Acknowledgments

It is a great pleasure to acknowledge the many people who contributed to the exhibi- tion Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960s to Today, and to this accompanying publication. First and foremost, it has been an honor and a joy to work so closely with the dedicated artists presented in Magnetic Fields. The idea for this exhibition grew out of our shared curatorial passion for abstrac- tion, and the desire to build upon the work done in each of our divergent professional capacities. For Erin, the exhibition continues her work in contextualizing intergenera- tional art practitioners and speaks to central themes of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art’s Permanent Collection and exhibition practice, namely the history of the artist’s gesture, and the bridging of the art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. For Melissa, it continues her effort to create platforms for underrecognized artists, particularly women and artists of color, and offers context for the work of Mildred Thompson (1936–2003), whom she champions through the Mildred Thompson Legacy Project. Most importantly, this exhibition is created in the spirit of raising awareness of and initiating conversation about the groundbreaking, sustaining, and innovative work of an exceptional group of underrecognized and up-and-coming artists. These artists’ achievements in abstraction merit greater recognition within the broader history and future of American abstraction. The selection of the twenty-one artists for this exhibition resulted from the exciting work of reviewing hundreds of artists’ oeuvres, across generations, in a range of media and stylistic pursuits. The final criteria that helped shape the suite of works on view include: the artist self-identifies as a woman of color; the majority of her practice has been dedicated to abstraction; and the work is rooted in the nonobjective or nonrepresentational. We thank our advisory group—and the exhibiting artists—for recommending artists for us to consider. We are grateful to those included, and others we learned about, as their points of view helped shape the premise of the exhibition. The essays by Lowery Stokes Sims and Valerie Cassel Oliver ground the project in the historical perspective that comes from years of dedicated attention to the impor- tant work of women artists, artists of color, and abstraction. In the “Conversations,” short-form essays ranging in tone from the personal to the scholarly, Nanette Carter, Allison Glenn, Gia M. Hamilton, Lauren Haynes, Sandra Jackson-Dumont, Michelle Perron, Alice Thorson, and Kathryn Wat reflect on a selection of artists and works in the exhibition. Lilly Wei’s thoughtful compilation of first-person interviews with artists from each of the three generations represented in Magnetic Fields offers invaluable insight into the artists’ individual experiences. These texts help disrupt art-world assumptions on the subject of abstraction and celebrate the breakthroughs in the genre by women artists of color. To our advisory group made up of the extraordinary Isolde Brielmaier, Licia E. Clifton-James, Gia M. Hamilton, Adrienne Walker Hoard, Sandra Jackson-Dumont, Dena Muller, Valerie Cassel Oliver, Lowery Stokes Sims, and Lilly Wei, we are pro- foundly grateful for your knowledge, guidance, and support throughout the planning of this project. We sincerely thank the Chair of the Kemper Museum Board of Trustees and Directors Mary Kemper Wolf for her leadership and enthusiastic support of Magnetic Fields, and Executive Director Barbara O’Brien for her guidance and encouragement of the exhibition. With gratitude, we acknowledge the hardworking and enthusiastic staff of the Kemper Museum, especially the exhibition team of Andrea Phillips, Liz Lumpkin, Aaron Jakos, and Will Toney for all their hard work in the direct plan- ning of logistics for the exhibition. All the lenders to this exhibition, both private and institutional, have our sincere gratitude for the confidence they placed in this project. The exhibition is a reality because of their exceptional generosity in loaning these exemplary works. The Mildred Thompson Legacy Project also thanks the participants in the Independent Curators International (ICI) Curatorial Intensive 2015 for their feedback and support; the Judith Alexander Foundation in Atlanta, Georgia, for their generous funding of documentation and conservation needs; and the Creative Time | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, which provided seed money for further research on Thompson. We received vital assistance from Omar Blayton, Anthony Craig Drennen, Donna Jackson, Lamar Lovelace, Adjua Mantebea, Gabriele Schilling and Christiane von Lengerke, Donna Snowden, Katherine Snowden Boswell, Souleo, and Sarah Workneh. We are grateful to the catalogue production team, including editor Kristin Swan, proofreader Ted Gilley, and Adrian Lucia, Melissa Duffes, Meghann Ney, and Susan E. Kelly with Lucia | Marquand. Finally, we look forward to collaborating with Director Susan Fisher Sterling, Chief Curator Kathryn Wat, and Associate Curator Virginia Treanor at the National Museum of Women in the Arts. We thank them for joining us in presenting Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960s to Today.

