An Experience of Color: Landscapes & Legacies
Curated by Niama Safia Sandy, An Experience of Color: Landscapes and Legacies, is a mixed media exhibition simultaneously exploring color and materials while crystallizing the connection between 20th century abstract expressionism and the moment it is born with the modes and concerns of 21st century contemporary artmaking.
An Experience of Color represents seven artists’ (Kwesi Abbensetts, Frank Bowling, Morel Doucet, Herbert Gentry, Norman Lewis, Sam Middleton, and Bob Thompson) engagement with form, and materials to invoke specific cultural, and spatial references.
Many of the artworks in An Experience of Color straddle the line between abstraction and figuration and the myriad histories and geographies each artist has loved, and sought to understand in their lifetime: Kwesi Abbensetts’s vivid mixed media compositions foreground Black experience and resilience in America through the eyes of a Caribbean expatriate; Frank Bowling practice integrates autobiography and postcolonial geopolitics into abstract compositions; Morel Doucet’s ceramics vision the aesthetic and environmental life in the Caribbean and other spaces inhabited and transformed by Black cultural influences; Herbert Gentry’s expressionist work draws from his life on two continents; Norman Lewis’s dark, rich abstractions explore kinetic movement in themes ranging from the mid-century music scene in Harlem to civil rights; Sam Middleton’s mixed media collage take inspiration from the topographies of Holland and the cacophonies of Harlem; Bob Thompson’s early bold, large-scale, gestural abstraction recalls the New England landscape.
The show will be on view at Spanierman Modern Miami through January 5.
