Painting the World Anew: Black Abstraction,  1960s–80s

Online, via Zoom

Explore the pioneering role of Black artists and Black creative spaces in New York City’s contemporary art movements of the late 1960s through the mid-1980s. At a time when photography and Social Realist painting dominated the aesthetics of the civil rights movement, a group of artists working in New York City’s downtown scene, including Alvin Loving and Melvin Edwards, turned to abstraction to convey their ideas of Black aesthetics and, in the process, forged new modes of engagement and a community activism. Together, this lecture highlights the central role abstraction and space played in cultivating multidisciplinary directions that spawned a new generation of the American avant-garde.

This series of online talks by the Whitney’s Joan Tisch Teaching Fellows highlights works in the Museum’s collection to illuminate critical topics in American art from 1900 to the present. During each thirty-minute session, participants are invited to comment and ask questions through a moderated chat.

Bentley Brown is an artist, curator, and doctoral student at The Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, where his research explores the pioneering role of Black artists and Black creative spaces within New York City’s downtown contemporary art movements of the 1960s–80s. He holds a master’s degree in African studies from University College London and currently teaches art history at Fordham University as an adjunct professor. In his artistic practice, Brown uses the mediums of canvas, found objects, photo-collage, and film to explore themes of Black identity, cosmology, and American interculturalism inspired by African American cultural production, and the desert landscape of his native Phoenix, Arizona.