Collection Highlights

Audio description 

Sam Gilliam is an African american artist who was born in Tupelo, Mississippi in 1933. He was the seventh of eight children. His family moved to Louisville, Kentucky shortly after he was born and that is where he spent his childhood. As a child he enjoyed drawing and painting. He even wanted to be a cartoonist while he was growing up. He attended the University of Louisville and received his Bachelor of arts degree in fine arts. After graduating he served in the army from 1956 to 1958. He then went back to school and studied under Charles Crodel. He eventually received his Master of Arts degree in painting.

Gilliam used his talents as a teacher in Washington’s public schools, Maryland Institute, College of Art and the University of Maryland, and The Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. While he did teach full time he also continued to paint. His style changed throughout the years but he is generally considered an abstract painter. He was the first painter to work with unsupported canvases which is what makes him such an important artist. This means that he did not use a frame to stretch his work, but instead hung the canvas from the ceiling or wall. He is also known for using geometric patterns in many of his works.

Today Gilliam still lives in Washington D.C. He is still making and exhibiting his artwork there.

In 1956, during the height of the Cold War, scientists were intent on creating a new educational curriculum that would clearly and vividly illustrate principles of physics, making the subject more appealing to students.  While best known for her earlier work documenting New York City architecture, Berenice Abbott was hired by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to help create a series of compelling photographs to be used in high school science textbooks across the country. 

Abbott spent several years in the late 1950s working at MIT, along with the renowned engineer and photographer Harold Edgerton.  During this time, she constructed and photographed physical representations of many scientific phenomena, including gravity, electromagnetism, and waves.

In this photograph, Abbott demonstrates properties of the refraction of light by shining beams of light through a piece of triangular glass.  In the process, she has also created an interesting and dynamic composition, wherein the viewer’s eye follows the angles created by the central triangle and the lines of refracted light.  Abbott’s elegant and precise work at MIT aptly demonstrates her prowess as a documentary photographer, capturing the intersection between art and science in order to inspire and spur future generations of scientists.

Berenice Abbott
American, 1898-1991

Berenice Abbott was a photographer who was born in Springfield, OH in 1898. She moved to New York City in 1918 so that she could study sculpture and drawing. Instead of attending a school to study sculpture she studied independently and made connections with well known artists through her own work. She then moved to Paris to study sculpture in 1921. From 1923 to 1935 Abbott worked as a darkroom assistant to the American Dada and Surrealist artist Man Ray in Paris. In 1925 she set up her own photography studio and made several well-known portraits of many artists, writers and creatives including James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst and Peggy Guggenheim. During this time she was introduced to the photography of Eugene Atget’s, which had a great impact on her life and work. Abbott spent many years working to represent and gain recognition for his work.
Abbott returned to New York City in 1929 where she continued to do portraits, but also began to document the city and the rapidly changing architecture. The project evolved into a Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in 1935, called Changing New York. This was an important opportunity for artists during the Great Depression of the 1930s, where artists were commissioned to create public works through the United States.
After the WPA project was complete, Abbott taught photography at the New School for Social Research in New York and experimented with photography as a tool to illustrate scientific principles and phenomena for mass audiences, such as refraction of light, magnetism and motion.
Berenice Abbott was inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum in 2000. Abbott’s accomplishments are considered wider ranging than anyone else’s in the history of American photography.

Jack Whitten was an African American artist who was born in Bessemer,  Alabama in 1939. Whitten began his studies at Tuskegee Institute in medicine to become an army doctor, but left to pursue a degree in art after becoming inspired by George Washington Carver’s legacy as a scientist, inventor and artist.  While studying at Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana Whitten began participating in civil rights demonstrations. He also traveled to nearby Montgomery, Alabama to hear Martin Luther King, Jr. speak during the Montgomery Bus Boycott and was deeply moved by his vision for a changed America. Angered by the violent resistance to change there, Whitten moved to New York City in 1960. He enrolled in The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in 1960 and earned his bachelor of fine arts degree in 1964. Afterwards he remained in New York as a working artist, strongly influenced by the Abstract Expressionists then dominating the art community. He was also deeply influenced by the Jazz music of John Coltrane as well as the paintings of Jacob Lawrence.

Whitten’s work reflects on his experiences during the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, and the political turmoil of the 60s. He was known as a painter and sculptor, and for his rigorous experimentation with the materiality and techniques of painting.  Largely working without much public attention over the following decades, in 2014 the travelling retrospective “Jack Whitten: Five Decades of Painting” opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego to critical acclaim. The artist died on January 20, 2018 in Queens, NY. Today, his works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Cleveland Museum of Art, among others. Former President Barack Obama awarded Jack Whitten the 2015 National Medal of Arts.

Romare Bearden was raised among the cultural artists and musicians of the Harlem Renaissance in New York City, meeting and befriending important figures including W.E.B. DuBois, Langston Hughes and Duke Ellington.  Bearden also lived and studied in Paris, soaking up influences by mid-century European modernist masters. He eventually returned to America, gradually synthesizing his various aesthetic and cultural experiences to create his own personal artistic language articulating aspects of his African-American heritage.

In Bearden’s arresting color lithograph Firebirds, the artist makes optimal use of the printing process to cut into large flat areas with areas of contrasting bands of color, evoking collages of traditional African cloth and patterns.  Three figures face each other, wearing distinctly patterned clothing.  The middle figure holds a perforated object that resembles a cross, or perhaps a musical instrument with holes for keys.  The small red bird and crowned birds at the top of the image may represent the Firebirds of the title; mythical creatures who immolated themselves by fire and were resurrected afterwards to new life.  Bearden’s three figures in Firebirds could evoke a reference to Picasso’s Three Musicians; the iconic figurative imagery suggesting an artistic legacy risen from the ashes of postwar Europe, transformed and reinterpreted with a New World cultural commentary and perspective.