ERIN DZIEDZIC and MELISSA MESSINA Co-curators

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 11

ERIN DZIEDZIC AND MELISSA MESSINA

Magnetic Fields An Introduction

Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960s to Today focuses a long- overdue lens on the contributions of women artists of color within the lineage of nonrepresentational art making.1 As the first museum exhibition of its kind, Magnetic Fields aims to spark more broad and inclusive presentations of American abstraction going forward. Intergenerational in scope, this exhibition and the accompanying catalogue amplify the formal and conceptual connections between twenty-one artists born between 1891 and 1981, many presented in conversation with one another for the first time. The artists’ compositional frameworks, exploration of materials, and inspired approaches to nonobjective art expand the discourse around nonpictorial image and object making. Featuring a range of media, including painting, sculpture, printmaking, and drawing, the exhibition places the unique visual vocabularies of black women artists in context with one another and within the larger history of abstraction. In presenting the commanding dialogue among these artists, Magnetic Fields celebrates those underrecognized leaders, and argues for their enduring relevance in the history and iconography of abstraction. The curatorial objective of Magnetic Fields is to present the formal, expressive, and conceptual scope of work by self-identifying black female artists who sustain(ed) a dedicated practice in the field of nonrepresentational abstraction. Given this focus, Magnetic Fields also pays tribute to the lived experience of each of the featured artists, who have come individually to pursue abstraction, disrupting the presumption that representation and narrative beholden to figuration are the prime modes of Detail, plate 33. visualizing personal experience. Collectively, their work represents a range of formalist approaches rooted in painterly, post-painterly, and hard- edge abstraction, with emphasis on process, materiality, innovation, and experimentation. These works employ and broaden the expressive language of abstraction amid its loaded, Eurocentric male–dominated history. This exhibition does not intend to homogenize or forsake the artists’ varied personal and conceptual motivations. Instead, it underscores the breadth and depth of the responses therein. Several of the artists in Magnetic Fields, including Lilian Thomas Burwell (born 1927) and Betty Blayton (1937–2016), describe their artistic practices as primarily spiritual endeavors.2 Alternatively, Candida Alvarez (born 1955) refers to her personalized visual language as a “subject-less pictorial mash-up” rooted in imagery from popular culture.3 While Mary Lovelace O’Neal’s contempo- raries during the Black Arts Movement responded with Fig. 1. Kianja Strobert more overtly narrative approaches, O’Neal (born 1942) describes how her work “spoke, (American, b. 1980), Porch lights, in perhaps a very abstract way, of my struggles as an African American, as an African 2015, paintings, metal lathe, papier-mâché, acrylic, screen, American woman.”4 Yet, as with many artists included here, she puts the onus on the felt, wire, 701/4 × 71 × 81/4 inches. viewer as the decipherer of meaning, stating, “Here’s the metaphor if you want to Courtesy of Tilton Gallery, deal with it.”5 New York, New York. Magnetic Fields acknowledges critical and contrasting perspectives within the common ground of abstraction. Styles and art historical referents among artists in the exhibition diverge considerably. Kianja Strobert (born 1980; fig. 1) employs references ranging from Lee Bontecou (born 1931; fig. 2) to Philip Guston (1913–1980), and looks at modern abstraction as “a collision of abstract and representational” elements.6 Other artists describe a more individualized means of arriving at their personal form of expression. Deborah Dancy (born 1949) has said, “This is how I identify my idea, through abstraction. My commitment to abstraction is a personal ideology.”7 Mildred Thompson (1936–2003) has for decades turned our eye toward abstraction’s limitless possibilities in works such as her Magnetic Fields triptych (1991, plate 44), whose surface transcribes paint into motion, gesture into celestial galaxies, and fields of color into rich pictorial atmospheres. Thompson stated in 1980, “With art, there are sym- bolic things that have to be learned to make work universal. . . . [Y]ou can’t limit who you communicate with. . . . But first you have to know yourself.”8 Following Thompson’s dictum, the artists in the Magnetic Fields exhibition share a profound self-awareness in their distinctive approaches to creating visual vocabularies, although often their work goes unrecognized in the larger art historical canon. It is clear, in examining the mythic discourse of American abstraction of the last half century—the scope of exhibitions presented, the collections amassed in major museums, and the historical and critical texts written on the subject—that the contri- butions of women artists of color have been at worst completely omitted, and at best undervalued. And though each of these artists exercised a studied point of view, backed by rigorous academic training and often a lifelong dedication to a highly

