Point of Departure

Point of Departure Abstraction 1958–Present August–December 2021 Learning Guide

Point of Departure Abstraction 1958–Present August–December 2021 The artists represented in this exhibition embrace the primacy of their materials, using a visual language rooted in observation. Through their works, Point of Departure surveys the evolution of abstraction from the late 1950s—after the first wave of artists associated with abstract expressionism—to the present.

The exhibition’s title is drawn from a 1965 jazz recording by Andrew Hill that both exemplifies and defies its time. Hill’s music had its roots in a post-Monk, hard-bop style, pushing it to the edge of free jazz and, as the title indicates, into new territory. Abstraction in visual art, like Hill’s music, continues its evolution. In this gallery, an untitled painting by Norman Lewis also from 1958 shows the fluid interplay between abstraction and depictive references shared by many of the works in the exhibition. Close observation of these works may yield questions about the broadening options for handling perceptions of reality. Although the works are packed with information, they are decidedly abstract. Without effort, they point to both past and future, making themselves timeless. For this reason, the installation is not presented chronologically.

Abstraction is one of the strengths of Sheldon’s collection. Seminal holdings of early modernism in America inspired acquisitions of key postwar works associated with abstract expressionism. With persistence, this focus has continued to the present. Recent additions to the collection provide inclusive presentation of diverse voices and perspectives that lead to more profound and accurate discussions of abstraction. To that end, Point of Departure includes six recent acquisitions and four loans from local collections.

Exhibition support is provided by Kristen and Geoff Cline, Melanie and Jon Gross, Kathy and Marc LeBaron, Patricia and Joel Meier, Roseann and Phil Perry, Rhonda Seacrest, Lisa and Tom Smith, and Donna Woods and Jon Hinrichs.

Point of Departure Abstraction 1958–Present August–December 2021

John McLaughlin

Carmen Herrera

#1, 1965

Gemini

Peter Halley Colortron

Tony Bechara May 22

Lee Krasner Invocation

Mavis Pusey Carome

Stanley Whitney Norman Lewis

Red

Untitled

Ron Gorchov Odili Donald Odita

Capital

Passage

William T. Williams

Jill Nathanson

Up Balls

Cantabile

Point of Departure Abstraction 1958–Present August–December 2021

Lisa Corinne Davis

Anish Kapoor

Deductive Data

Breathing Blue

Terry Winters Event Horizon

Larry Poons Untitled

Sue Williams Cutie Pie

Ross Bleckner The Past Tense of Light

Dan Christensen Holiday in Blue

John McLaughlin

Sharon, MA 1898–Dana Point, CA 1976 #1, 1965 1965 Oil on canvas, 60 x 48 inches University of Nebraska–Lincoln Anna R. and Frank M. Hall Charitable Trust H-1493.1970

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A self-taught artist, John McLaughlin began painting full-time after World War II, producing canvases influenced by the work of Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, and sixteenthcentury Japanese painters. His longstanding engagement with Japanese art had roots in his childhood and developed further when he and his wife Florence Emerson, a grandniece of Ralph Waldo Emerson, worked as Japanese print dealers in Boston after World War I. McLaughlin’s mature works, characterized by rectangular forms that explore what Zen masters describe as the spaces between the

John McLaughlin #1, 1965

objects or the “marvelous void,” encourage a meditative or introspective state in the viewer.

Such canvases were part of his first solo exhibition at the Felix Landau Gallery in Los Angeles, an installation in 1952 that helped launch his reputation as one of the leading artists working in California. The breadth of his accomplishments was recently recognized with the 2016 retrospective John Laughlin: Total Abstraction at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

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Tony Bechara

born San Juan, Puerto Rico 1942 May 22 2008 Acrylic on linen, 60 1/4 x 60 1/4 inches University of Nebraska–Lincoln Robert E. Schweser and Fern Beardsley Schweser Acquisition Fund through the University of Nebraska Foundation U-5636.2011

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Painter and printmaker Tony Bechara was born in Puerto Rico in 1942 and moved to Washington, DC, to study at Georgetown University in his late teens. Subsequently, he attended Georgetown School of Law, NYU’s Graduate School of International Relations, the Sorbonne in Paris, and the School of Visual Arts in New York. His interests in the dynamics of color and the expressive possibilities of abstract geometries are evident his works based on principles of color,

Tony Bechara May 22

organization, and randomness.

