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John Biggers: Wheels in Wheels

July 2016 - 5 November 2017

Kline Gallery

Mint Museum Uptown at Levine Center for the Arts

 

   
John Biggers (American, 1924-2001) Family Arc, 1992, lithograph. 1996.66A-C. Collection of The Mint Museum. © Estate of John Biggers, Courtesy Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, LLC  

 

John Biggers grew up in Gastonia, North Carolina, in a large family that valued education and creativity. His interest in art took shape during his years at Hampton Institute (now Hampton University), where he studied with Viktor Lowenfeld, who encouraged his students to learn about not only Western art but African and African American art and culture as well. By 1943 his talents were already being recognized, resulting in the inclusion of his work at the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition “Young Negro Art.” Soon after receiving his master’s degree from Pennsylvania State University, Biggers moved to Houston, where he was hired as the founding chairman of the art program at Texas State University (now Texas Southern University). He remained in Houston from 1949 until 1989, when he returned to Gastonia. Throughout his career he created not only powerful paintings, prints, drawings, and sculpture, but also a large body of important murals. Two of these reside in the atrium of the O’Kelly Library at Winston-Salem State University. Although Biggers was celebrated with a large retrospective of his work in 1995 that traveled to such cities as Houston, Boston, Hartford, and Raleigh, a significant body of his work has never been exhibited at The Mint Museum until now.  As the title of one of his paintings, Wheel in Wheel, suggests, the smallest details relate to the larger ones and the personal is inextricably linked to the universal. As seen in the works in this exhibition, certain themes would remain central to his work throughout his career, most notably the importance of women and family and the power of the human spirit to triumph over adversity. 

- Jon Stuhlman, Senior Curator of American, Contemporary, and Modern Art, The Mint Museum

 

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Created by Joyce Weaver