14 developed personal abstract style, frequently they did so to their detriment, being largely overlooked for gallery representation, exhibition opportunities, and critical attention. Our research for this exhibition required a reexamination of numerous little-known exhibition records, catalogues, and ephem- era. We exhumed items from institutional storage archives. We studied scholarly articles, essays, and personal accounts to establish a chronology of where and when abstraction became more preva- lent in the curricula of black art students. We reviewed the incom- plete archives of deceased artists to understand the gaps left in the historical research and also the dovetailing of missing periods of documentation amongst peer artists. We visited homes and studios in which living artists continue(d) to add to decades of abundant inventory, revealing rooms upon rooms of significant works largely unexplored by curators, art dealers, archivists, and historians. The project’s many merits justified such demanding investigatory efforts. More optimistically, our exhibition also includes loans from presti- gious collections such as the Denver Art Museum and the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and from respected galleries who represent a number Fig. 2. Lee Bontecou (American, of the artists in Magnetic Fields. Ultimately, by shifting critical attention, fostering b. 1931), Untitled (No. 25), 1960, welded steel, canvas, 72 × 56 × deeper appreciation, and establishing parity of value, this exhibition moves to achieve 20 inches. Collection of the an expanded perspective on the canon of American abstraction. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, The shared experience of marginalization should not, however, overshadow Richmond, Virginia, Gift of Sydney and Frances Lewis, the opportunities each artist attained through her determined spirit and strength 85.364. of expression. Many artists in Magnetic Fields have been featured in significant solo museum exhibitions, some with accompanying publications; others have strong commercial gallery representation; and several have received foundation grants to support their studio practice. Many followed similar educational paths: Alma Thomas (1891–1978), Mildred Thompson, Mary Lovelace O’Neal, and Sylvia Snowden (born 1942) attended Howard University and were influenced by luminaries such as James A. Porter (1905–1970), Loïs Mailou Jones (1905–1998), and David C. Driskell (born 1931); Candida Alvarez, Barbara Chase-Riboud (born 1939), Abigail DeVille (born 1981), Howardena Pindell (born 1943), and Kianja Strobert all attended Yale University at various times. Several artists made work at the revered Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop in New York, which enriched their creative experience with new processes for expanding their visual range, and offered wider exposure for their work. Most of these artists have held prestigious residencies over the course of their careers; in fact, sixteen of the twenty-one artists included in Magnetic Fields have attended the historically inclusive Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Also critical to note is that over one-third have at some point in their practice maintained influential teaching careers at respected institutions across the country. An occupation often pursued out of financial necessity became, not surprisingly and most commendably, a shared passion among the artists. These achievements are a testament to the

MAGNETIC FIELDS 15 character of the artists, their seriousness of purpose, and the enduring quality of their work.

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The past several years have marked a promising turn toward a more inclusive narrative around American abstraction. African American abstract artists such as William T. Williams (born 1942), Jack Whitten (born 1939), Stanley Whitney (born 1946), Sam Gilliam (born 1933), Ed Clark (born 1926), and McArthur Binion (born 1946) have gained more gallery and museum attention. Romare Bearden’s (1911–1988) nonobjective abstractions from the early 1960s were (re)discover‌ ed. Norman Lewis (1909–1979) was recognized in a smaller but potent two-person exhibition with Lee Krasner (1908–1984) at the Jewish Museum, as well as in a traveling retrospective, and also included in some of the most prominent private and institutional collections. Pioneering exhibi- tions such as Valerie Cassel Oliver’s group shows Black in the Abstract: Epistrophy and Black in the Abstract: Hard Edges / Soft Curves at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston received widely published accolades.9 More recently, the Denver Art Museum’s Women of Abstract Expressionism exhibition broadened the scope of the movement, giving more visibility to its early female practitioners, although no women artists of color were represented.10 In 2016, the Tang Museum at Skidmore College and the Studio Museum in Harlem hosted an exceptional and long-overdue retrospective of the work of Alma Thomas. This crystalizing of interest follows Hilarie M. Sheets’s ARTnews report in mid-2014 stating, “The contributions of African American artists to the inventions of abstract painting have historically been overlooked.”11 This convergence of exhibitions, in addition to a shared curatorial passion for abstraction, precipitated the conversations that resulted in Magnetic Fields. While abstraction by black artists is now receiving attention in academic circles, and also among collectors in both the private and public sectors, museum exhibitions on the subject thus far have focused solely on or been weighted heavily with male artists.12 Some of the most recent exhibitions that have celebrated the breadth of African American artists working in abstraction have been presented at commercial galleries.13 We recognized that the efforts noted above, and the historical deficiency in the critical scope of exhibitions—particularly in institutional settings—provided a timely opening for a visual dialogue between intergenerational groups of female artists of color. Admittedly, the endeavor of expanding the canon of American abstraction will need the continued time and attention of thoughtful artists, scholars, curators, and archivists. Magnetic Fields serves as one conversation—an examination of artists whose pursuits have been and are dedicated to nonobjective abstraction—among many that we hope will follow. The twenty-one artists in the exhibition are part of a much broader lineage of black women abstract artists working throughout American history and internationally, from which additional platforms and perspectives can emerge. There are artists, not included in this exhibition, who experimented with abstraction early in their careers and moved into other modes of expression, and others who have created exceptional nonrepresentational series within an otherwise pictorial oeuvre.

