Hard Art

This fall, MoMA PS1 will present Hard Art, a major exhibition that examines the legacy of abstract painting by Black artists in the US from 1969 to today. Hard Art features over forty artists and juxtaposes historical paintings by practitioners who came to prominence in the 1970s with recent conceptually driven practices that incorporate sculpture, video, sound, and painting. Organized thematically, the exhibition traces the legacy of three generations of artists including Frank Bowling, Mark Bradford, Peter Bradley, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Ed Clark, Melvin Edwards, Jennie C. Jones, Joe Overstreet, and Raymond Saunders, alongside new and recent works by Aria Dean, Torkwase Dyson, Nikita Gale, Suzanne Jackson, Rindon Johnson, Caroline Kent, Carolyn Lazard, Eric N. Mack, Charisse Pearlina Weston, and SoiL Thornton, among others.

Together, these cross-generational conversations emphasize the enduring relevance and increasing urgency of abstraction in shaping the current political imaginary. The exhibition’s title derives from Bradley’s description of The DeLuxe Show, which leveraged abstraction’s perceived opacity and complexity as a prompt for deepened engagement with art. The presentation will be accompanied by a fully illustrated publication featuring essays by Connie Butler, Hannah Black, Jessica Bell Brown, Torkwase Dyson, Rindon Johnson, and Erich Kessel, among other contributors, as well as an illustrated chronology of significant museum exhibitions by June Kitahara and Sheldon Gooch.