Charles Alston (1907-1977)

Selected Works

1 of 3

Untitled, 1931
watercolor and graphite on paper
22 x 18 inches / 55.9 x 45.7 cm
signed

The Conductor, 1941
gouache with casein on paper
20 7/8 x 14 3/4 inches / 53 x 37.5 cm
signed

Untitled (Abstraction), c.1959
oil on canvas
27 3/4 x 50 inches / 70.5 x 127 cm

Exhibitions

The Armory Show 2024, Booth 312

September 6 – 8, 2024

Postwar Abstract Painting: “Art is a language in itself”

November 19, 2022 – January 21, 2023

Manhatta: City of Ambition

January 18 – March 26, 2022

Distinctive/Instinctive: Postwar Abstract Painting

February 20 – May 22, 2021

Paper Power

February 4 – July 14, 2020

Globalism Pops BACK Into View: The Rise of Abstract Expressionism

November 21, 2019 – January 25, 2020

RISING UP/UPRISING: Twentieth Century African American Art

March 15 – May 3, 2014

Beyond the Spectrum: Abstraction in African American Art, 1950-1975

January 11 – March 8, 2014

Abstract Expressionism In Context: Seymour Lipton

June 1 – August 2, 2013

Abstract Expressionism: Reloading the Canon

January 22 – March 19, 2011

Abstract Expressionism: Further Evidence (Part One: Painting)

March 14 – July 31, 2009

Decoding Myth: African American Abstraction, 1945-1975

January 6 – March 10, 2007

Building Community: The African American Scene

January 13 – March 11, 2006

Embracing the Muse: Africa and African American Art

January 15 – March 6, 2004

African-American Art: 20th Century Masterworks, X

January 17 – March 8, 2003

African-American Art: 20th Century Masterworks, IX

January 17 – March 9, 2002

African-American Art: 20th Century Masterworks, VIII

January 18 – March 10, 2001

African-American Art: 20th Century Masterworks, VII

January 13 – March 4, 2000

African-American Art: 20th Century Masterworks, VI

January 14 – March 6, 1999

African-American Art: 20th Century Masterworks, IV

January 23 – March 26, 1997

African-American Art: 20th Century Masterworks, III

January 31 – April 6, 1996

Collage: Made in America

June 8 – August 25, 1995

African-American Art: 20th Century Masterworks, II

February 1 – April 8, 1995

African-American Art: 20th Century Masterworks

November 18, 1993 – February 12, 1994

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New & Noteworthy

The Art Newspaper, January 04, 2019

by Margaret Carrigan

Visit Website

Prints & Publications

Abstract Expressionism: Further Evidence

Published 2009

African American Art: 200 Years

Published 2008

Embracing the Muse: Africa and African American Art

Published 2004

African-American Art: 20th Century Masterworks, X

Published 2003

African-American Art: 20th Century Masterworks, IX

Published 2002

African-American Art: 20th Century Masterworks, VIII

Published 2001

African-American Art: 20th Century Masterworks, VII

Published 2000

African-American Art: 20th Century Masterworks, VI

Published 1999

African-American Art: 20th Century Masterworks, V

Published 1998

African-American Art: 20th Century Masterworks, IV

Published 1997

African-American Art: 20th Century Masterworks, III

Published 1996

African-American Art: 20th Century Masterworks, II

Published 1995

African-American Art: 20th Century Masterworks

Published 1994

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Artist Information

Biography
Public Collections
Murals
Solo Exhibitions
Group Exhibitions
Download PDF

“I’m intensely interested in space, form, color, the things that challenge all contemporary artists. It would be wonderful if I could just sit back and do it esthetically. But, I have to react to the other thing. I’m part of it, I have no choice. I think I’ve gotten to the point where it isn’t satisfying to do another handsome, decorative abstraction. Painting has become so impersonal. I have a need to relate to humanity in a more direct way.”[1]

Charles Alston was born in Charlotte, North Carolina in 1907 to the Reverend Primus Priss Alston and Anna Elizabeth Miller Alston. Alston’s father, who nicknamed him Spinky, died when Alston was three. His mother subsequently married Harry Bearden, uncle of Romare Bearden. In 1915, the family moved to Harlem, but Alston continued to spend summers in North Carolina until he was fifteen. As a teenager, Alston painted and sculpted from life, mastering an academic-realist style, and in 1925, he was offered a scholarship to the Yale School of Fine Arts but decided to attend Columbia University instead. Alston received his BA with a concentration in fine arts in 1929 and continued on for a master’s degree at Columbia University Teachers College, where he became increasingly interested in African art and aesthetics. While in graduate school, Alston taught at the Utopia Children’s House, where he became mentor to a young Jacob Lawrence. He received his MA in 1931.