16 Still others have explored the effect of abstraction on figuration or the landscape, which is among the many worthy subjects that could not be covered here in their entirety. Unfortunately, there are likely many more such artists who have been lost to the art historical record altogether. Magnetic Fields presents an exemplary selection from a wide range of works produced from the 1960s to 2017, which collectively chart a trajectory of nonobjective art practices. The exhibition’s beginning decade of the 1960s corresponds to the period in American art history when the language of nonrepresentational abstraction moved beyond its origins in the Abstract Expressionist movement and began taking root outside New York City. Its hallmarks were beginning to be studied in universities (among them, Howard University), and—with many variants and “post” distinctions— were henceforth interpreted and redefined by new generations of artists, including African Americans. In an era of social change and ideological activism, however, black artists pursing abstraction risked marginalization not only in the art world, but within their commu- nity. In a 2008 article about the work of Jack Whitten in Art in America, Saul Ostrow astutely notes that for Whitten, “focusing on form was a means of absorbing and coping with the political and social tensions of the 60s and 70s, even as this pursuit was viewed by some as being inherently Eurocentric and formalist, and its black prac- titioners in denial of their identities and responsibilities.”14 As the art of the mid-1960s and into the 70s began to mirror the climate of social upheaval at the time of the civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, and anti-war movements, the expression of gender and identity politics came to the fore. Often, figurative representations were supported as the stronger mode of expression for these ideas.15 Ostrow further describes the efforts of these later generations who were attempting to define their own styles within abstraction as “tending to appear tangential to the dominant themes of the their day,” noting, “only in hindsight does their pertinence come to be recognized.”16 Many such black artists suffered a similar fate to Whitten, seemingly falling into no camp but their own—as particularly evidenced by the lack of interest in and opportunities for African American women committed to abstraction. This pattern of invisibility and exclusion continued in the decades that followed. Lilian Thomas Burwell speaks of times in the 1980s when she saw direct references to her style, palette, and materiality in the work of male counterparts also working in Washington, DC, like Sam Gilliam. Yet the communal reciprocity within this circle of artists did not lead to a broader recognition of her influence, not to mention her own work. Betty Blayton described scant interest in her work from commercial or collecting enterprises in New York City during her lifetime, despite her continuous prodigious studio efforts, which she balanced with her pioneering administrative and fundraising roles for such institutions as the Studio Museum in Harlem.17 For decades, Howardena Pindell has penned numerous essays on the continued effects of rampant ignorance, racism, and misogyny in the art world, even devoting a full chapter to “Art World Racism” in her book The Heart of the Question, published as late as 1997.18 The prevalence of identity-based exhibitions in the late twentieth century further marginalized black female artists who focused on nonobjective abstraction. The 1971

