Curated by Kellie Jones

Organized by Yale art historian Kellie Jones, this group exhibition joins the politics of race to the practices of avant-garde painting, sculpture, and video in the mid-'60s and '70s. The fifteen artists included—Al Loving, Alma Thomas, and Howardena Pindell among them—pursued vibrantly modernist alternatives to the figuration of the contemporaneous Black Arts Movement. The show's catalogue explores the creative contexts—like Minimalist sculpture and free jazz—that shaped black abstraction and presents a transcription of the museum's cross-generational roundtable (moderated by Jones last June) on abstraction then and now, featuring artists Julie Mehretu and Louis Cameron, their nonobjective predecessors Melvin Edwards and William T. Williams, and Lowery S. Sims (president of the Studio Musuem).

— Richard Meyer