idiom of Abstract Expressionism, Monroe developed a singular process that was highly- considered - almost empirical. Every painting began as rectilinear grid, which Monroe used as a register to formulate the color palette for his work. Stretching back to his tutelage under Hans

Hofmann, Monroe’s approach to painting began as an inquiry into the relationships between a set of colors. Over long periods, line and form would emerge in a discursive, iterative process.

Although Monroe intended each work to establish a visual context within which viewers could have their own contingent experiences, he also encoded a lifetime of his artistic experience and inquiry within the successive layers of paint - an animating quality which his friend Charles

Lloyd characterized as a surpassing knowingness.

Arthur was a great painter, philosopher, sage, and seer. My last visit to his studio is indelibly etched in my memory bank: every corner, every surface of his studio held a layer of his consciousness. In the pure white light of the…the East Bay, his “knowingness” was revealed.

-Charles Lloyd Arthur Monroe - In Consideration of Time

Arthur Monroe, The Ancestors Are Humming - Installation View (2021)

Arthur Monroe (b. 1935, New York, NY; d. 2019, Oakland, CA) was an American abstract painter and museum professional. He was educated at The Boy’s School in the Bedford-

Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn and the Brooklyn Museum School Art School (BMAS). Monroe trained further in painting at the renowned Art Students League and under the private tutelage of the seminal German-American painter Hans Hofman. During his lifetime, Monroe exhibited at venues including the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY); the San Francisco

Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA); the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, MN); University of

Kristiansand Kunsthalle (Norway); the Oakland Museum (Oakland, CA); the Museum of the

African Diaspora (San Francisco, CA,); the Pasadena Museum of Art (Pasadena, CA); the

University of California, Santa Barbara

(Santa Barbara, CA); the University of

California at Berkeley (Berkeley, CA); the

University of Santa Cruz (Santa Cruz, CA); and the Trident Museum of Art (Santa Clara,

CA). His artwork resides in the permanent collections of the National Museum of

African American History and Culture

(Washington, DC); Kristianina University

(Oslo, Norway); the University of Agder

(Grimstad, Norway); and the De Sassiet

Museum (Santa Clara, CA). Monroe worked as the Chief Registrar of the Oakland

Museum of Art for over 30 years. His collected papers from 1950 - 2019 were recently acquired by the Smithsonian’s

Archives of American Art.

Malin Gallery (formerly Burning in Water Gallery) is a New York-based contemporary art gallery. With a close-knit group of roster artists and industry professionals, Malin Gallery is a

21st century gallery that still maintains a classical value system of integrity, scholarship, and long-term support of individual artists.

Founded in 2015 by Dr. Barry Thomas Malin as Burning in Water, Malin Gallery actively represents a diverse roster of living artists. The curatorial program combines exhibitions by roster artists with historically-oriented shows, particularly of work by previously under- recognized artists. The gallery’s progressive approach to curation has earned it a reputation in both introducing and re-introducing important artists to a NY audience. Malin Gallery exhibitions have been reviewed in multiple national publications, including The New York Times, The New

Yorker, Artforum, The Wall Street Journal, ARTnews, Time Out - New York, Galerie, The

San Francisco Chronicle, The London Review of Books and Artnet News. Gallery artists are included in renowned public collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art,

New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the

National Gallery of Art (Washington D.C.); the Saint Louis Art Museum; and the New

Orleans Museum of Art. Gallery artists have also received important grants and awards including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, a New York Foundation for the Arts Grant,

National Endowment for the Arts Award, Robert Rauschenberg Fellowship and the Art for

Justice Fund Grant.

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Barry Thomas Malin [email protected]

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Catherine Hanczor [email protected]

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