Louise Nevelson and James Little at Rosenbaum Contemporary

I wanted to share my recently curated exhibition of internationally acclaimed female contemporary artist, Louise Nevelson and African American Minimalist painter, James Little, for our Boca Raton Gallery location that will open in Nov 2020.

Here are some great biographical excerpts that show how important, art historically, this exhibition will be.

 James Little is a meticulous craftsman who creates his own colors with pure pigment and heated beeswax and layers each hue multiple times in parallel bands on the canvas. This technique gives his paintings a formal intelligence, a depth of color and an exciting energy that is all their own. In his new paintings, color and structure are critical fixations that in Little’s work complement his geometric pictorial style. The edges of his vertical bands are saturated with lucid color as they give way to other patterns—chevrons, rectangles and zigzag designs of varying widths. 

 Born in Memphis, Tennessee, James Little received a BFA from the Memphis Academy of Art (1974) and then an MFA from Syracuse University (1976). Little’s commitment to understanding of the artwork of his predecessors has inspired his own disciplined formalism – in his own words: “a formalism that has more to do with the rehabilitation of the medium and identifying what makes great painting great… Take painting and try to do something heroic and successful and ambitious.”

 Once labeled a “defiant abstractionist,” Little has mastered the application of oil paint and beeswax to create lush pictorial effects for his paintings, void of any sense of horizon or landscape. Painting in encaustic, Little applies up to twenty layers of paint over the course of three months. The artist’s affinity for the “alchemy” of his technique mirrors his formalist interests in “flatness, the flat plane, and materials that keep illusions at bay.” Little confronts color with two concerns: “How to make it flat and how to make it interesting. Color has to have some humanity in it.”

 Since the 1970s, the work of James Little has been extensively exhibited in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe. Among his awards and honors, Little has received the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award in Painting in 2009 and the Pollock-Krasner Award in 2000. In 2016, Little was commissioned by the Metropolitan Transit Authority to create public artwork for the Long Island Rail Road’s new Brooklyn-bound platform at Jamaica Station. Little’s winning proposal will consist of an installation of 33 colored glass windows, expected to be unveiled in February of 2020. 

 Little’s paintings are included in many public and private collections, including the Newark Museum; Menil Collection; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse; New Jersey State Museum, Trenton; Tennessee State Museum, Nashville; Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock; Art in Embassies Program, N’Djamena Collection, Chad, Central Africa; Maatschappij Arti Et Amicitiae, Amsterdam, Holland; Library of Congress, Washington, DC; and Saint Louis Art Museum, Saint Louis.

 Louise Nevelson, an internationally acclaimed female, was born in Kiev, Russia, in 1899 and immigrated to Rockland, Maine, at the age of six. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Nevelson worked at the Sculpture Center in New York as well as at Atelier 17.  

 She was a sculptor known for her monumental, monochromatic, wooden wall pieces and outdoor sculptures.

 It was during the mid-1950s that she produced her first series of black wood landscape sculptures. Shortly thereafter, three New York City museums acquired her work: the Whitney Museum of American Art purchased Black Majesty, The Brooklyn Museum purchased First Personage, and The Museum of Modern Art purchased Sky Cathedral.  In 1967, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York organized Nevelson's first retrospective. Since then, her work has been the subject of over 135 solo exhibitions including a posthumous 1994 retrospective organized by the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome.  

 During the 1970s and early 1980s, Nevelson was occupied with numerous public commissions and the production of large-scale sculpture and monumental environments often using Cor-Ten steel.