CCS Bard, Hessel Museum of Art

Adkins (1953-2014) and <a target="_blank" href=https://www.mutualart.com/Organization/CCS-Bard--Hessel-Museum-of-Art/"/Artist/Ja-Tovia-Gary/702F05534A288F02">Ja’Tovia Gary</a> (b. 1984).</p><p>Adkins’ Progressive Nature Studies (2013) and Gary’s Giverny I (Négresse Impériale) (2017) are shown in tandem, highlighting a longstanding history of Black Americans recognizing the gaps in the art historical canon and utilizing their practice as a means to assert Black autonomy, as well as to solidify or reconstruct an alternative perspective on the role of Blackness within the history of art-making.</p><p>Terry Adkins’ Progressive Nature Studies contains a fictionalized portfolio of the legendary agricultural chemist and inventor George Washington Carver. In his lifetime, Carver, who also painted (and received an honorable mention for his botanical paintings at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair), produced a number of paints, dyes, and pigments extracted from minerals found in the soil of Alabama. Beautifully rendered in a series of monographic prints, Adkins created Progressive Nature Studies from the backsides of his own collection stereo view cards, imagining what Carver’s abstract paintings might have looked like, and transformed here to support the excitingly bold claim that Carver was a pioneering—perhaps the first—abstract painter.</p><p><br></p>" />