Artist’s abstract works focus of new Picker exhibition

Felrath Hines, an African-American artist who was involved in the civil rights movement but refused to have his work categorized by his ethnicity or style, is the subject of a new exhibition at Colgate University’s Picker Art Gallery.

The Picker show features Hines’s abstract works from 1979 through 1992, a period many experts consider his most productive.

Hines (1913-1993) is primarily known as a colorist, playing with exquisite color modulations in his geometric paintings, says Johanna Halford-MacLeod, director of programming and publications at The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C, who is serving as the exhibition’s guest curator.

Hines’s disdain for artistic fashions led him from early landscapes and figure paintings done in a cubist style, to abstract landscapes, to geometric abstractions with smooth surfaces, a style that was no longer current when he took it up in the mid-1970s, according to Halford-MacLeod.

She notes that in the last 15 years of his life, his paintings became ‘increasingly vibrant, compelling and elusive, and seem to have been, at times, more and more about an almost indefinable and almost cosmic space.’

Hines didn’t begin his formal art training until 1944, when he was 31. He attended the School of the Art Institute in Chicago while he worked as a dining-car waiter on the Chicago Northwestern Railroad.

He would later move to New York, studying at the Pratt Institute and taking private lessons from Nahum Tschacbasov. Hines also trained to become a conservator, eventually launching a very successful private practice that included clients such as the Yale University Art Gallery and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Hines would join the Smithsonian Institution as chief conservator of the National Portrait Gallery in 1972.  From 1980 to 1984, when he retired, he worked in the same role at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.

Hines was active in the civil rights movement and in 1963   joined with 15 other African-American artists including Charles Alston, Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis, and Hale Woodruff  to form the Spiral Group in New York City. The group would meet at an art studio or an apartment to discuss the artist’s role in social change.

Hines would later endorse formation of the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition after he found himself excluded from some exhibitions by major art museums, a victim of increasingly potent racial politics, according to Halford-MacLeod.

She notes, however, that Hines continually resisted the limitations of being identified as a black artist.

‘I do not want my work to be placed in a special category with a particular group,’ he told an interviewer in 1989. ‘I should be able to show wherever I want to show and under the circumstances I prefer to show’. It has to do with me as a creative painter. In my opinion, that’s what all art should be about.’