About

Al Loving’s early hard-edged abstractions established him as the first African American to secure a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum in 1969, within a year of his move to New York. To Loving, however, the early success was something of a burden. “I felt stuck inside that box,” he said of his work at the time. In the following decade, the artist underwent a radical transformation, departing from the Apollonian notions of centralized composition, figure/ground separation, and pictorial frame. “[It] strikes me as radical a rupture as one can make in one’s history,” wrote the critic John …