MAGNETIC FIELDS 17 exhibition Contemporary Black Artists in America at the Whitney Museum of Ameri- can Art, for example, was the museum’s response to the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition’s (BECC) demands for black artists’ inclusion in the Whitney’s exhibitions, programming, and curatorial oversight. In her book Mounting Frustration: The Art Museum in the Age of Black Power, art historian Susan E. Cahan describes the exhibition as a flawed and misdirected attempt to re-create the values of “art as a site of political empowerment through the assertion and embodiment of community” in the museum.19 She writes, “Shows like Contemporary Black Artists in America manifested segregation in the guise of integration, operating as ostensible acts of inclusion that maintained separation.”20 These types of identity-focused exhibitions ghettoized and seemingly homogenized African American artists who were making works in a range of styles and perspectives, both abstract and representational, rather than situating their diverse works within the broader critical context of the contempo- rary art world. Given these variables, many artists in Magnetic Fields who came to maturity during the end of the Abstract Expressionist golden age, and who produced abstract works in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, were denied the already limited opportunities to garner the sales, exhibitions, and critical attention that their peers received. In the 1980s and 90s, several exhibitions laid important groundwork for the exposure of women artists of color, but few featured those working in abstraction. Curator and art historian Lowery Stokes Sims described, in her 1996 catalogue essay for the exhibition Bearing Witness at Spelman College, two critical modes of distinc- tion for African American women artists at that time: multiculturalism and deconstruc- tivism, or the “dismantling of dominant Eurocentric, male values, and world views, through the presentation of female and nonwhite value systems.”21 She notes that for these artists figuration was the prevalent mode, pointing out that black female artists who worked in nonrepresentational abstraction especially struggled for recognition. Just as Saul Ostrow would observe in writing about Jack Whitten a decade later, she describes how they faced “resistance from certain camps of black self-image-making, which perceive abstraction as being outside an authentic black identity.”22 Therefore it could be said that black female artists creating nonrepresentational imagery during these decades were working on a periphery of a periphery of a periphery.23 Twenty years later, Magnetic Fields foregrounds these artists, who were (and are) “dismantling” the Eurocentric male grip on abstraction, with the goal of merging the concentric circles that held them outside of the epicenter of American art. Many artists and historians, including Sims, have noted the problematic tendency to read the work of black female artists as autobiography, narrowly defining them as arbiters of self-image through representation.24 The work of artists creating decidedly nonrepresentational abstractions has thus at times been critiqued as a failure to engage with the artists’ lived experience. Yet the artists in Magnetic Fields do not disavow connections to identity; rather, through a range of nuanced responses and individualized lexicons, they offer more metaphorical interpretations of the time and place in which they live(d). Mary Lovelace O’Neal, for example, wrote candidly about critiques of her work in the early 1970s by peers like Amiri Baraka, who challenged the “blackness” of her large, all-black, minimal canvases. O’Neal’s defiant rebuttal

18 questioned, “How much blacker can it get?”25 Mildred Thompson, in response to similar accusations made on the Howard University campus in 1977 that she was not a “Black artist” because she had studied with “whitey” in Europe, later wrote about the misappropriation of African motifs as a measure of inauthenticity:

To copy symbols that one does not understand, to deliberately make use of a form that one does not know how to analyze or appreciate was for me the height of prostitution. I had spent long years trying to find out who I am and what my influences were and where they came from. It was perhaps because I had lived and studied with “whitey” that I had learned to appreciate my Blackness.26

In the 1980s and 90s, when figuration was taking precedence as a way of address- ing themes of resistance that emerged from the Black Arts Movement, artists such as Nanette Carter (born 1954) continued the pursuit of abstraction. Carter stated, “My work always has a concept,” and to “create new worlds but talk about the one we are in” was itself a “documentation of the time period.”27 Deborah Dancy described likewise pushing through the pressure to engage in figuration, saying, “Once the commitment to abstraction was made, it was home. It is a political choice to make what I make. When you step into artificiality you aren’t grounded.”28 These assertions underscore the artists’ bold aesthetic decisions to use line, form, and color over figuration to reflect notions of identity in subtle and more interpretive ways. Each did so as a personal, but no less political choice. And in so doing, they asserted their position among their peers working figuratively, while affirming the viability of abstrac- tion as a means to interpret their place in the world around them.

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The conceptual and formal connections among works in this exhibition testify to the broad legacy of nonobjective abstraction. They also reflect the “particular distinction” of certain practices within African American art in the last one hundred years, as noted by curator and museum director Franklin Sirmans, including the “usage of materials at hand (Arte Povera), the importance of abstraction coupled with improvisa- tion (Action Painting), and the inherently political nature of conceptual art.”29 Artists working across time and place share common aesthetics and impulses. For example, repetitious mark making, a bright color palette, and cosmic references are found in Mildred Thompson’s Magnetic Fields triptych as well as in Alma Thomas’s Orion (1973, plate 40). Often, the artists in Magnetic Fields are acutely aware of the work of their predecessors and contemporaries. Yet some with similarities in visual vocabulary had no knowledge of one another—like Mavis Pusey (born 1928) and Jennie C. Jones (born 1968), who are among the few artists in the exhibition (and female artists histori- cally) who work(ed) in hard-edge geometric abstraction. Earthen and gritty textured planes are found in the paintings of both Sylvia Snowden and Kianja Strobert, though the artists work in Washington, DC, and upstate New York, respectively. The kaleido- scopic merging of bright colors and organic forms in Betty Blayton’s paintings and

