Loving, Alvin 1935–

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Alvin Loving 1935

Artist

Lived with Family in India

Works Exhibited at Whitney Museum

Learned Papermaking Craft

Sources

The 20th-century artistic style known as abstract expressionism, with its emphasis on patterns, geometrical shapes, and works that focus on the process of making art, has grown into a generally accepted part of the American cultural vocabulary. For much of the earlier part of his career, the artist Alvin Loving was recognized as the foremost African-American exponent of abstract expressionism. His works always bore a distinct personal stamp, and in recent years he has extended abstract expressionist ideas in highly original ways.

Alvin Loving Jr., often known as Al, was born in Detroit on September 19, 1935. His father, the first black teacher in Detroits public high schools, had worked as a sign painter and taken some art classes. The elder Alvin Loving would later become a pioneering educator, ascending to a university professorship and then a deanship in the University of Michigan system and serving in teaching and administrative posts in India and Nigeria on special leaves. When his son was twelve, Alvin Loving Sr. had him copy landscapes and watercolors he had done himself. Soon Loving was painting sets for plays presented at Detroits Northern High School.

Lived with Family in India

Loving moved to Cass Tech High School after exhausting Northerns art offerings, and graduated in 1954. He took classes at Wayne State University and a local art school the following year, but then moved with his family to India for a year instead of continuing school. The distance from his home gave Loving perspective on his ambitions, and he decided to pursue a career in the fine artsat a time when the number of working African-Americans fine artists was minusculerather than as a commercial artist.

At this crucial formative stage, Loving came under the influence of artist Al Mullen, who himself had been a student of the German abstract expressionist Hans Hoffmann. Hoffmanns paintings featured large, intensely colored rectangles with indistinct edges that seem to float in backgrounds of a related color; he is regarded as one of abstract expressionisms pioneers, and his style influenced Loving directly. Having settled on his choice of career, Loving proceeded methodically to acquire his education as an artist; he was interrupted only by two years during which he worked as a propaganda illustrator at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. Loving received an associates degree from Flint Junior College (now Mott Community College) in 1958, a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Illinois in 1963, and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Michigan in 1965.

Loving taught briefly at Eastern Michigan University in the late 1960s, but he felt the need to make an impact with his own art and headed for New York, the art worlds mecca. (Later, ironically, he would find a strong market for his work in Detroit and would come to be impressed by the sophistication of that citys art buyers.) A Detroit gallery owner smoothed the way by introducing Loving to her counterparts in New York, and his career took off with surprising speed. Producing new works inspired by Hoffmann and by another

At a Glance

Born September 19, 1935, in Detroit, Ml; son of Alvin Loving, an educator and Mary Helen (Green) Loving; married Wyn Cortes Reiser, 1969; children: Alvin III, Laurie, Alicia, Ann. Education: Flint Junior College, associates degree, 1958; University of Illinois, B.F.A., 1963; University of Michigan, M.F.A., 1965.

Career: Works exhibited in one-person show at Whitney Museum of American Art, 1969; numerous exhibitions in United States and worldwide; guest lecturer and artist-in-residence posts at University of California at San Diego, Ohio University, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maryland Institute, University of Kansas, Virginia Commonwealth University, Noire Dame University, Universtiy of Vermont ai Johnsonville, Cornell University; joined faculty of City College of New York, 1988, named associate professor, 1992.

Selected awards: National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, 1970, 1971, 1975, 1976, 1985; Guggenheim fellowship, 1986.

Addresses: Gallery G. R. NNamdi Gallery, 66 E. Forest, Detroit, Ml 48201-1814.

arch-abstractionist, Josef Albers, Loving hit on what would for a time become a trademark style: representations of open-insides cubes whose edges interlock.

Works Exhibited at Whitney Museum

In 1969 Loving snared the Holy Grail of many a young artist: a one-person show at New Yorks Whitney Museum of American Art. The show was part of a series intended to explore the world of African-American art, and Lovings work stood out for its seeming disengagement from the turbulent racial issues of the late 1960s. But it likewise was distinctive on its own terms, brilliantly fusing pure abstraction with the feel of the optical-illusion paintings of the popular Hungarian artist Viktor Vasarely. The result was that in the 1970s, Loving found his work in demand for gallery and museum shows all over the countryand himself in demand as a university teacher and artist-in-residence. In 1969 he married Wyn Cortes Riser; the couple has four children.

University residencies at the University of California at San Diego, Ohio Universtiy, the University of Kansas, Notre Dame University, and other institutions helped to pay the bills, but Loving began to feel trapped by his trademark style. Basically, I was trying to liberate myself from those cubes, that box, he told the Detroit Free Press. I couldnt find a way out. But the series of experiments Loving undertook continued to raise his standing in the art world. By the late 1990s, Lovings major works would sell for over $70, 000 apiece.

In the mid-1970s Loving began to create works that used the gallery space itself as his canvas, tacking strips of actual painted canvas to the walls and ceilings and draping them across the rooman idea counted as quite radical at the time, although it later became fairly common. Once again, Loving fused two trends in contemporary art, for his work retained an element of geometric abstractionthe hung pieces of canvas would be sewn into various geometrical shapes. In the next stage of Lovings career he collapsed this style based on sewn cloth back into the space of the traditional picture frame, creating woven-fabric surfaces that critic John Canaday (later quoted in the Boston Globe) dubbed soft sculpture. The tactile nature of Lovings works during this period suited them for public spaces such as a station of the Detroit People Mover downtown parking shuttle.

Learned Papermaking Craft

In the 1980s and 1990s, Loving continued to make new stylistic turns, building at each point on his own previous work. He turned to the collage medium, working at first with paint and corrugated cardboard that, sculpture-like, jutted out from the surface plane of the work. Loving also became known for a signature use of color; he tended toward hot colors, such as red, accented with cool touches. Collage, Loving told the Detroit Free Press (in an interview quoted by Michigan State Universitys Shannon Bonner) has a wonderful ability to make a string of extreme things go together. In the 1980s Loving learned the craft of papermaking and incorporated his own handmade paper into his collage works.

It is tempting to liken Lovings abstract creations with the vivid abstract patterns that appear in certain traditions of African art. Nevertheless, asked by Bonner whether he consciously tried to incorporate African elements into his work, Loving replied, I absolutely never think about it. Loving has argued that African Americans will produce works that differ stylisticaly from those of their white counterparts, but he is skeptical about the existence of a specifically African-American aesthetic or artistic outlook.

Loving, who joined the faculty of the City University of New York in 1988, has recently worked in a style he calls material abstraction; it is marked by the use of paper that is spattered or sprayed with paint, cut into shaped pieces, and then arranged on a surface. In the 1990s and early 2000s the prices his works commanded were helped by the emergence of a strong market for art among African Americans. His works were often shown at the G. R. NNamdi galleries in Detroit and Chicago, and he found that Detroit, from which he had fled as a young man in the late 1960s, actually provided him with his strongest sales.

Sources

Books

St. James Guide to Black Artists, St. James Press, 1997.

Periodicals

Boston Globe, September 29, 1988, p. 79.

Christian Science Monitor, June 22, 2001.

Jet, June 1, 1992, p. 18.

On-line

http://www.msu.edu/bonnersh/alov.htm

James M. Manheim

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