Installation view of Black in the Abstract, Part 1: Epistrophy at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, 2013. Photo by Paul Hester.
Black in the Abstract, Part 1: Epistrophy (Outside the Lines series)
About
Valerie Cassel Oliver traces the recent histories of black artists working in abstraction beginning in 1960 to the present, enabling a visual discourse that evolves and shifts over a fifty-year period. Black in the Abstract, Part 1: Epistrophy features eighteen artists who are engaged in the dissolution or fragmentation of the figurative. The exhibition is as much a meditation on the practice of painting as it is a resistance to the historical renderings and contemporary readings of the black body in landscape. What is left by way of figuration is a distillation of form, site, and space into its very essence reconstituted into a scatological explosion of form and color.
The exhibition not only highlights black artists who have worked within the genre of abstract painting, but also the various conversations surrounding the practice that have emerged over the last five decades. Some of these issues include the meditation and interrogation of the history and practice of painting; the contentious nature of the two-dimensional frame; and experimentations that disrupt the precepts of painting and flat plane as well as the integration of the politics of their time. The exhibition’s subtitle is extracted from the musical jazz context and lends itself to the very nature of how many of the artists featured in this exhibition work in terms of repetition of mark-making onto a surface and the continuous reconstitution of form.
Artists featured in Black in the Abstract, Part 1: Epistrophy include members of AfriCOBRA (Kevin Cole, James Phillips, Frank Smith), Candida Alvarez, Romare Bearden, Nick Cave, Abigail DeVille, Sam Gilliam, Richard Mayhew, Jayson Musson, Floyd Newsum, Angel Otero, John Outterbridge, Howardena Pindell, Shinique Smith, Kianja Strobert, Alma Thomas, and Jack White.
The second-round of exhibitions opens in January 2014: Rites of Spring, on view January 11 – March 9, 2014, curated by Daderko; Painting: A Love Story, curated by Arning, on view January 18 – March 23, 2014; and Black in the Abstract, Part 2: Hard Edges/Soft Curves, curated by Cassel Oliver, on view January 25, 2013 – March 23, 2014.
Organizers
Black in the Abstract, Part 1: Epistrophy (Outside the Lines series) is curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver, Senior Curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.
Support
Outside the Lines has been made possible by the patrons, benefactors and donors to the Museum’s Major Exhibition Fund: Major Patron -Chinhui Juhn and Eddie Allen, Fayez Sarofim, and Michael Zilkha. Patrons – Carol C. Ballard, Mr. and Mrs. I. H. Kempner III, Ms. LouisaStude Sarofim and Mr. Wallace Wilson. Benefactors – George and Mary Josephine Hamman Foundation, Louise D. Jamail, Anne and David Kirkland, KPMG, LLP, Beverly and Howard Robinson, Andrew Schirrmeister III and Leigh and Reggie Smith. Donors – A Fare Extraordinaire, Anonymous, Bank of Texas, Bergner and Johnson Design, Jereann Chaney, Elizabeth Howard Crowell, Dillon Kyle Architecture, Sara Paschall Dodd, Ruth Dreessen and Thomas Van Laan, Marita and J.B. Fairbanks, Jo and Jim Furr, Barbara and Michael Gamson, Brenda and William Goldberg, King & Spalding L.L.P., Marley Lott, Belinda Phelps and Randy Howard, Phillips, Lauren Rottet, Susan Vaughan Foundation, Inc., and Karen and Harry Susman.