MAGNETIC FIELDS 19 prints finds kinship in the elements of Candida Alvarez’s paintings and drawings; and while the artists knew of one another, they work(ed) independently, with studios in the Bronx and Chicago. Deborah Dancy’s works on paper Winter into Spring 2 and Winter into Spring 4 (both 2015, plates 17 and 18), Brenna Youngblood’s (born 1979) painting Forecast (2014, plate 45), and Evangeline “EJ” Montgomery’s (born 1930) prints Sunset (1997, plate 26) and Sea Grass (1998, plate 27) transcend generation and medium in their expressive lines and cloudy, aqueous color fields. Meanwhile, the use of carefully handled collage elements, shaped compositions, and exquisitely subtle textures connects the works of Nanette Carter and Howardena Pindell, who are closer in age and geographic proximity. Such affinities are recognized and set in context throughout the Magnetic Fields exhibition. Even within the specific scope of this exhibition’s nonrepresentational focus, a number of artists incorporate representational elements, either as raw material or in compositional effects. In palette, texture, and intention, the painting Harlem Flag (2014, plate 19) by Abigail DeVille has remarkable similarities to the material process of 1980s “constructions” by Gilda Snowden (1954–2014). Akin to DeVille’s creative response to the streets of Harlem, New York, her predecessor Snowden transformed found debris from the urban decay of Detroit, Michigan, into dimensionally constructed assem- blages, such as Monument (1988, fig. 3). DeVille’s built or assemblaged surfaces render a sense of dimensionality also felt in Snowden’s Imaginary Landscape (2006, plate 37).30 El Gato (2001, plate 10) by Chakaia Booker (born 1953) reframes discarded tire rubber into sculptural inventions that explore themes from diversity and cultural connections, Fig. 3. Gilda Snowden (American, 1954–2014), to scarification and textile design. Noticeably, younger artists in the exhibition, such Monument, 1988, encaustic on as Abigail DeVille and Brenna Youngblood, who incorporate found objects with hints of wood with objects, 76 × 81 × representational imagery, find precedent in the torn pieces of postcard landscapes and 8 inches. Collection of the Detroit Institute of the Arts, bits of exhibition invitations imbedded in Howardena Pindell’s Autobiography: Japan Founders Society Purchase, (Shisen-dō, Kyoto) (1982, plate 32). Such collage elements, seen throughout the exhibi- Chaim, Fanny, Louis, Benjamin, Anne and Florence Kaufman tion, conceal and reveal fragments of representation, serving to blur the boundaries of Memorial Trust. pure abstraction. Political undercurrents also flow throughout the exhibition.31 The black palette in Mary Lovelace O’Neal’s drawings “Little Brown Girl with Your Hair in a Curl” / Daddy #5 and “. . . And a Twinkle in Your Eye” / Daddy #6 (both 1973, plates 28 and 29), or her painting Black Glitter Nights (ca. 1979), incorporating traces of her trademark use of the velvety pigment lampblack, for example, are not “empty abstractions”; rather, they use color and material as metaphor for the black experience. Furthermore, her use of provocative titles, as in the iconic painting Racism Is Like Rain, Either It’s Raining or It’s Gathering Somewhere (1993, plate 30), informs the reading of this monumentally scaled work. Maren Hassinger (born 1947) similarly uses sociopolitically inflected titles and materials—specifically New York Times newspapers—in her textural floor sculpture Wrenching News (2008, plate 20). By twisting the newsprint,

20 she makes its original text unreadable, evoking instead a sense of the warped percep- tions surrounding media content. This negation of textual meaning has a corollary in Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Malcolm X #13 (2008, plate 16), one of a series of steles, or monuments, dedicated to the civil rights icon that attempt to develop a visual lan- guage to express that which has lost its verbal resonance. Another politically charged sculpture, by Shinique Smith (born 1971), is Bale Variant No. 0017 (2009, plate 35), which visualizes accumulation and consumer excess in a columnar gathering of tightly packed gray, blue, and white garments. In piling these once-worn pieces onto one another, Smith disrupts the autonomy of the sculptural object from the individual to the collective. In their contributions to this catalogue, Lowery Stokes Sims, Valerie Cassel Oliver, and Lilly Wei further examine the historical connections, individual circumstances, and common lineage reflected in these artists’ works. In her essay, “Black, Woman, Abstract Artist,” Sims explores assumptions about the negotiation of black subjectiv- ity in the work of the women artists ranging from Alma Thomas in the 1960s to Howardena Pindell in the early 1980s. Cassel Oliver addresses the changing concep- tions of essentializing blackness in her essay, “Kindred: Materializing Representation in the Abstract,” focusing on the work of the younger generation of artists in Magnetic Fields. In a suite of edited interviews, Wei introduces the voices of several artists working in abstraction across generations and disciplines. Amidst these longer texts, a two-part series of brief, individually authored “Conversations” embodies the theme of pluralistic dialogue and interpretation at the heart of the exhibition. Both critical and conversational, these intimate reflections by artists, writers, curators, and arts educa- tors on works in Magnetic Fields speak to the significance of the intergenerational relationships among colleagues that drive these artists’ works into the twenty-first century. Together, these short- and long-form essays and interviews bridge formal and conceptual histories to enrich and widen the discourse on American abstraction.

