Spilling Over: Painting Color in the 1960s

In Dan Johnson’s Surprise, three images of South America appear in a painterly wash that suggests an expanse of ocean. Frank Bowling, who was born in the then British colony of Guyana, made a series of paintings between 1967 and 1971 that combine abstraction with continental shapes in order to explore histories of colonization and the African diaspora. Working without a brush, he sprayed paint onto thinly paint-soaked canvases. He then used stencils to create the outlines of continents and countries that had been brutally and dramatically altered by the slave trade. Hard lines of blunt color draw attention to the periphery. 

Dan Johnson’s Surprise was included in the 1969 Whitney Annual—the precursor to the Biennial—shortly after Bowling moved to New York in 1966.