Equals 6: A Sum Effect of Frank Bowling’s 5+1
University Hall Gallery, UMass Boston • Boston, MA • umb.edu • Through February 18, 2023
Frank Bowling’s Americas, currently on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, has a satellite exhibition at UMass Boston’s University Hall Gallery. The centerpiece of a multifaceted, collaborative project has as its starting point the landmark 1969 exhibition 5+1 at SUNY Stony Brook, which was curated by Bowling to spotlight the underrepresented abstract work of five Black artists and himself. The five, all men, were Melvin Edwards, Al Loving, Jack Whitten, Daniel LaRue Johnson, and William T. Williams. Equals 6 brings Bowling’s impulse into the present by featuring the varied work of women artists and Queer male artists—Dell Hamilton, Glenn Ligon, Steve Locke, Julie Mehretu, Destiny Palmer, and Howardena Pindell—and thus provides an edifying look at an expanded notion of abstract work today.
For example, in Homage to the Auction Block, Locke reworks Josef Albers’ pristine nesting squares and inserts the geometric shape of an auction block at the painting’s focal point. An exercise in color and contrast, it also conveys a message about slavery and oppression. Mehretu’s print, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (a title echoing both W. B. Yeats and Joan Didion), encompasses a whirl of anxious markings that suggests a fraught moment of discordant jazz…or conflicted humanity. An energetic, monumental sculptural drawing, Systems Won’t Save Us, (Otherwise Known as Frankenstein) by Dell Hamilton bursts forth to proclaim the center won’t hold, the systematic solutions won’t work, and that as a person who is neuro divergent she won’t assimilate. In the 12-minute, scripted video Free, White and 21, the well-known abstract artist (and SUNY Stony Brook professor) Howardena Pindell recounts her searing experiences of racism as a young Black woman.
As a means for the MFA to further expand its community connections and audiences, the laudable project, which includes an online component, enabled a small group of UMass Boston students to participate in the research and curatorial process. “Connecting our students with these artists and curators” says gallery director Samuel Toabe, “has given them agency within these institutions. We want to show them that, like Bowling, they too can subvert the art historical discourses around abstraction and representation by asserting their voices and getting involved.”
—Jack Curtis