Bechara is a recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and was awarded public commissions from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the Cooper Square Development Corporation of New York City. He currently serves as a trustee of Studio in a School and the Brooklyn Academy of Music and is chair emeritus of El Museo del Barrio. He lives and works in New York.

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Mavis Pusey

Kingston, Jamaica 1928–Falmouth, VA 2019 Carome circa 1970 Oil on canvas, 58 x 48 inches University of Nebraska–Lincoln Olga N. Sheldon Acquisition Trust U-5726.2012

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Born in Jamaica in 1928, Mavis Pusey moved to New York in 1946 to study at the Traphagen School of Fashion and, later, at the Art Students League. By 1969, after almost a decade working as a patternmaker for Singer in London, Pusey returned to New York to work at Robert Blackburn’s printmaking workshop, an important collaborative studio where artists were encouraged to experiment and freely exchange ideas. Her paintings during this period, including Carome, depict the abstracted city: “I am inspired by the energy and the beat of the construction and demolition of these buildings—the tempo and

Mavis Pusey

movement mold into a synthesis and, for me,

Carome

become another aesthetic of abstraction.”

Pusey’s role as a leading abstract painter in New York was recognized as early as 1971, with the inclusion of her work in Whitney Museum of American Art’s Contemporary Black Artists in America exhibition, and more recently in the 2017 show Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960s to Today at Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. Pusey was a recipient of a PollockKrasner Foundation award and a Tiffany Foundation grant.

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Norman Lewis

New York, NY 1909–New York, NY 1979 Untitled 1958 Oil on canvas, 48 1/2 x 61 inches University of Nebraska–Lincoln Olga N. Sheldon Acquisition Trust and gift from Billy E. Hodges U-5742.2012

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Norman Lewis began his career as a social realist painter, depicting the inequities caused by poverty and racism, before shifting his style toward an abstraction that draws on sources as varied as music, nature, and Chinese, Japanese, and African art. As the only Black painter among the first generation of abstract expressionist artists, which included Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock, and Ad

Norman Lewis Untitled

Reinhardt, Lewis is now best remembered for his paintings with rhythmic lines and layers of color that also hint at depictive forms.

Throughout his career, Lewis remained committed to social causes. In 1963, he formed the Spiral Group with other Black artists, including Romare Bearden, Charles Alston, and Hale Woodruff, to further the Civil Rights Movement. Lewis died on August 27, 1979, in New York City.

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Odili Donald Odita

born Enugu, Nigeria 1966

Passage 2010 Acrylic on canvas, 84 x 109 inches University of Nebraska–Lincoln Robert E. Schweser and Fern Beardsley Schweser Acquisition Fund through the University of Nebraska Foundation U-5638.2011

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Born in Nigeria and raised in Ohio, Odili Donald Odita makes large paintings and murals that combine a number of disparate influences, including African textiles, science fiction hyperspace, painted clay walls of homes in West Africa, op art, and hard-edged abstraction of the 1960s.

Characterized by structured patterns and vibrant colors, his works demonstrate both

Odili Donald Odita

formal experimentation and his interest in art’s

Passage

relationship to the human condition, which he has described as a desire “to engage with color in terms of the politics of specificity and difference, and to speak toward individuality and of a unique distinctiveness that runs parallel to the notion of humanity itself.”

Odita holds a BFA (with distinction) from Ohio State University and an MFA from Bennington College. He lives and works in Philadelphia, where he has taught at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art since 2006.

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William T. Williams

born Cross Creek, NC 1942 Up Balls 1971 Acrylic on cotton canvas, 84 x 60 inches University of Nebraska–Lincoln Anna R. and Frank M. Hall Charitable Trust U-6292.2013

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William T. Williams spent his early childhood in Spring Lake, North Carolina, before moving with his family to New York City by the late 1950s, when he attended his first art classes at the School of Industrial Art in Manhattan.

He subsequently attended Pratt Institute and Yale University, earning his BFA in 1966 and MFA in 1968.

His first solo exhibition in New York, which included Sheldon’s painting Up Balls, occurred in 1971 at the Reese Paley Art Gallery. In the same year, his work was included in The Deluxe Show, a seminal exhibition in Houston that was among the first racially integrated shows to feature abstract paintings

William T. Williams Up Balls

made by Black and white artists. Williams’s contributions to the field of painting have been recognized with awards such as a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Awards, a Joan Mitchell Foundation Award, and the North Carolina Award, the highest civilian honor given by the state.

