MoMA PS1's 'Hard Art' Makes the Case for Sorting Art by Identity

By Tom Whitfield, Arts & Voices

"Hard Art," a survey of abstract work by more than 40 Black artists from 1969 to today, is on view at MoMA PS1 in Long Island City through March 15, 2027. Holland Cotter, chief art critic of The New York Times, has named it a Critic's Pick — and the show's very existence takes a position in an old argument.

The argument: is it useful, or even valid, to keep sorting art by identity? On the evidence of "Hard Art," Cotter writes, the answer is yes. The material, he argues, remains "far less well known to us than it should be" despite years of sporadic exposure.

The show was organized by MoMA PS1's director, Connie Butler, with curatorial assistant Sheldon Gooch and research assistant June Kitahara.

Why did 'Black abstraction' need defending at all?

For many in the art world during the civil rights era and beyond, "Black" and "Abstract" did not jibe. A common assumption held that advanced new Black art had to be political in a clearly readable — usually figurative — way, and abstraction, by definition, did not qualify.

Some Black artists chafed at that requirement. A small succession of abstraction-themed roundups followed over the decades, including "Afro-American Abstraction" at P.S. 1 itself in 1980 — a show later criticized for narrowly defining Blackness through its emphasis on African elements.

The pivotal precedent came earlier. In 1971, the New York painter Peter Bradley, affiliated with the mostly white Color Field movement that included Kenneth Noland and the critic Clement Greenberg, curated "The De Luxe Show" in a rehabbed Houston theater in a predominantly Black neighborhood. It was one of the country's earliest known interracial exhibitions of contemporary abstract work. Of the 18 artists Bradley chose, half were white and half were Black, all contemporaries in age and career length.

Bradley's criterion, in his own words: "Anyone who was painting and making good, hard abstraction. When I say the word 'hard,' I mean artists who were making abstract art and who had suffered to make it; living in poverty and so forth — Black and white artists alike."

Many of the white artists had mainstream market status. The Black artists — Ed Clark, Sam Gilliam, Richard Hunt, Virginia Jaramillo, Daniel LaRue Johnson, Al Loving, Joe Overstreet and William T. Williams — remained on the market's fringes. Racial politics kept them there, Cotter writes. Their response was not overt protest but formal innovation.

What does formal innovation look like here?

The examples are concrete. In the early 1970s, Ed Clark made volumetric, relief-like paintings using a janitor's push-broom. Sam Gilliam draped color-drenched canvases over workroom sawhorses, breaching the divide between painting and sculpture. Joe Overstreet strung paintings midair with ropes, turning them into sculpture.

Succeeding generations have taken up that invitation, and "Hard Art" demonstrates it:

• Suzanne Jackson's recent acrylic gel hangings, embedded with what looks like street scraps and paint globs.
• Rodney McMillian's 2010 wall piece turning black vinyl fabric into a galactic vista.
• David Hammons's 2017 work hiding what appears to be a ceiling-high painting-on-wheels behind an industrial tarp — which Cotter reads as "tribute and sendup" to abstraction itself.
• Hannah Black's 2023 spray-paint paintings referencing broken-windows policing, and SoiL Thornton's 2026 image of the American flag as an air mattress swollen to near-explosion.
• Eric N. Mack's 2015 "Tent," a walk-in enclosure of castoff quilts and blankets.

References to Blackness surface everywhere, often in titles. Mary Lovelace O'Neal's mural-scale all-black painting, "Blacker Than a Hundred Midnights Down in a Cypress Swamp," uses lampblack — soot — as its only pigment and quotes the activist writer James Weldon Johnson. O'Neal died this year at 84; her solo show runs at Boesky Gallery in Chelsea through Dec. 19. Melvin Edwards's steel sculpture pays homage to the French Guianese Negritude founder Léon-Gontran Damas; Edwards also died this year, at 88. Howardena Pindell's 1980 collage honors the Afro-Brazilian goddess of the sea in "Feast Day of Iemanja II, December 31." Nikita Gale's 2020 installation "Private Dancer" syncs flashing lamps to the silent recorded beat of Tina Turner's 1984 album.

Not everything carries a backstory. Richard Hunt's 1962 "Linear Peregrination," a welded steel drawing-in-space, delivers what Cotter calls a hit of pure beauty. Lorraine O'Grady's black-and-white video "Landscape (Western Hemisphere)" looks like wind-whipped trees but is a close-up of the artist's hair stirred by fans. Senga Nengudi's "Water Composition (Green)," colored water sealed in flexible plastic, was conceived in 1970 as interactive; the version here is stationary. Maren Hassinger's "The Veil Between Us" appears to be soft African raffia but each strand is twisted cuttings from The New York Times.

What does the show change for the category?

Jack Whitten, included here and the subject of a lauded MoMA retrospective last year, wrote of the 1980 exhibition that it "really taught me a lesson. My work cannot be shown under these circumstances. I knew that already but I continue to exhibit with Black shows for political reasons. I can never expect anything from such shows. My work does not fit into the present category of Black art."

Cotter suspects Whitten, who died in 2018, would have felt OK in "Hard Art" — not only for political reasons, though he would have understood the need for identity-based solidarity at a time when, in Cotter's words, African American history and culture is under active suppression. The harder claim, and the show's real stakes, is that the hard-won expansion of the category "Black Art" has crucially shaped the category of "American art" — and continues to do so.

"Hard Art," through March 15, 2027, MoMA PS1, 22-25 Jackson Avenue at 46th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens.