Arthur Monroe

Malin Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of paintings by the late Oakland-based artist Arthur Monroe. The presentation includes nine large-scale paintings drawn from a three-decade span from 1980 to 2011. Monroe travelled within several of the major cultural milieu of the mid-century: the New York School of Abstract Expressionism; the literary scene of New York’s East Village; and modern Jazz and Beat circles in New York and the Bay Area. After resettling in Oakland, Monroe showed extensively with key contemporaries from the Bay Area, including Robert Colescott, Joan Brown, Jay DeFeo, Mary Lovelace O’Neal, Mike Henderson and Raymond Saunders. The Ancestors Are Humming is the first solo gallery exhibition of Monroe’s work in New York since 1966.

Arthur Monroe (b. 1935, New York, NY; d. 2019, Oakland, CA) was an American abstract painter and museum professional. He was educated at The Boy’s School in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn and the Brooklyn Museum School Art School (BMAS). Monroe trained further in painting at the renowned Art Students League and under the private tutelage of the seminal German-American painter Hans Hofman. During his lifetime, Monroe exhibited at venues including the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY); the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA); the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, MN); University of Kristiansand Kunsthalle (Norway); the Oakland Museum (Oakland, CA); the Museum of the African Diaspora (San Francisco, CA,); the Pasadena Museum of Art (Pasadena, CA); the University of California, Santa Barbara (Santa Barbara, CA); the University of California at Berkeley (Berkeley, CA); the University of Santa Cruz (Santa Cruz, CA); and the Trident Museum of Art (Santa Clara, CA). His artwork resides in the permanent collections of the National Museum of African American History and Culture (Washington, DC); Kristianina University (Oslo, Norway); the University of Agder (Grimstad, Norway); and the De Sassiet Museum (Santa Clara, CA). Monroe worked as the Chief Registrar of the Oakland Museum of Art for over 30 years. His collected papers from 1950 - 2019 were recently acquired by the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art.