Not to be confused with Powers Boothe, an American actor.
Power Boothe in studio, 2014.
Power Boothe is an American painter known for his abstract works as well as set designs for experimental theatre, dance and video productions. He has also produced short films and visual theater. As a painter, he has been referred to as a "Rogue Minimalist".[1]
Boothe has received numerous individual grants, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Pollock/Krasner Foundation Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship for painting. He has received awards for his designs for experimental theater, dance, and video productions, including a Bessie Award for set design, a Film/Video Arts Foundation Award for film, and several Art Matters Grants for theater. He has been the co-recipient of numerous collaborative grants including several NEA Inter-Arts Grants and NY State Council Grants, as well as a Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Grant. In addition, he has been awarded a Yaddo Artists Colony residency, a McDowell Colony residency, and an Asian Cultural Council Grant for travel and study in Japan.[3]
Power Boothe, Painting with Center Line, 1971, 72"x72", Acrylic on Canvas
Paintings, including Painting with Center Line, were exhibited in the 10th Theodoron Award Exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in 1971. In his New York Times review of the exhibition, Hilton Kramer wrote, “The most interesting ‘discovery’ in the show is the painter Power Boothe, who works in a mode of color abstraction that is at once very cerebral and very romantic. His three paintings, as well as the attractive watercolor sketches, are full of attractive chromatic subtleties that seem- for a change!- to be derived from real emotions. I find his work enormously appealing.”[4]
Power Boothe, Hours, 1973, 72"x72", Acrylic on Canvas
In 1973 Boothe's painting, Hours was exhibited in his first One-Person Exhibition at A. M. Sachs Gallery in 1973.
Boothe served as Lecturer in the Humanities at Princeton University from 1988 to 1994 and served on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts from 1979 to 1988.[5] As Director of the School of Art at Ohio University from 1998 to 2001, he produced a symposium on cognitive theory and the arts: Art/Body/Mind. As Co-director of the Mount Royal Graduate School of Art at the Maryland Institute College of Art from 1993 to 1998, he curated the exhibition, Art + Necessity. The Maryland Institute awarded him the Trustees Award for Teaching Excellence in 1998. Boothe is currently a Professor of Painting at the Hartford Art School, University of Hartford. He served as Dean of the Hartford Art School from 2001 to 2010, where he led a successful campaign to build the Renée Samuels Center, a studio facility focused on teaching art and technology.
Power Boothe, Red Line Gray Drift, 1974, 72"x72", Acrylic on Canvas (Wadsworth Antheneum)Power Boothe, Lapoetes Mavina, 1983, 72"x72", Oil on Canvas (New Britain Museum of American Art)Power Boothe, Territory#1, 1994, 72"x72", Oil on Canvas
Measured, dreamlike, solemn, or quick and animated, there is always something insistently personal in the way Power Boothe treads. He is a painter for whom rhythm is the essential organizing force. Just as the symmetry of the human gait can be altered by countless fortuitous events (the most determined walker is distracted by sounds, movement, encounters), so the basic rhythmic structure of Boothe’s paintings is modified by countless emotional intonations. But essentially, these paintings are intimations of basic movements in the universe to which the artist is intuitively attuned.[6]
Mr. Boothe began as a figural artist, but before the end of his student days in the late 1960's, he had turned to abstraction, becoming what might be called a rogue Minimalist. That is, he works according to the grid but is not its slave. The roguery is already evident in the early works at the [Greenwich] show, which spans from 1971 to 1988. These are the canvases bisected into two columns of sizable rectangles painted in pastel hues. Some are hard-edged, others blurred. By 1973, the artist is hitting his stride, notably in two all black canvases. The grids in these are each filled with a motif - a disk with a white spot at the center and a white spot with a small comet's tail -but it is the square-to-square modifications of the motif that are the subject. Indeed, Mr. Boothe's whole subject seems to be the variations possible between one part of a painting and another, and between one painting and another. At the same time, it could also be the idea behind the aphorism, "the more things change, the more they are the same." [...] More than anything else, it is the variations in mood that keep Mr. Boothe apart from hard core Minimalists, along with his hints of automatism and of a fascination with puzzles."[1]
Harold E. Porcher writes about Boothe:
[He] does not neatly fit into the file for Minimalist artists. In his oils, you see brush strokes, and in his drawings, varied pencil techniques that show his hand. But in the body of work as a whole, you see staccato rhythms and a consistency that draws you into the patterns while engaging your curiosity through the subtle variations. ... Boothe allows the viewer to identify with the creator of the work and not see it as a manufactured product void of life. In this way he shares the aesthetic of Minimalism, but also offers a connection to the painterly artists who followed other avenues.[7]
Stephen Haller of ArtNews writes about Boothe's more recent work, saying:
“Boothe employs deceptively modest means in his work. Stare for a few moments at Territory #1, and the optical flutter created by his zippy monochromatic stripes produces a surprising rainbow of colors. The striated white lines that are limned on a wet black field in Extension reveal the artist’s deft touch and also imply that a natural force may have shaped the trajectory and flow. To say that Boothe has a remarkably steady hand understates the case. These paintings seem to have appeared full blown, with no evidence of correction.”