Having finished graduate school in the midst of the Great Depression, Alston remained in Harlem, one of the city’s hardest-hit communities. in 1934, he co-founded the Harlem Art Workshop. When the Workshop needed more space soon after, he found it at 306 West 141st Street. Aided by funding from the Works Progress Administration (WPA), “306” (as it was known) became a center for the most creative minds in Harlem. Regulars included Bearden, Lawrence, Augusta Savage, Richard Wright, Robert Blackburn, Countee Cullen, Ralph Ellison, and Gwendolyn Knight. In 1935, Alston became the first black supervisor in the Federal Art Project when he was assigned to direct the WPA’s Harlem Hospital murals. The paintings he designed—influenced by the work of Mexican muralists, jazz music, and the prevailing social realism of the 1930s—were approved by the Federal Art Project but rejected by the hospital’s administration for what they saw as an excess of subject matter relating to African Americans. After protests and extensive press coverage, the muralists were allowed to proceed. In 1936, two of the works were exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA). Two Rosenwald Fellowships at the end of the decade enabled Alston to travel throughout the south and to work with Hale Woodruff at Atlanta University. During World War II, Alston worked as an artist for the Office of War Information, served in the US Army, and was also a member of the board of directors for the National Mural Society. In 1944, he attended the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn for a year, and in 1949, he and Woodruff created murals for the Golden State Mutual Life Insurance building in Los Angeles. Entitled Negro in California History, the project comprised two works—Exploration and Colonization (1537-1850) by Alston and Settlement and Development (1850-1949) by Woodruff.

Alston began creating abstract paintings in the 1950s, but he never abandoned figural representation. Instead, he would shift between the two modes of painting, depending on what he believed was best for a given subject. In 1950, he entered one of his new, abstract works in the competitive exhibition American Painting Today at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It won the purchase prize, and the museum acquired it. Many of Alston’s abstract works from this decade were inspired by African art, but unlike several of his his abstract expressionist contemporaries whose passion for American Indian, Pacific, and African art was connected to a modernist search for an imagined “primitive” impulse, Alston’s paintings were created through an intimate knowledge of African aesthetics. In Alston’s work, the African influence is part of a dialogue between past and present, one that finds modernism in tradition and vice-versa.

From his early days at the Utopia Children’s House in 1930 until his death in 1977, Alston remained an influential teacher and a committed activist. He taught at the Art Students League, MoMA, and City College. In 1963, he co-founded the Spiral Group (along with Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis, Hale Woodruff, and others), which sought to contribute to the Civil Rights movement through the visual arts in part by increasing gallery and museum representation for black artists. In 1967, President Lyndon Johnson appointed Alston as a trustee of the Kennedy Center, and in 1970, Alston became a member of the New York City Arts Commission. In 1975, Columbia University Teacher’s College, which once barred Alston from a required life-drawing course because the models were white, honored him with its first Distinguished Alumni Award.

[1] Grace Glueck, “Art Notes: ‘The Best Painter I Can Possibly Be,’” New York Times, Dec. 8, 1968.

SELECTED MUSEUM COLLECTIONS

Art Galleries at Black Studies, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX
Butler Art Institute, Youngstown, OH
Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, NH
Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI
Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
Howard University, Washington, DC
John L. Warfield Center of African and African American Studies, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX
Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, Kalamazoo, MI
Library of Congress, Washington, DC
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN
Mott-Warsh Collection
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA
Museum of Natural History, New York, NY
NYC Health + Hospitals, New York, NY
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York, NY
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC
The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY
Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY

Abraham Lincoln High School, New York, NY
City College, New York, NY
Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Corporation
Harriet Tubman Junior High School, NY
Museum of Natural History, New York, NY
Women’s Pavilion, Harlem Hospital, New York, NY

1953
John Heller Gallery, New York, NY;1955;1958

1960
Feingarten Gallery, New York, NY

1962
Dunbarten Gallery, Boston, MA

1968-69
Farleigh Dickinson Gallery of Modern Art, NY

1979
Randall Galleries,Ltd., New York, NY;1983

1990
Kenkeleba Gallery, New York, NY

1935
Negro Art, YWCA, 144 West 138th Street, New York, NY

1937
An Exhibition of the Harlem Artist Guild, presented by Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity, New York Public Library, 201 West 115th Street, New York, NY

1940
Exhibition of the Art of the American Negro (1851-1940), Tanner Art Galleries, Chicago, IL; traveled to Library of Congress, Washington, DC

1950
American Painting Today,1950, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY

1964
Artists for CORE: Third Annual Art Exhibition and Sale, Gallery of American Federation of Arts, American Federation of Arts, New York, NY

1965
Sixth Annual Arts Festival, Temple Emanu-El, Yonkers, NY

1968
Gallery of Modern Art, New York, NY
Invisible Americans: Black Artists of the 30’s, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY

1972
Atlanta University Center, GA

1975
Art Students League, New York, NY

1978
New York/Chicago: WPA and the Black Artist, Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY

1994
African-American Art: 20th Century Masterworks, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York, NY
The Harmon and Harriet Kelley Collection of African American Art, San Antonio Museum of Art, San Antonio, TX; El Paso Museum of Art, El Paso, TX; Michael C. Carlos Museum, Emory University, Atlanta, GA; Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, OH; Hunter Museum of Art, Chattanooga, TN

