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.

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Sam Gilliam

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Beginning in the early 1960s, Sam Gilliam chose to pour paint directly onto canvas. In 1968, with works like Bow Form Construction, Gilliam’s experiments with staining and folding canvas evolved into a series of draped paintings.

At the time, members of the Black Arts Movement were calling for African American artists to work in a figurative mode. They argued that Black artists should create meaningful and powerful depictions of people who historically had been denied them. In response, Gilliam said, “Figurative art doesn’t represent Blackness any more than a non-narrative media oriented kind of painting, like what I do.” His adoption of abstraction was less a rejection of the Black Arts Movement, though, than an avowal that other forms of making were equally relevant.

Bow Form Construction, 1968

A canvas painted many colors draped in a white gallery space.

Sam Gilliam, Bow Form Construction, 1968. Acrylic and enamel on draped canvas, 119 7/16 × 332 5/16 in. (303.4 × 844.1 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from the Friends of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Howard W. Lipman Foundation, and gift of the Ford Foundation Purchase Program and an anonymous donor, by exchange 2001.343. © Sam Gilliam / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph by Tom Powel Imaging

A canvas painted many colors draped in a white gallery space.

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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

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“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