Al Loving

The blocky hexagons and cubes of Al Loving’s geometric paintings, composed of several brightly colored canvases attached to each other, are flat, yet they give the illusion of being three-dimensional. Loving’s first exposure to art was through his father, a trained artist who occasionally worked as a sign painter. The artist pursued an MFA from the University of Michigan, later moving to New York and joining a social circle that included Howardena Pindell and Richard Van Buren; within a year, he had his breakthrough moment when he exhibited his work in a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Afterward, he was widely exhibited and received grants from the National Endowment of the Arts. Loving’s work then transitioned from hard-edged pieces like 7 Septehedrons (1969) to more experimental fabric assemblages inspired by the sorts of traditional quilts made by his mother and grandmother, as seen in Untitled (1975) where strips of stained canvas are irregularly stitched together.