1995
African-American Art: 20th Century Masterworks, II, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York, NY; Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach, CA

1996
African-American Art: 20th Century Masterworks, III, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York, NY

1997
Revisiting American Art: Works from the Collections of Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, NY
African-American Art: 20th Century Masterworks, IV, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York, NY; Fisk University Galleries, Nashville, TN

1998
African-American Art: 20th Century Masterworks, V, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York, NY; The Newcomb Art Gallery, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA

1999
African-American Art: 20th Century Masterworks, VI, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York, NY; Flint Institute of Arts, Flint, MI

2000
African-American Art: 20th Century Masterworks, VII, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York, NY; Appleton Museum of Art, Ocala, FL
A Brush with the Past, G.R. N’Namdi Gallery, Birmingham, MI

2001
African-American Art: 20th Century Masterworks, VIII, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York, NY; Texas Southern University Museum, Houston, TX

2002
African-American Art: 20th Century Masterworks, IX, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York, NY

2003
African-American Art: 20th Century Masterworks, X, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York, NY
Challenge of the Modern: African-American Artists 1925-1945, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY
An American Legacy: Art from the Studio Museum in Harlem, Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY

2004
Embracing the Muse: Africa and African American Art, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York, NY

2005
Syncopated Rhythms: 20th Century African American Art from the George and Joyce Wein Collection, Boston University Art Gallery, Boston, MA

2006
Building Community: The African American Scene, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, LLC, New York, NY, January 13-March 11, 2006

2007
Decoding Myth: African American Abstraction, 1945-1975, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, LLC, New York, NY
For the People: American Mural Drawings of the 1930s and 1940s, Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY

2008
African American Art: 200 Years, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, LLC, New York, NY

2009
Harlem Renaissance, Oklahoma City Museum of Art, Oklahoma City, OK
A Force for Change: African American Art and the Julius Rosenwald Fund, The Spertus Museum, Chicago, IL; Allentown Art Museum, Allentown, PA; Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ
Abstract Expressionism: Further Evidence (Part One: Painting), Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, LLC, New York, NY
Nexus New York: Latin/American Artists in the Modern Metropolis, El Museo del Barrio, New York, NY
Highlights from John and Vivien Hewitt Collection of African American Art, Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts & Culture, Charlotte, NC

2010
Translating Revolution: U.S. Artists Interpret Mexican Muralism, National Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago, IL

2011
Abstract Expressionism: Reloading the Canon, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, LLC, New York, NY

2013
Abstract Expressionism / In Context: Seymour Lipton, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY

2014
Witness: Art and Civil Rights in The Sixties, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY,; Hood Museum of Art, Hanover, NH; The Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX
Beyond the Spectrum: Abstraction in African American Art, 1950-1975, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY
RISING UP/UPRISING: Twentieth Century African American Art, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY

2015
Collectors Legacy: Selections from the Sandra Lloyd Baccus Collection, The David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland, College Park, MD

2017
Constructing Identity: Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African-American Art, Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR
Art of Rebellion: Black Art of the Civil Rights Movement, Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI
Jacob Lawrence: Lines of Influence, SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, GA

2018
I Too Sing America: The Harlem Renaissance at 100, Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH
Something to Say: The McNay Presents 100 Years of African American Art, McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX
The Masters: Art Students League Teachers and their Students, Hirschl & Adler, New York, NY
Augusta Savage: Renaissance Woman, Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens, Jacksonville, FL; New-York Historical Society Museum & Library, New York, NY; Palmer Museum of Art, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA; Dixon Gallery & Gardens, Memphis, TN
Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today, The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery, Lenfest Center for the Arts, Columbia University, New York, NY

2019
Black Refractions: Highlights from The Studio Museum in Harlem, Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, CA; Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, SC; Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, Kalamazoo, MI; Smith College Museum of Art, Smith College, Northampton, MA; Utah Museum of Fine Arts, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT; Frye Art Museum, Seattle, WA
Harlem: In Situ, Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, MA
A LABOR OF LOVE: The Art Collection of Dr. Constance E. Clayton, Art & Artifacts Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, New York, NY
Afrocosmologies: American Reflections, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT
Globalism Pops BACK Into View: The Rise of Abstract Expressionism, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY

2020
Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925-1945, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX
Uptown 2020, The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery, Lenfest Center for the Arts, Columbia University, New York, NY
Riffs and Relations: African American Artists and the European Modernist Tradition, curated by Adrienne L. Childs, The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC
Paper Power, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY

2021
Distinctive/Instinctive: Postwar Abstract Painting, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY
Creating Community: Cinque Gallery Artists, The Art Students League, New York, NY
The Kinsey African American Art & History Collection, Greenwood Cultural Center and ONEOK Boathouse, Gathering Place, Tulsa, OK; Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma, WA; The Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art, Pepperdine University, Malibu, CA
Black American Portraits, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA

2023
Crosscurrents: Intercultural Conversations in Art, Mott-Warsh Collection, Flint, MI