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The exhibition title Magnetic Fields denotes exploration, the charting of new direc- tional currents and re-charting of hidden terrain within the history of abstraction. This exhibition brings together unique perspectives and new alignments representing more than a half-century of artistic development. Intergenerational in scope, it reclaims the contributions of black women artists and pays homage to their legacy. While these twenty-one artists come to their practice with different goals and perspectives, as well as unique biographies and experiences, their passion for abstraction—a shared universal language of color, form, composition, texture, and line—is the connecting force. Among these works we see the personal evocation of the spiritual and the scientific; the exploration of the emotional spectrum, from exuberance to sorrow; the interpretation of natural, physical, and cosmic phenomena; and allusions to the body, place, movement, and sound. The breadth of styles within the genre demonstrates the enduring vitality of a language that has been adopted, adapted, and recharged over time and across generations.

MAGNETIC FIELDS 21 Pioneering artist and curator Howardena Pindell poignantly wrote, “We must evolve a new language which empowers us and does not cause us to participate in our own disenfranchisement.”32 This exhibition proposes that perhaps nonrepresentational abstraction can be that language. Pindell and fellow artists Alma Thomas, Mavis Pusey, Lilian Thomas Burwell, EJ Montgomery, Mildred Thompson, Betty Blayton, Mary Lovelace O’Neal, Sylvia Snowden, and Barbara Chase-Riboud paved the way techni- cally and conceptually, rigorously persevering alongside their male contemporaries for decades. Maren Hassinger, Candida Alvarez, Chakaia Booker, Nanette Carter, Deborah Dancy, and Gilda Snowden sustained the pursuit of abstraction against continued odds. More recently, Jennie C. Jones, Shinique Smith, Brenna Youngblood, Abigail DeVille, and Kianja Strobert have assumed the mantle of abstraction, shaping its future course. Like the bands of concentric reverberations pulsating in Mildred Thompson’s painting Magnetic Fields, each wave of artists delivers renewed energy to and broadens the scope of this most magnetic field of American abstraction.

1 The terms “nonrepresentational” and painting.” Candida Alvarez, “News,” “nonobjective” are used interchangeably in accessed January 16, 2016, http://www this catalogue to describe the type of .candidaalvarez.com/. abstraction examined in the Magnetic 4 Melanie Anne Herzog, “Mary Lovelace Fields exhibition, works that privilege the O’Neal: Painting Outside the Borders,” nonliteral and nonnarrative and do not in Mary Lovelace O’Neal, ed. Rene Paul directly depict the physical world. These Barilleaux and David C. Driskell (Jackson: works interpret concepts, themes, and Mississippi Museum of Art, 2002), 35. formal approaches that are grounded in 5 Ibid., 32. and expand beyond the tenets of Abstract 6 Conversation with the artist, October 10, Expressionism, such as color, shape, form, 2016. line, gesture, and composition. 7 Conversation with the artist, January 28, 2 Conversation with Betty Blayton, July 10, 2017. 2016. Blayton spoke of very early investiga- 8 Mildred Thompson, quoted in Jaqueline tions of the metaphysical world and her Fonvielle-Bontemps and David C. Driskell, interest in mysteries beyond the physical. Forever Free: Art by African American She cited Zecharia Sitchin’s Twelfth Planet: Women 1862–1980 (College Park: University Book I of the Earth Chronicles as a source of Maryland Art Gallery, 1980), 134. for her Planets series, which was not 9 See sections on the exhibitions Black in completed. She also described having the Abstract: Epistrophy and Black in the conversations about past lives with her Abstract: Hard Edges / Soft Curves in father, who was a physician, when she was Outside the Lines, ed. Valerie Cassel Oliver around 10 years old. and Nancy O’Connor (Houston: Contem- 3 “Having run away from seemingly inad- porary Arts Museum Houston, 2014). equate definitions for abstract painting, 10 See Joan Marter, ed., Women of Abstract I find myself immersed in a relationship Expressionism (Denver: Denver Art that tracks, exchanges, and shreds the Museum in association with New Haven world of news, front-page photography, and London: Yale University Press, 2016). design, and pictorial memory into a 11 Hilarie M. Sheets, “Black Abstraction: Not subject-less pictorial mash-up. In essence, a Contradiction,” ARTnews, June 4, 2014. there is not more picture; there is only

