OPENING RECEPTION | JUNE 3RD | 6-8PM

Dr. Stradford, an artist whose work is best known as abstract expressionism, has undertaken the challenge of exploring a dark side of American culture. Her work documents the devastation of a prosperous enterprising African American community and challenges the dismissive assumptions that have sometimes overlooked the abilities of black communities, whose diligence has transformed cities through hard work and determination. 

As an artist, her practice includes social, cultural and historical documentation. It straddles figuration and abstraction. Using new technology, photographic research and drawing, she creates digital images, painted canvases and printed silks.

Her work is currently in the collections of three museums, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, The Parrish Museum, Southampton NY and The California African American Museum: CAAM.

Cullen Washington Jr.’s Black Color Field Paintings are a record of the history of Black skin, wounded, scarred and amended. The surface of the painting is collaged paper.
As I mend the papers together, they mend wounds. The wounds become keloids (an area of irregular fibrous tissue formed at the site of a scar or injury more prominent in Black skin). The keloids become amendments, the 13th Amendment and the 14th Amendment.

The work is also about space and the underlying beginning of matter and light hence their title, Primers. The atmospheric surfaces are comprised of graphite, charcoal, ground mineral pigments and ink; a primordial mixture using the basic element carbon found in most natural phenomena. The richness of my blacks are a mixture of cyan, magenta, yellow and black inks, the process colors in printing processes used to make all other colors in the printed spectrum.

Cullen Washington Jr. is a native of Louisiana and received his BA from Louisiana State University and his MFA from Tufts University/School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. Washington lives and works in New York and has exhibited his work in museums, group and solo shows nationally and internationally.