Newark Museum Highlights African-American Expression, From Romare Bearden to Mickalene Thomas

ARTNET NEWS
By Brian Boucher
Purvis Young, Untitled, ca. 1988. Photo courtesy Newark Museum
NEW JERSEY---An exhibition opening [June 17] at the Newark Museum highlights the institution's holdings of African-American artists, with a spotlight on self-taught practitioners, who make up half the show's roster. A Purvis Young painting, showing a central figure holding aloft what appears to be a body, might be a deposition or lamentation scene.... [Emma] Amos's seven-foot-wide painting The Heavens Rain (1990) presents an apocalyptic scenario, with people, books, and even a horse plummeting down from a black sky in what Bloom calls a “startling" work. [link]

Newark Museum: “Modern Heroics: 75 Years of African-American Expressionism at the Newark Museum" (Ends January 8, 2017); 49 Washington Street Newark, New Jersey; 973.596.6550; newarkmuseum.org
Emma Amos, The Heavens Rain, 1990. Photo courtesy Newark Museum.