22 12 Exhibitions mounted at major museums decade defined by social protest and within the last twenty years that have American race relations. Among the works focused on abstract works by male in the exhibition, representational imagery contemporaries of the artists in Magnetic with a focus on the figure was prevalent, Fields include: Sam Gilliam: A Retrospec- as in works by Benny Andrews, Barkley L. tive, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, Hendricks, Norman Rockwell, and DC (2005) and Contemporary Arts Philip Guston. Museum Houston (2006); Jack Whitten: 16 Ostrow, “Process, Image and Elegy,” 148. Five Decades of Painting, Museum of 17 Conversation with the artist, July 10, 2016. Contemporary Art San Diego (2014), Walker 18 Howardena Pindell, The Heart of the Art Center, Minneapolis (2105), and the Question: The Writings and Paintings of Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Howardena Pindell (New York: Midmarch Ohio (2015); and Procession: The Art of Arts Press, 1997). Norman Lewis, Pennsylvania Academy of 19 Susan E. Cahan, “Contemporary Black the Fine Arts, Philadelphia (2015), Amon Artists in America at the Whitney Museum Carter Museum of American Art, Fort of American Art,” in Mounting Frustration: Worth, Texas (2016), and the Chicago The Art Museum in the Age of Black Power Cultural Center (2016–17). There have (Durham and London: Duke University also been a very small number of group Press, 2016), 113. exhibitions dedicated to abstraction by 20 Ibid., 114. African American artists, including, for 21 Lowery Stokes Sims, “American Women example: Afro-American Abstraction: Artists: Into the Twenty-First Century,” An Exhibition of Contemporary Painting in Bearing Witness: Contemporary Works and Sculpture by Nineteen Black American by African American Woman Artists, Artists, P.S. 1, New York (1981); Energy/ ed. Jontyle Theresa Robinson (New York: Experimentation: Black Artists and Spelman College and Rizzoli International Abstraction 1964–1980, Studio Museum Publications, 1996), 84. in Harlem (2006); African-American Artists 22 Ibid., 87. and Abstraction, Museo de Artes Univer- 23 Melissa Messina, in conversation with sales, Havana, Cuba (2014); and Black in Dena Muller, advisor to Magnetic Fields. the Abstract, Contemporary Arts Museum Additional barriers created peripheries for Houston (2013–14). women artists of color. As Lowery Stokes 13 The Search for Freedom: African Sims also aptly points out in her essay American Abstract Painting, 1945–1975, in this volume, responsibilities to family Kenkeleba Gallery, New York (1991); Beyond and the meeting of social expectations the Spectrum: Abstraction in African precluded many artists in this exhibition American Art, 1950–1975, Michael Rosenfeld from participating fully in their studio Gallery, New York (2014); the Art Dealers practice. Instead, they took on teaching Association of America’s presentation of and arts administrative roles to balance Romare Bearden: Abstracts 1958–1962 financial needs that could not be met at the Armory Show in 2012; or the through sales of their work. group exhibition Blackness in Abstraction, 24 Sims’s continuation of this discussion curated by Adrienne Edwards for Pace appears in “American Women Artists,” Gallery, New York, in 2016, which included in Bearing Witness, 91. many noted black artists. 25 Herzog, “Mary Lovelace O’Neal,” 32. 14 Saul Ostrow, “Process, Image and Elegy,” 26 Mildred Thompson, “Memoirs of an Artist,” Art in America, April 2008, 153. SAGE (A Scholarly Journal on Black 15 The Brooklyn Museum’s exhibition Women) 4, no. 1 (Spring 1987): 43. Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties 27 Conversation with Nanette Carter, (March 7–July 12, 2014), organized by January 27, 2017. Teresa A. Carbone and Kellie Jones, 28 Conversation with Deborah Dancy, offered a focused look at works from a January 28, 2017.

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