Decoding Myth: African American Abstraction, 1945-1975 features abstract painting and sculpture by seven prominent artists: Charles Alston, Harold Cousins, Beauford Delaney, Sam Gilliam, Norman Lewis, Alma Thomas and Hale Woodruff. All of these artists embrace formal issues of color, shape and line – allowing for a broad and richly varied interpretation of individual inspiration, references and affinities. Working alongside contemporaries like Adolph Gottlieb, Ad Reinhardt, Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell, these artists helped to define and shape the American abstract movement in the Postwar era. By setting aside representational imagery and specific narratives that referenced the African American experience, many such abstract works have been marginalized or ignored completely, perhaps considered “against type” or irrelevant. Alongside critical dismissal was the disapproval of many in the African American community-at-large, which valued social realism as a more important genre.

In the exhibition essay, Black/Abstraction: Two Opposing Ideas?, Jonathan Binstock explores the history of critical thinking as it pertains to this institutional dichotomy of consideration. He writes, “Of particular interest here, however, is not a specific instance of oppositional thinking, but rather an engrained intellectual mindset, a structural logic that has made a certain kind of dichotomous thought endemic to an entire area of art history. I am referring to the highly polarized relationship between representation and non-representation that has been written wholesale into the history of painting and sculpture made by African Americans, such that non-representational abstraction by black artists has always been, and continues to be, nearly completely ignored while all other forms and styles seem ripe for interpretation and appreciation.”