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Carmen Herrera

born Havana, Cuba 1915 Gemini 2007 Acrylic on canvas, 36 1/8 x 72 inches University of Nebraska–Lincoln Robert E. Schweser and Fern Beardsley Schweser Acquisition Fund through the University of Nebraska Foundation U-5637.2011

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A painter, sculptor, and printmaker, Carmen Herrera was born in 1915 in Havana, Cuba. She studied architecture at the Universidad de la Habana before enrolling in the Art Students League in New York City. Following World War II and after frequent travels to France, Herrera

Carmen Herrera

settled in New York and began her prolific

Gemini

career making art that she has described as her “quest for the simplest of pictorial resolutions.”

Through her use of geometric forms, brilliant color, and crisp lines, Herrera explores spatial tension in paintings that bring together a range of influences, such as Russian suprematism, De Stijl, Brazilian concretism, and minimalism. Having gained commercial success late in her career—in 2004 at the age of eighty-nine—Herrera is among the most celebrated abstract artists working today.

In 2020–2021, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston presented a retrospective exhibition that surveyed her career. Herrera lives and works in New York City, where she continues to make prints and designs for murals around the city.

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Peter Halley

born New York, NY 1953 Colortron 1999 Acrylic, Day-Glo fluorescent pigment and metallic acrylic, and Roll-a-Tex paint additive on canvas, 78 x 83 1/2 inches University of Nebraska–Lincoln Robert E. Schweser and Fern Beardsley Schweser Acquisition Fund through the University of Nebraska Foundation U-5357.2003

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Since the 1980s, Peter Halley has been known for his Day-Glo paintings that feature motifs derived from windows, prison cells, and city grids that he associates with urban space and the digital landscape. He uses vertical lines and large planes of color in ways that are indebted to the influence of artists Barnett Newman and Ellsworth Kelly.

Halley completed his undergraduate studies at Yale University and, in 1978, received an

Peter Halley Colortron

MFA from the University of New Orleans. In addition to his career as an artist, Halley is the author of critical theory essays and was the publisher of Index Magazine from 1996 to 2005. Between 2002 and 2011, Halley returned to Yale, where he served as the director of graduate studies in painting and printmaking. He now lives and works in New York City.

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Lee Krasner

New York, NY 1908–New York, NY 1984 Invocation 1969–71 Oil on canvas, 85 5/8 x 55 7/8 inches University of Nebraska–Lincoln Olga N. Sheldon Acquisition Trust and Sheldon Art Association U-5640.2011

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Born in 1908 to a Russian Orthodox Jewish family living in New York, Lee Krasner began her training at a number of the city’s art institutions and studied with Hans Hofmann, the influential German painter and teacher.

She became an established, abstract artist by the 1930s and was so deeply embedded in the city’s contemporary art scene that she played an instrumental role in jumpstarting the career of her future husband, Jackson Pollock. It was she who introduced him to critic Clement Greenberg and collector Peggy Guggenheim.

Even though Krasner spent significant time championing Pollock’s art both during his lifetime and after his death, she continued her own artistic career, making many paintings, prints, and mosaics featuring curvilinear

Lee Krasner

forms that cover the full expanse of the work’s

Invocation

surface. Her individual accomplishments were recognized in 1984 with a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and, more recently, in Lee Krasner: Living Color that completed its four-venue tour in Europe in January 2021.

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Stanley Whitney

born Philadelphia, PA 1946 Red 2015 Oil on linen, 72 x 72 inches University of Nebraska–Lincoln Anna R. and Frank M. Hall Charitable Trust H-3121.2016

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Stanley Whitney lives and works in New York City and Parma, Italy, where he makes paintings and prints that are indebted to color field painting and minimalism. Whitney earned a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and an MFA from Yale University. Some of his recent solo exhibitions include Stanley Whitney at Gagosian in Rome, Italy; Stanley Whitney: Afternoon Paintings at Lisson Gallery in London, England; and Dance the Orange at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Selected public

Stanley Whitney Red

collections where his work is held include the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; Philadelphia Museum of Art; The Studio Museum in Harlem; Yale University Art Gallery; and this museum. He is a professor emeritus of painting and drawing at Tyler School of Art, Temple University.

