LILIAN THOM A S B U RWELL SOAR ING
LILIAN THOMAS BURWELL, ASSATEAGUE ISL AND, MARYL AND, C. 1965
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LILIAN THOMAS BURWELL: SOARING
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his exhibition celebrates artist Lilian Thomas Burwell, born in Washington, D.C., raised and educated in Manhattan and Brooklyn, and who lives and works in Highland Beach, Maryland. It highlights her unique abstract visual language defined by a distinctly bold palette and organic inferences to flora, fauna, and other natural phenomena. The exhibition’s title pays homage to the essay Soaring With a Painterly Voice written by the late Dr. David Driskell on the occasion of Burwell’s 1997 survey exhibition at Hampton University Museum in which he describes her work as “transcendental in showing stylistic diversity of earthly beauty and cosmic vision.” 1 The show chronicles Burwell’s transition from two-dimensional painterly planes, which came to maturity in the 1980s, to the three-dimensional sculptural forms from the last three decades for which she has become best known. It is a declaration of her spiritual connection to nature and her enduring belief in abstraction as an interpretive language with universal resonance. Most importantly for the artist,
Soaring provides a platform for her primary artistic intention, which is to bring about feelings and experiences she and the viewer may hold in common, and as such share in a “perception of spirit.” 2 This solo gallery presentation, the 94-year-old artist’s first in New York City, offers a vital opportunity to honor an important voice in American abstraction too long under-recognized by the broader art world.3 In recent years, Burwell’s innovations in sculptural surfaces have been compared to those of Elizabeth Murray and Frank Stella.4 She has rightly been described by curator and museum director Kathryn Wat as “an artistic foremother to contemporary artists who disturb the conventional trope of the rectangular painting.”5 Burwell developed her oeuvre during a highly influential time in the Washington, D.C. art community. Despite more politically overt artistic narratives she saw as a developing artist in the 1960s and ‘70s, she made a conscious decision to “do work that presented the beautiful, or at least elicited a feeling of beauty, as well as of peace and hope,” which she saw as running “concurrent with or beyond whatever stark reality exists.”6 She hails among many Black abstract artists in the area, with influential peers such as Alma Thomas, Sam Gilliam, and Sylvia Snowden, who pursued abstraction despite the prevalence of narrative and figure-based modes of expression often chosen by African American artists of this time. In abstraction Burwell found an antidote. She, like Alma Thomas, pursued abstraction—the use of color, light, line, shape, and texture— to concentrate on “beauty and happiness” rather than “on man’s inhumanity to man.”7 Grounding
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Lilian Burwell’s creativity developed in eras that were, as art historian Lowery Sims describes, “especially hostile to the aspirations of females and black people.” She, like many female artists of her time, navigated “strategies of accommodation and defiance of societal expectations.”8 She made
forays into painting while taking government jobs in graphic design and later, like her contemporaries Loïs Mailou Jones, Alma Thomas, and Mavis Pusey, earned her living as an art educator. Burwell began a dedicated pursuit of abstract painting in 1964, taking classes with Benjamin Abramowitz whose abstract expressionist teaching and philosophy incalcuably influenced her. She describes this as a time when she learned how making marks of color and line can create intuitive compositions, stating: “the painting tells you what to do, point and counterpoint, like a dance.” 9 The early formation of a personal style is evident in paintings of the late 1960s, such as Red Anatomy (1969) [fig. 1]. The composition is grounded in an instinctive approach to mark making, one in which each brushstroke responds to the one made prior, and the expressionist philosophy of revealing the unconscious through line, color, and form. This work, with its strong, central, golden swirl suspended in a crimson background, demonstrates an early commitment to a personal iconography rooted in natural forms and biomorphic patterns. Comparably in Cycloid (1972) [fig. 2], made a few years later, a similar ovoid emerges from circular beige and white swaths ensconced in black and gray planes. While these forms evoke the motion and stasis of nature, they remain ambiguously derived. A pivotal work which marks another phase of Burwell’s development is Daffodil Growing (1973) [fig. 3]. This painting, made in direct response to her planting the Spring bulb as a memorial to a friend, offers a more overt, though not fully explicit, layering of petal-like shapes rendered in tones of gold and amber. Works from the mid-late 1970s, a time when Burwell found opportunities such as a year-long sabbatical to delve deeper into her painting practice, are marked by this refined color sensibility and more complex forms and compositions. In 1980 Burwell retired from teaching and set up a
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home studio where she painted daily while caring for her dying mother. The dedicated intention she brought to both of these endeavors is evident in works from this year. These paintings are decidedly not morose but instead honor the complex cycles of life with sensitively rich color, detailed brushwork, and spatial depth. Sanseveria (1980) [back cover], for example, is a masterwork with its commanding scale complemented by strong, sinuous brushstrokes of indigo, emerald, and turquoise. Burwell masterfully blends foreground and background, solid and liquid, in an amalgamation that evokes the resurrective mysteries of Spring itself. That her imagery can as easily be seen as a leaf, petal, or blade of grass as much as a plume of smoke or a ripple of water shows her desire to draw attention to the similarities in natural phenomena as the link between all living things, what she describes as a “sense of the universality and infinity of all life.” 10 Other works such as Waxleaf (1981) [plate 3] and Leaflight (1983) [fig. 5] followed. Their complexity exemplifies Burwell’s steadfast exploration into abstraction as a personal and spiritual interpretation of the natural world.
