DMA Acquires Frank Bowling Painting in Advance of 2015 Exhibition

by Christina Rees November 21, 2014
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(This painting is eighteen feet long.) Frank Bowling, Marcia H Travels, 1970, acrylic on canvas, 120.1 x 224.5 in.

As part of an initiative by still-new Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, Gavin Delahunty, the DMA plans to originate more exhibitions of underrepresented artists, and in early 2015 the museum will open a show of works by Frank Bowling  (b.1936).

Frank Bowling: Map Paintings will feature four massive paintings that have not been seen together since their showing in 1971 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and in advance of this show, the DMA has acquired  “Marcia H Travels” (1970), which is “the first work in the DMA’s collection by the Guyanese-born British painter.” The other three will be on loan from private collections.

Writes the DMA: “Bowling, widely celebrated for his contributions to the field of abstraction and his advocacy of black artists internationally, created a number of paintings in the 1970s characterized by his use of world maps as organizational tools to explore color as its own subject—a recurring theme in his work.”

Bowling made the Map Paintings while living in New York. “Marcia H Travels,” with ghostly map-like outlines of South America, Africa, and Guyana, refers in its title to Bowling’s friend and fellow artist Marcia Hafif. The exhibition Frank Bowling: Map Paintings will open in February and run through July 2015.

For more info, please go here.

 

 

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