Al Loving

Black Composition, Abstract Expressionist Collage by Al Loving

circa 1980

An innovative artist of abstraction who found inspiration in the hard-edge style of Minimalism as well as in the free-form creation of traditional quilt making, Al Loving was the first African American to have a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Born in Detroit, Michigan, Loving was inspired to pursue art at an early age, captivated by the work of his father who had studied art and made his living as a sign painter and the quilting done by his mother and grandmother. He earned a BFA from the University of Illinois and an MFA from the University of Michigan.

Loving moved to New York in 1968, where his art, with its striking hexagonal and cubic shapes conveying a sense of spatial illusion, soon caught the attention of the art world. Just a year later, the Whitney Museum opened its exhibition of his paintings featuring geometric forms influenced by Abstract Expressionists like Hans Hofmann, who had taught Al Mullen, Loving's mentor in Michigan.

By the 1970s, Loving shifted to a new approach, experimenting with torn canvas and collage for kaleidoscopic patterns. Spiraling motifs laced over the layers of color, which the artist had joined together through strips of cardboard and canvas, blurring the line between painting and sculpture. In 1974, critic Peter Schjeldahl wrote in the New York Times that Loving’s pieces “energize the space around them” and appear to be “caught in the act of moving across the wall.”

Loving explained that he used abstraction “to speak directly to the art” and examine the changes in painting sparked by modernism, where “passion and feelings became real. The subject matter became less important than the art itself.” Loving was a longtime educator, and his legacy extends to the students he taught at the City College of New York from 1988 to 1996. He exhibited widely in his lifetime, with solo shows at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Neuberger Museum of Art. His work is also in the collections of leading museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney and the National Gallery of Art.

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