landscapes around which the viewer moves and becomes immersed. Much in the same way that Burwell scaled back her color palette in the 1970s to focus on composition, here she let the grandness of scale teach her the ways in which viewer participation can complete a work. In these pieces Burwell was able to explore her philosophy of “unified reality,” her belief in an integrated existence in which art is “as inseparable from experience and function as the spirit is from the mind and body.”13 Soaring
FIG. 3. DAFFODIL GROWING, 1973, OIL ON CANVAS, 30½ X 40⅛ IN.
Ascending If the 1970s saw Burwell’s work originating from her “digging in the earth” and considering the “cyclical transition of plant life…and the rhythms and ever-unfoldingness of that life,” then the early-mid 1980s exemplifies an ascension.11 Flame Dance (1983) [plate 1] offers the unveiling of a fiery wellspring of vertical energy. Burwell’s signature organic brushstrokes in enigmatic red hues form what may be interpreted as the center of a rose or the heat of flames. The piece demonstrates Burwell’s need to bring a life-force into multiple dimensions. In these ways, it can be seen as a precursor to her later shaped canvases. In 1984, Burwell created Skybound [plate 4], a work that would forever change the direction of her pursuits in abstraction. No longer was the two-dimensional plane sufficient for her exploration. With Skybound, Burwell physically cut out a negative space, wing-like in shape, from her canvas. This extraction not only allowed for a physical but also a psychological expanse, giving her the ability to pursue space in a more dynamic way. Fellow D.C.-based artist and friend, Sam Gilliam encouraged the shift in the canvas’s orientation from a square to a diamond, further bringing forth the work’s sculptural characteristics and evoking motion in the composition. These features together with its flowing lines, variations in blue, and sense of movement, represent ascension both within the work and for the artist. Burwell describes the piece—like herself—as having “taken flight.”12 In the following months and years Burwell became emboldened to further explore sculptural space while still remaining committed to the medium and history of painting. Multi-paneled screen-like works such as The Second Day (1984) [fig. 4] and Orison Piece (1985-86) unfold as sectional, abstracted
By the 1990s and 2000s Lilian Burwell was artistically soaring. Comfortably situated in a large home studio in Highland Beach, Maryland, with space and equipment to fervently continue her explorations in abstraction, she pursued the multi-layered wall-based works for which she is now best known. These mid-scale pieces are comprised of wood segments shaped into organic forms and meticulously wrapped in canvas and painted in an almost trompe l’oeil style. Her combined shapes poetically reference leaf, wing, and wave in ways that enigmatically transform the space in which they hang into earth, sky, and ocean. These works are a culmination of decades of material experimentation synthesized in a language culled from the natural world and the vocabulary of abstraction. The brightness and boldness of Burwell’s lines and forms highlight her ever-replenishing location of joy in the development of her visual language. If a painting like Arctic Flow (1983) [plate 2], with its delicate filigree and icy palette, can be interpreted as petals unfurling or glaciers flowing, then works from almost a decade later of similar palette and detail, such as Eastbound (1991) and Interconnection (1992) [plates 7 and 6], might represent winged flight or the sleek fins of ocean mammals. Burwell, like fellow abstractionist Mary Lovelace O’Neal at the same time, chose to reference ocean life, particularly whales and dolphins, as a strong pronouncement of both the force and delicacy of the natural world. The forms in the three-part wall sculpture, Dolphinium (c. 1990s) [plate 5], read as if Burwell’s earlier painting, Skybound, from a decade prior have outgrown their airy support and seek to dive into the ocean. Here again, Burwell merges the sources of natural phenomena into highly original sculptural forms. This interconnectedness, so important to Burwell, comes alive in these works. Air becomes water. Solid becomes liquid. Even Plexiglas, which the artist heats and molds into shapes and situates among the painted segments, as in Dolphin Spirit (2006) [plate 8] and Montagne (2012) [plate 10], becomes both light and form in Burwell’s creative handling. In Spirit of Blue Grosbeak (2007) [plate 9], the two organic Plexiglas forms may represent the energy of the bird’s wings or the clouds through which it soars. For Burwell, they are interconnected manifestations.
