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"Emotion. It’s about getting as much feeling out of the work as you can. There’s not a lot of verbiage surrounding what I do. You’re not gonna get a syllabi on my Black identity, or anything like that. The art world is overloaded with rhetoric and jargon. Just stop and put it on the wall and let’s see what happens. If it performs, it performs. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t. To have to explain it is what creates the deficit for me. Those things get in the way of having an experience with the art.”
–James Little
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Kavi Gupta presents Black Stars & White Paintings, the highly anticipated solo exhibition of new paintings by New York-based abstract artist James Little, a critically and publicly celebrated highlight of the 2022 Whitney Biennial, Quiet as It's Kept.
In her recent longform profile on Little in The New York Times, Hilarie M. Sheets described Little as “one of the breakout stars” of the Biennial, describing how his paintings “held court with a mysterious luminosity and presence.
The phenomenal impact Little’s work had on Biennial visitors marks just one more milestone in a tremendous year, which also includes the stunning, retrospective tribute James Little: Homecoming at The Dixon Gallery and Gardens in Little’s hometown of Memphis, TN, and the inclusion of Little’s work in the era-defining traveling exhibition The Dirty South.
Black Stars & White Paintings builds on the momentum of Little’s landmark year, marking a moment of long overdue, global recognition of his status as a contemporary master.
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Little’s erudite Black Stars captivate the eye with their velvety luster, dramatic, acuminate forms, and restrained palette of only two shades of black. Their elegant simplicity belies the months of exacting effort Little invests building up their luxuriant surfaces with dozens of layers of handmade encaustic paints—a medium he painstakingly manufactures himself in his Brooklyn studio.Reflective of Little’s lifelong study of color relationships and formal aesthetic theories, these guileless masterworks demand veneration as monuments to pure abstraction. Yet, as their carefully crafted name reveals, they simultaneously proclaim Little’s grasp of this historical moment, and his awareness of how identity politics has often skewed people’s perspective on his work. -
“I call them Black Stars because they are black stars. The name Black Stars is also a reflection on Black exceptionalism. It’s a celebration of that. But that’s not what drove me to make the paintings. That whole racial aspect isn’t any more important to me than trying to paint some emblematic arrangements with two tones of black.”
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INDIVIDUAL WORKS
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When asked what he most hopes people take home with them after an encounter with his paintings, Little answers with his trademark combination of sincerity and wit:
“Emotion. It’s about getting as much feeling out of the work as you can. There’s not a lot of verbiage surrounding what I do. You’re not gonna get a syllabi on my Black identity, or anything like that. The art world is overloaded with rhetoric and jargon. Just stop and put it on the wall and let’s see what happens. If it performs, it performs. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t. To have to explain it is what creates the deficit for me. Those things get in the way of having an experience with the art.”
From making his own mediums, to meticulously planning his intricate designs, to carefully applying dozens of layers to each painting over the course of as many weeks, emotion also defines every phase of the creation of Little’s Black Stars & White Paintings—emotion brought about by transcendent focus, exhaustive effort, and ecstatic appreciation for visions manifested as sublime masterworks of art.
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“Emotion. It’s about getting as much feeling out of the work as you can. There’s not a lot of verbiage surrounding what I do. You’re not gonna get a syllabi on my Black identity, or anything like that. The art world is overloaded with rhetoric and jargon. Just stop and put it on the wall and let’s see what happens. If it performs, it performs. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t. To have to explain it is what creates the deficit for me. Those things get in the way of having an experience with the art.”From making his own mediums, to meticulously planning his intricate designs, to carefully applying dozens of layers to each painting over the course of as many weeks, emotion also defines every phase of the creation of Little’s Black Stars & White Paintings—emotion brought about by transcendent focus, exhaustive effort, and ecstatic appreciation for visions manifested as sublime masterworks of art.
