Tag: blackartists

Steve Locke

Because of my interest in Albers, a friend who recently saw a few of Steve’s pieces from Homage to the Auction Block (2019-ongoing) series shared them with me. The work posits that the basic Modernist form is indeed the slave auction block. With the discovery of that form, all the other forms became possible.

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Maren Hassinger

Maren Hassinger (born Maren Louise Jenkins in 1947) is an African-American artist and educator whose career spans four decades. Hassinger uses sculpture, film, dance, performance art, and public art to explore the relationship between the natural world and industrial materials.

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Awilda Sterling-Duprey

For Burnaway’s series CRUSH, Michelle Santiago Cortés details the dance-drawings and improvisational mark-making of Awilda Sterling-Duprey. Throughout her decades-long career, Sterling-Duprey has paid close attention to how movement appears in painting and how dance lends itself to its own kind of painterly gesture. She has distilled elements of both disciplines to their constituent parts, which can be broken down into kinds of information: visual, spatial, tactile, sonic, and so on.

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Gabriel Mills

Saw below during a recent trip to the High Museum in Atlanta. Gabriel is interested in abstraction as a mode of painting that offers an open-ended forum for posing questions about the nature of his everyday experience as a Black artist. For Mills, abstraction represents a rebellious way of approaching marginalized and countercultural political ideologies through unencumbered expressivity.

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Igshaan Adams

like Magdalena has work featured in To Weave the Sky. A queer artist who was born of a Muslim father and raised by his Christian grandmother, Adam’s elaborate textiles address the diverse cultural and spiritual contexts that continue to form his identity. The artist has embraced Islamic spirituality and particularly Sufism, and his works might be read as enlarged prayer rugs.

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Thomas Sills

I saw below during a recent visit to the Greenville County Museum of Art, which hosted an exhibit of his work in 2022. Sills’ first solo exhibition was held at Betty Parsons Gallery in May 1955. He experimented with color and form his entire career, moving from the action painting of Abstract Expressionism to vibrant Color Field painting with energetic palettes and juxtapositions.
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Cameron Johnson

like Lisa is in the faculty show at Meredith. In his statement he addresses the idea of sacrifice and the internal challenges of selflessness. “The juxtaposition between our internal emotions and external action is conveyed through the use of contrasting colors and textures. The areas that lack definition or detail, depict uncertainty and apprehension. The use of abstraction allows the focus to be placed on the interaction between elements, instead of what they represent.”

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