FIG. 4. LILIAN THOMAS BURWELL WITH HER INSTALL ATION, THE SECOND DAY, 1984. P H O T O : J A I M E M E L N I C O V E
Lilian Thomas Burwell comes to her art with a distinct alchemy that blends innovative processes with a spiritual impulse. For more than six decades, she has utilized abstraction to invite viewers to explore not only the formal and conceptual qualities in her work, but also to bring their own experiences to meet its energy. She believes that a shared experience of nature as perceived through the language of abstraction is the precise incitement for unity. She poignantly declares: “I want my work to affect you, to make some difference to you. …This work is not complete for me until you bring yourself to it.”14 This culmination—her impetus and the viewer’s interpretation—forms the basis of a spiritual call and response through which she is simply an instrument.15 It is not surprising, then, that this exhibition comes as the calls for widening the art historical canon and expanding the narratives of American abstraction grow louder. As evidenced here, Burwell’s soaring voice, grounded in a demand for beauty and a celebration of our shared experience through art, resonates from the proverbial belfry. —Melissa Messina, Curator
1
2
In From Painting to Painting as Sculpture: The Journey of Lilian Thomas Burwell, (Hampton, VA: Hampton University Museum, 1997), 9. Conversation with the artist, January 21, 2021.
3
A solo exhibition was held for Burwell in 2000 at The Skylight Gallery, Center for Arts and Culture, Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, Brooklyn, NY.
4
Lowery Stokes Sims, “Black, Woman, Abstract Artist,” and Kathryn Wat,
“Conversations: Kathryn Wat on Lilian Thomas Burwell,” in Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960s to Today, (Kansas City, MO: Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, 2017), 41 and 31. 5
Kathryn Wat, “Conversations: Kathryn Wat on Lilian Thomas Burwell,” in Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960s to Today, (Kansas City, MO: Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, 2017), 31. Wat also adds: “she retains an unshakeable faith in the capacity of a painted surface to transport us to a place of memory and emotion.”
6
Lilian Thomas Burwell, “The Journey,” From Painting to Painting as Sculpture: The Journey of Lilian Thomas Burwell, (Hampton, VA: Hampton University Museum, 1997), 14.
7
Thomas as quoted in Arnesia Young, “Alma Thomas: The Life and Work of a 20th-Century Black Female Abstract Artist,” www.mymodernmet.com, accessed March 16, 2021. https://mymodernmet.com/alma-thomas/?fbclid=IwAR0qN1uGf6tR20n97D9A3laGYB5XI9cUto5NRHIS3Ify4OToDA-zZ9iV1ks
8
Lowery Stokes Sims, “Mildred Thompson: An Artist’s Odyssey,” in Mildred Thompson: Radiation Explorations and Magnetic Fields, (New York, NY: Galerie Lelong & Co., 2018), 54-55.
9
Conversation with the artist, January 21, 2021.
10
Lilian Thomas Burwell, “The Journey,” From Painting to Painting as Sculpture: The Journey of Lilian Thomas Burwell, (Hampton, VA: Hampton University Museum, 1997), 33.
11
Ibid, 44.
12
Ibid, 40.
13
Ibid, 49.