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In addition to its recent inclusion in the 2022 Whitney Biennial: Quiet As It’s Kept, Little’s work has been exhibited extensively in solo and group exhibitions around the world, including the definitive historic group exhibition Afro-American Abstraction (1980) at MoMA P.S.1, New York, NY, curated by April Kingsley, which also included such luminaries as Mel Edwards, Ed Clark, Sam Gilliam, David Hammons, Richard Hunt, Al Loving, Howardena Pindell, Martin Puryear, Jack Whitten, and William T. Williams; as well as James Little: Homecoming at The Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis, TN, with catalogue; and the landmark group exhibition The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse at Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA, curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver and traveling to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR, with catalogue; and acclaimed exhibitions at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; the Smithsonian Institute, Washington, DC; and St. Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MO; among many others.
Little’s paintings are represented in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Richmond, VA; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; the Menil Collection, Houston, TX; The Library of Congress, Washington, DC; Maatschappij Arti Et Amicitiae, Amsterdam, Holland; Saint Louis Art Museum, Saint Louis, MO; Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY; New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, NJ; Tennessee State Museum, Nashville, TN; Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock, AR; Rice University Moody Center For The Arts, Houston, TX; and Newark Museum, Newark, NJ, among many others.
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James Little’s erudite Black Stars captivate the eye with their velvety luster, dramatic, acuminate forms, and restrained palette of only two shades of black. Their elegant simplicity belies the months of exacting effort Little invests building up their luxuriant surfaces with dozens of layers of handmade encaustic paints—a medium he painstakingly manufactures himself in his Brooklyn studio. Reflective of Little’s lifelong study of color relationships and formal aesthetic theories, these guileless masterworks demand veneration as monuments to pure abstraction. Yet, as their carefully crafted name reveals, they simultaneously proclaim Little’s grasp of this historical moment, and his awareness of how identity politics has often skewed people’s perspective on his work. “I call them Black Stars because they are black stars,” Little says. “The name Black Stars is also a reflection on Black exceptionalism. It’s a celebration of that. But that’s not what drove me to make the paintings. That whole racial aspect isn’t any more important to me than trying to paint some emblematic arrangements with two tones of black.”
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James Little
Small Fires Everywhere....Everywhere, 2022Oil on linen
64 x 74 in
162.6 x 188 cm -
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SELECT EXHIBITIONS -
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James Little in the Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY 1 April - 5 September 2022Artist James Little, represented by Kavi Gupta in Chicago, standing with three of his Black paintings in the 2022 Whitney Biennial. -
Critical praise for artist James Little in the 2022 Whitney Biennial:
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"In his magisterial, all-black, oil-and-wax “Stars and Stripes” (2021), it’s hard to say whether the bars that make up its geometric pattern are converging or colliding."
—NEW YORK TIMES
"three compelling canvases by James Little, whose work in geometric abstraction—executed in oils mixed with beeswax—hinges on its feeling of freedom.
'Abstraction provided me with self-determination and free will. It was liberating. I don’t find freedom in any other form,' [Little has] explained."—VOGUE
"Three stunning black-and-gray works by New York–based artist James Little, who is part of a cohort of Black artists dedicated to abstraction that has included the likes of Jack Whitten and Stanley Whitney, command a wall. Depending on where one stands, the shapes in them fade into their black backgrounds and then come back into crisp focus."
—ARTNEWS
"Yet in the Whitney show his large, magnificent, and quiet triptych of three paintings, Stars and Stripes, Exceptional Blacks, and Big Shot, is a major statement about what counts in painting, and by implication in all art."