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Ron Gorchov

Chicago, IL 1930–New York, NY 2020 Capital 1978 Oil on canvas, 31 5/16 x 31 3/4 x 7 1/8 inches University of Nebraska–Lincoln Robert E. Schweser and Fern Beardsley Schweser Acquisition Fund through the University of Nebraska Foundation U-6848.2018

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Best known for his saddle-shaped paintings, such as the one on view here, Ron Gorchov grew up attending classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago before enrolling briefly at the University of Mississippi. He soon returned to Chicago to resume his training at Roosevelt College, the Art Institute, and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

After moving to New York in 1953, Gorchov worked as a lifeguard until his first solo show at Tibor de Nagy Gallery in 1960. Throughout the next decade, he experimented with

Ron Gorchov

various canvas shapes before settling on his

Capital

characteristic curving structure. Gorchov’s career enjoyed a resurgence in the early 2000s when the art dealer Vito Schnabel, son of painter Julian Schnabel, began championing his work in galleries and in Double Trouble, an exhibition at New York’s MoMA PS1 in 2006.

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Jill Nathanson

born New York, NY 1955 Cantabile 2019 Acrylic and polymers with oil on panel, 42 7/8 x 81 inches University of Nebraska–Lincoln Gift of the artist and Berry Campbell Gallery New York U-6920.2020

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Jill Nathanson engages with the legacy of color field painting. She completed her undergraduate studies in 1976 at Bennington College in Vermont, where she worked in the artistic orbit once occupied by Helen Frankenthaler, one of the progenitors of such

Jill Nathanson Cantabile

a visual language. To create these large planes of color, Nathanson begins with computer files of color, overlapping them digitally to create new hues that elicit the visual response she seeks. She then creates polymer-based pigments that she pours on prepared panels, in a practice akin to Frankenthaler’s soak-stain technique.

In addition to her degree from Bennington College, Nathanson holds an MFA from Hunter College. Her most recent solo show was Jill Nathanson: Light Phrase at Berry Campbell Gallery, New York in January 2021.

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Lisa Corinne Davis born Baltimore, MD 1958

Deductive Data 2021 Oil on canvas, 55 5/8 x 48 5/8 inches University of Nebraska–Lincoln Olga N. Sheldon Acquisition Trust U-6944.2021

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Lisa Corinne Davis attended Cornell University for two years, where she was asked to choose between living in student dorms or Ujamaa House with the campus’s Black students, a binary that continues to inform her studio practice today. In her grid paintings, she uses the language of abstraction to argue for “a more fluid definition of Blackness,” which is also the title of a 2016 essay she wrote for ArtCritical, asserting “my position as an abstract painter allows me to manifest my own self of self—my black self—as an expression of self-determination and freedom,

Lisa Corinne Davis Deductive Data

while avoiding an oppositional stance.”

Davis holds a BFA from Pratt Institute and an MFA from Hunter College, where she serves as a professor of art and head of painting.

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Larry Poons

born Tokyo, Japan 1937 Untitled 1975 Acrylic on canvas, 92 3/4 x 23 3/4 inches On loan from Kathryn and Marc LeBaron

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Born in Tokyo, Japan, on October 1, 1937, Larry Poons attended the New England Conservatory of Music, the School of the Museum of Fine Art, Boston, and the Art Students League in the early 1960s.

Throughout his long career, Poons’s style underwent several shifts. In the 1960s, he began making paintings that used mathematical principles to place dots across the surfaces of his canvases before shifting to make lyrically abstract paintings by pouring or throwing paint, as seen in the work on view here.

Poons’s painting and motorcycle riding endeavors were the subject of a 2018 HBO documentary, The Price of Everything, in which he says he aspires “to be like Beethoven … to grow, move on, excel.” He currently splits his time between New York City and East Durham, New York, in the Catskill Mountains.

Larry Poons Untitled

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Ross Bleckner

born New York, NY 1949 The Past Tense of Light 1986 Oil on canvas, 108 x 84 inches On loan from Karen and Robert Duncan

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Ross Bleckner was born in 1949 in Brooklyn and grew up in Hewlett Harbor on Long Island. He studied at New York University with classmates Sol Lewitt and Chuck Close, receiving his BFA in 1971 before enrolling at California Institute of the Arts, where he earned his MFA in 1973. Bleckner’s paintings from the 1980s, including the canvas on view here, pay tribute to op art. However, by the end of the decade, he began producing work that traced the toll of the AIDS epidemic in works that explore the profound sense of loss.