14
Ibid, 49.
15
Conversation with the artist, January 21, 2021. A believer that abstraction emanates from the unconscious, Burwell also describes a clairvoyance in which viewers’ interpretations have often explained intentions consciously unknown to her prior, and as such completing the work.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Lilian Thomas Burwell was born in 1927 in Washington, D.C., and attended Pratt Institute, where she also did her practice teaching. She earned an MFA from Catholic University in 1975. As a master teacher of art in the public schools of Washington, D.C., she designed the pre-secondary school art curriculum before becoming a member of the visual arts faculty at Duke Ellington School of the Arts. She served as board member of the Smithsonian Institution Renwick Alliance from 1989 to 1992, and the Arlington Arts Center from 1984 to 1987. She was founding and curatorial director of the Alma Thomas Memorial Gallery and curatorial director of the Sumner Museum and Archives in Washington, D.C., from 1981 to 1984. Her published writings include From Painting to Painting as Sculpture: The Journey of Lilian Thomas Burwell (1997) and A Dichotomy of Passion: The Two Masters (2008). Her works are in the collections of the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora at the University of Maryland;
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Hampton University Museum; the Phillips Collection; and many others. Her work was included in Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960s to Today, an intergenerational exhibition highlighting 21 Black female abstract practitioners that traveled from Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City to The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. and the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, FL in 2017 and 2018. Her life and art, as well as that of her aunt, is the subject of the recent documentary Kindred Spirits: Artists Hilda Wilkinson Brown and Lilian Thomas Burwell, which was an official selection at the San Antonio Black International Film Festival, the Martha’s Vineyard African American Film Festival, and the D.C. Black Film Festival in 2020. Burwell lives and works in Highland Beach, Maryland. ABOUT THE CURATOR
Melissa Messina is an Independent Curator, Curatorial Advisor, and Curator of the Mildred Thompson Estate. For over 15 years, her exhibitions, site-responsive projects, and public programs have been presented in cultural institutions throughout the U.S. and abroad. She was recently the co-curator of Mildred Thompson, The Atlanta Years, 1986-2003 at Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta, GA (2019), and Mildred Thompson: Against the Grain, at the New Orleans Museum of Art, LA (2018). In 2017, Messina co-curated Magnetic Fields, Expanding American Abstraction, 1960s to Today. She was formerly the Interim Executive Director and Senior Curator of the SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA; the National Program Director for ArtTable, NY; and a founding staff member and then guest curator at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum. Her research on Black female abstract practitioners has been funded by Creative Time | Warhol Foundation, the Stuart A. Rose Library at Emory University, and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR.
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ABOUT THE GALLERY Christine Berry and Martha Campbell opened Berry Campbell Gallery in the heart of Chelsea on the ground floor in 2013. The gallery has a fine-tuned program representing artists of post-war American painting that have been over-looked or neglected, particularly women of Abstract Expressionism. Since its inception, the gallery has developed a strong emphasis in research to bring to light artists overlooked due to race, gender or geography. This unique perspective has been increasingly recognized by curators, collectors, and the press. In March of this year, Roberta Smith reviewed Ida Kohlmeyer: Cloistered for the New York Times. This rare group of paintings from the artist’s estate had not been on view together since they were created in the late 1960s. Berry and Campbell share a curatorial vision that continues with its contemporary program. Recently the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston acquired works by abstract painter, Jill Nathanson. Harry Cooper, senior curator and head of Modern art at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. chose a painting by Judith Godwin from the 1950s to hang in their Abstract Expressionist galleries. Works by Frank Wimberley were acquired by the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C. Berry Campbell has been included and reviewed in publications such as the Wall Street Journal, Artforum, Art & Antiques, The Brooklyn Rail, the Huffington Post, Hyperallergic, East Hampton Star, Artcritical, the New Criterion, the New York Times, Vogue and Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art. Not only did the program expand, but in 2015, the gallery physically expanded, doubling its size to 2,000 sq feet. The gallery recently added the estates of Frederick J. Brown and Mary Dill Henry to its roster. Berry Campbell is located at 530 W 24th Street in the heart of Chelsea, New York, on the ground floor. The gallery is open to the public Tuesday through Saturday, 10:00 am to 6:00 pm or by appointment.
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