Al Loving

Art + Practice and The Baltimore Museum of Art will present a solo exhibition of artworks by artist Al Loving (b. 1935, Detroit, MI; d. 2005, New York, NY) at A+P in Leimert Park, Los Angeles, co-curated by BMA Dorothy Wagner Wallis Director Christopher Bedford and BMA Senior Programming and Research Curator Katy Siegel. Following this presentation, the exhibition will travel to BMA.

For forty years, Loving experimented with materials and process to expand the definition of modern painting, drawing on everything from free jazz to his family’s quilting tradition. In the 1980s, Loving broke free of the flat image, using heavy rag paper to make three-dimensional collages in brilliant colors. At A+P, Spiral Play will feature twelve of these collages, some of them monumental in scale. The work is radical, beautiful, and deeply human.

Loving was born in Detroit in 1935. He received his MFA at the University of Michigan, training in an Abstract Expressionist, gestural painting style. In 1968, Loving moved to New York City to engage in more active dialogue with his peers, and shifted to a hard-edge geometric mode. After less than a year in New York, he was offered a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, which won critical acclaim. Despite his success, Loving felt trapped inside “the box” of geometric abstraction at a charged political moment—as if his art and his life were out of alignment. In the 1970s, he discovered a method of working with torn, dyed, and sewn canvas, drawing on quilting traditions, that rendered his paintings more vibrant and immediate. From the 1980s onward, Loving experimented with large scale collages that expanded into space, reconciling geometry and an expression of life force through profound and playful organic form.

“This collaboration between BMA and A+P represents an alignment of vision and ambition between two vastly different institutions at opposite ends of the country who share a conviction that art must be made accessible to the broadest demographic, specifically urban communities who are too often ignored by museums”, said BMA Director Christopher Bedford. “The exhibitions we will undertake together intend to correct the 20th- and 21st-century canon, quite literally changing the face of that story, making it clear that art is a place of conversation and inclusion that can participate meaningfully in changing the world for the better,” he added.

The BMA will be co-organizing four project-based exhibitions with A+P from 2017 to 2018. The exhibitions will be on view at A+P in Leimert Park and will travel to BMA in Baltimore, MD for their second showings. This collaboration marks A+P’s second project-based collaboration with a museum institution, after A+P’s inaugural project-based collaboration with the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University.

“Bedford has been a great supporter of A+P as well as a member of A+P’s board of advisors. We are excited to work with him and Siegel to co-organize project-based exhibitions in Leimert for our community to access free museum-curated contemporary art,” said A+P Executive Director Allan DiCastro. “We are also elated to bring the artistic caliber of artist Al Loving to the West Coast, Los Angeles and more specifically to the Leimert Park community,” DiCastro explained.