In 1988, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art organized Bleckner’s first solo museum

Ross Bleckner The Past Tense of Light

exhibition, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum mounted his midcareer retrospective in 1995. His work was also included in three Whitney Biennial exhibitions in the 1970s and 1980s. Bleckner lives and works in New York.

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Dan Christensen

Cozad, NE 1942–East Hampton, NY 2007 Holiday in Blue 1993 Acrylic on canvas, 96 x 90 1/2 inches On loan from Kathryn and Marc LeBaron

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Dan Christensen, who is considered a color field or post-painterly abstract artist, was born in Cozad, Nebraska, in 1942. On a teenage trip to Denver, Christensen saw work by Jackson Pollock that cemented his wish to be an artist and spurred him to earn his BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute.

After graduation, Christensen moved to New York, where he began using a spray gun to make paintings that drew the attention of influential critic Clement Greenberg, who championed his art. Christensen’s

Dan Christensen

contributions to painting were recognized

Holiday in Blue

by a Guggenheim Fellowship and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. His work was the subject of a retrospective at the Spanierman Gallery in New York shortly before his death in 2007.

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Anish Kapoor

born Mumbai, India 1954 Breathing Blue 2017 Etching, 27 1/2 x 37 13/16 inches On loan from Lisa M. and Thomas C. Smith

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Best known as a sculptor, Anish Kapoor has made large-scale public works that explore nuances of form, color, material, and surface.

The amorphous shapes seen in this series

Anish Kapoor Breathing Blue

of ten prints recall his monumental sculpture Cloud Gate in Chicago’s Millennium Park.

Kapoor was born in Mumbai in 1954 and has lived in London since the early 1970s when he moved there to study art. After enrolling at Hornsey College, Kapoor completed his postgraduate studies at the Chelsea School of Art. Some of his recent solo exhibitions have been held at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Urban Planning, Shenzen, China (2021); Houghton Hall, Norfolk, UK (2020); and Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, Germany (2020). Kapoor represented Britain at the 44th Venice Biennale in 1990 and received the Premio Duemila for Best Young Artist. The following year, he received the Turner Prize. He was awarded a CBE in 2003 and a knighthood in 2013 for services to the visual arts.

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Terry Winters

born New York, NY 1949 Event Horizon 1991 Oil on linen, 96 x 120 inches University of Nebraska–Lincoln Olga N. Sheldon Acquisition Trust U-6946.2021

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A painter, printmaker, and draftsman, Terry Winters developed an interest in minimalism while studying at the Pratt Institute, where he received his BFA in 1971. However, an opportunity to work in New Mexico on Walter De Maria’s earth work in 1977 radically shifted his process. Winters initiated a new series of paintings that featured cellular forms that critics have described as

Terry Winters Event Horizon

universal or dream-like and similar to works made by William Baziotes, Arshile Gorky, Philip Guston, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko. He debuted the work in 1982 at Sonnabend Gallery in New York.

Winters has been the subject of two painting retrospectives: the first at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1992 and the second in 2004 at the Addison Gallery of Art. In 2001, the Metropolitan Museum of Art organized a retrospective of his prints.

He splits his time between upstate New York and Manhattan, where he is currently making work that explores how information is processed in the twenty-first century.

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Sue Williams

born Chicago, IL 1954 Cutie Pie 2001 Oil and acrylic on canvas, 84 x 104 inches University of Nebraska–Lincoln Olga N. Sheldon Acquisition Trust U-6945.2021

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Informed by her lived experience as a survivor of domestic violence, Sue Williams uses an abstract visual language to make paintings that highlight the sexism and misogyny experienced by women. In the 1980s, she often incorporated figural doodles and text in her work. By the late 1990s, Williams had begun creating purely abstract paintings that allowed her to both explore the materiality of

Sue Williams Cutie Pie

oil paint and interrogate the male-dominated world of abstraction. As the artist has said, “I want to draw attention to issues; I want people to be informed.”

Williams was born in the suburbs of Chicago in 1954 and received her BFA from California Institute of the Arts in 1976. Her work is held by the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Art Institute of Chicago. She was selected to participate in three consecutive Whitney Biennials, beginning in 1993. The same year, Williams was also awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

She lives and works in New York.

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