Spilling Over: Painting Color in the 1960s

Mar 29–Aug 18, 2019

This exhibition gathers paintings from the 1960s and early 1970s that inventively use bold, saturated, and even hallucinatory color to activate perception. During this period, many artists adopted acrylic paint—a newly available, plastic-based medium—and explored its expansive technical possibilities and wider range of hues. Color Field painters poured paint and stained unprimed canvas, dramatizing painting’s materiality and visual force. Painters associated with Op art deployed pattern, geometric arrangement, and intense color combinations to emphasize that vision is a commingling of physical response and unconscious association. At the same historical moment, an emerging generation of artists of color and women explored color’s capacity to articulate new questions about perception, specifically its relation to race, gender, and the coding of space. The exhibition looks to the divergent ways color can be equally a formal problem and a political statement.

Drawn entirely from the Whitney’s collection, Spilling Over includes important recently acquired works by Emma Amos and Kay WalkingStick, as well as paintings that entered the collection soon after they were made, by artists such as Alvin Loving, Ellsworth Kelly, Miriam Schapiro, and Frank Stella, among others. The title comes from a quote by artist Bob Thompson, whose work is also presented. He said, “I paint many paintings that tell me slowly that I have something inside of me that is just bursting, twisting, sticking, spilling over to get out. Out into souls and mouths and eyes that have never seen before.” Spilling Over demonstrates how painting retained an urgency for artists who wanted to see anew.

The exhibition is organized by David Breslin, DeMartini Family Curator and Director of the Collection, with Margaret Kross, curatorial assistant.


Support for Spilling Over: Painting Color in the 1960s is provided by the LLWW Foundation and the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation.

Back

15 / 18

Previous Next

Miriam Schapiro

15

In paintings like Jigsaw, Miriam Schapiro explored how geometric abstraction could serve both formal and feminist concerns. Here, she experimented with the spatial effects of color, using hues in this painting that she described as “blinding and high keyed, enough so as to optically distort the form.” Although she would not become explicitly associated with feminism until after 1971, when she advanced the Feminist Art Program with Judy Chicago at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), such early paintings contain oblique references to the body and gender identity. At this time, she often adopted geometries that resembled apertures and passageways evocative of the female body. If a human figure is implied in this painting, however, it is hard to read as male or female—a rebuke of the idea that gender can be simply defined and categorized.

Jigsaw, 1969

A painting featuring brightly colored shapes.

Miriam Schapiro, Jigsaw, 1969. Acrylic on canvas, 80 × 72 1/8 in. (203.2 × 183.2 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from Mr. and Mrs. Harry Kahn 69.46. © 2019 Estate of Miriam Schapiro / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

A painting featuring brightly colored shapes.

Events

View all

Audio guides

Painting of a woman and legs in bright colors.

Emma Amos, Baby, 1966. Oil on canvas, 46 1/2 × 51 in. (118.1 × 129.5 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchased jointly by the Whitney Museum of American Art, with funds from the Painting and Sculpture Committee; and The Studio Museum in Harlem, museum purchase with funds provided by Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee T.2018.33a-b. © Emma Amos; courtesy of the artist and RYAN LEE Gallery, New York

Painting of a woman and legs in bright colors.

"More often than not, you have to assume that there is some sort of relationship between radical gestures and art, and radical gestures and the world."
—Rashid Johnson

Hear from the artists, the exhibition’s curator, and scholars speaking about works on view.

View guide

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection

View 18 works

In the News

“It’s a perfect summer show that you will want to visit again and again. Its abounding freshness clears your eyes and lifts your spirits, so that everything around you, in and out of the museum, looks clear, bright, alive, and new.”
-Hyperallergic