— NEW YORK SUN
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James Little: Homecoming
The Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis, TN 17 April - 10 July 2022Dixon Gallery and Gardens present sixteen gallery spaces with independent, Dixon-organized exhibitions, featuring the exhibition James Little: Homecoming. For more than four decades, James Litle has grappled with the history... -
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The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts | Richmond, VA 22 May - 6 September 2021Following its VMFA debut, The Dirty South has addionally on view at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston in Houston, TX and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, AK. -
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Abstraction & Social Critique
Kavi Gupta | 835 W. Washington Blvd. Floor 1, Chicago, IL, 60607 23 October 2021 - 1 January 2022Kavi Gupta proudly presents Abstraction and Social Critique, an intergenerational group show of artists whose aesthetic positions declare the continued relevance and influence of abstraction. The artist James Little, whose... -
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James Little in Afro-American Abstraction
MoMA PS1 | NYC 17 February - 16 April 1980This is the world I want to live in,” thought artist Lorraine O’Grady while attending the opening of Afro-American Abstraction at P.S.1 in 1981. “I found myself surrounded by 200... -
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FORTHCOMING EVENTS
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JAMES LITTLE IN DUKE ELLINGTON’S SACRED CONCERTS
NEW york choral society
TISHMAN AUDITORIUM AT THE NEW SCHOOL
63 FIFTH AVENUE NEW YORK, NY 10003
NOVEMBER 18 | 7 PM
NOVEMBER 19 | 2 PM
The New York Choral Society presents a historic staging of Duke Ellington’s Sacred Concerts.
This music is the most important thing I’ve ever done or am ever likely to do. This is personal, not career. Now I can say out loud to all the world what I’ve been saying to myself for years on my knees.”–Duke Ellington
Combining elements of jazz, classical music, choral music, spirituals, gospel, blues and dance, Ellington’s three Sacred Concerts in 1965 in 1968, and 1973. Ellington said it was the most important music he’d ever written. Because of the scale of the music and the number of artists needed to perform each work, Ellington’s Sacred Concerts have rarely been performed in their entirety since his death in 1974 and have not been performed in a concert hall setting in New York City in over 35 years.The chorus is joined by vocalists Brianna Thomas and Milton Suggs, dancer Daniel J. Watts, artist James Little, and The New School Studio Orchestra. David Hayes and Keller Coker conduct
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PUBLICATIONS
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The Shape of Abstraction: Selections from the Ollie Collection
Exhibition catalog to honor the extraordinary collection gift from Ronald and Monique Ollie that adds significant depth and breadth to the museum's holdings of abstract paintings, prints, and drawings by... -
Afro-American abstraction: An exhibition of contemporary painting and sculpture by nineteen black American artists
Curator: April Kingsley Sunday, February 17 - April 6, 1980 James Little 'Born 1952 in Memphis, Tennessee. Moved to New York in 1976. Studied at the Memphis Academy of... -
James Little: Reaching for the Sky
January 1, 2005 -
Color / Line / Form
January 1, 2018 -
Louise Nevelson + James Little
January 1, 2020Published in 2020 by Rosenbaum Contemporary for Louise Nevelson + James Little, an exhibition pairing Louise Nevelson's monochromatic black sculptures with James Little's large-scale, black-tones paintings. -
James Little: Untold Stories
January 1, 2007' Great artistic skill, truthfulness, idealism, vision, and passion are fundamental to the creation of a profoundly spiritual art. In this ravaged time of endless war, a fresh approach to... -
James Little
This catalogue features full-color illustrations of works and exhibitions by the artist. James Little (b. 1952, USA) is an American abstract artist whose distinctive aesthetic language is rooted in geometric... -
James Little: Beyond Geometry
Published by The Lobby Gallery Park Avenue and 59th Street, New York, NY.'Juxtaposition is key, rhythm the motor, and scale the locus of drama. The kick-step frontality of Picasso's Funeral (2006) and the sky veils of pigment cascading through American Dreamers Denied... -
James Little: Chromatic Rhythm
The Sarah Moody Gallery of Art, Tuscaloosa, AL -
The Shape of Abstraction
Selections From The Ollie Collection, Saint Louis Art Museum, Saint Louis, MO January 1, 2020
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PAST WORK
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James LittleRemember Amal, 2018-19Oil on linen39 x 50 x 2 in
99.1 x 127 x 5.1 cm -
James LittleMistaken Identity, 2018Oil on linen32 x 30 in
81.3 x 76.2 cm -
James LittleSurrender Is Not An Option, 2014Oil and wax on canvas72 1/2 x 94 in
184.2 x 238.8 cm -
James LittleHidden Figures, 2018Oil on linen28 x 36 in
71.1 x 91.4 cm
James Little, Black Stars & White Paintings: Kavi Gupta | Elizabeth St. Fl. 1
Past viewing_room