A New York Times review of a Boothe show in SoHo in 1995 said: "The syncopated patterns of Power Boothe's handsome abstractions, emblematic of a style that he has cultivated since the late 1960's, create intimations of the cinematic in the suggestion of a gentle, slow-motion light moving across a meticulously made surface that is still very much a painting."[8]
Performing arts
Power Boothe, set design for David Gordon Dance Production, Transparent Means for Travelling Light, 1985 (Harvard University)
In the performing arts, Boothe has designed sets for experimental theatre, dance and video productions.[9] and has also produced short films and visual theater. For this work, he has received a Bessie Award for set design, a Film/Video Arts Foundation Award for film, and several Art Matters Grants for his theater productions. He has art directed and designed internationally-recognized music videos, and has designed sets for Obie Award-winning productions.[10]
Related Research Articles
Kenneth Noland was an American painter. He was one of the best-known American color field painters, although in the 1950s he was thought of as an abstract expressionist and in the early 1960s he was thought of as a minimalist painter. Noland helped establish the Washington Color School movement. In 1977, he was honored by a major retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York that then traveled to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and Ohio's Toledo Museum of Art in 1978. In 2006, Noland's Stripe Paintings were exhibited at the Tate in London.
Abstract expressionism is a post–World War II art movement in American painting, developed in New York City in the 1940s. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve international influence and put New York at the center of the Western art world, a role formerly filled by Paris.
Frank Philip Stella is an American painter, sculptor and printmaker, noted for his work in the areas of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction. Stella lives and works in New York City.
Agnes Bernice Martin was an American abstract painter known for her minimalist style and abstract expressionism. Born in Canada, she moved to the United States in 1931, where she pursued higher education and eventually became a U.S. citizen in 1950. Martin's artistic journey began in New York City, where she immersed herself in modern art and developed a deep interest in abstraction. Despite often being labeled a minimalist, she identified more with abstract expressionism. Her work has been defined as an "essay in discretion on inward-ness and silence".
Abstract art uses visual language of shape, form, color and line to create a composition which may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world.
Helen Frankenthaler was an American abstract expressionist painter. She was a major contributor to the history of postwar American painting. Having exhibited her work for over six decades, she spanned several generations of abstract painters while continuing to produce vital and ever-changing new work. Frankenthaler began exhibiting her large-scale abstract expressionist paintings in contemporary museums and galleries in the early 1950s. She was included in the 1964 Post-Painterly Abstraction exhibition curated by Clement Greenberg that introduced a newer generation of abstract painting that came to be known as color field. Born in Manhattan, she was influenced by Greenberg, Hans Hofmann, and Jackson Pollock's paintings. Her work has been the subject of several retrospective exhibitions, including a 1989 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and been exhibited worldwide since the 1950s. In 2001, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts.
Gene Davis was an American Color Field painter known especially for his paintings of vertical stripes of color.
Friedel Dzubas was a German-born American abstract painter.
Walter Darby Bannard was an American abstract painter and professor of art and art history at the University of Miami.
Dan Christensen, was an American abstract painter He is best known for paintings that relate to Lyrical Abstraction, Color field painting, and Abstract expressionism.
Raymond Parker (1922-1990) was an Abstract expressionist painter who also is associated with Color Field painting and Lyrical Abstraction. Ray Parker was an influential art teacher and an important Color Field painter and an instrumental figure in the movement coined by Clement Greenberg called Post-Painterly Abstraction.
Jonathan Horowitz is a New York-based artist working in video, sculpture, sound installation, and photography. Horowitz critically examines the cultures of politics, celebrity, cinema, war, and consumerism. From found footage, Horowitz visually and spatially juxtaposes elements from film, television, and the media to reveal connections and breakdowns between these overlapping modes of communication.
Stephen Westfall is an American painter, critic, and professor at Rutgers University and Bard College.
Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is set out to expose the essence, essentials or identity of a subject through eliminating all non-essential forms, features or concepts. As a specific movement in the arts it is identified with developments in post–World War II Western Art, most strongly with American visual arts in the 1960s and early 1970s. Prominent artists associated with this movement include Ad Reinhardt, Nassos Daphnis, Tony Smith, Donald Judd, John McCracken, Agnes Martin, Dan Flavin, Robert Morris, Larry Bell, Anne Truitt, Yves Klein and Frank Stella. Artists themselves have sometimes reacted against the label due to the negative implication of the work being simplistic. Minimalism is often interpreted as a reaction to abstract expressionism and a bridge to postminimal art practices.
Ted Stamm (1944-1984) was an American minimalist and conceptualist artist.
Myron Stout was an American abstract painter whose geometric paintings and drawings bridged the styles of Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism.
Sedrick Ervin Huckaby (1975) is an American artist known for his use of thick, impasto paint to create murals that evoke traditional quilts and his production of large portraits that represent his personal history through images of family members and neighbors.
Sigrid Sandström is a Swedish artist and a professor of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki. Her work is characterized by graphic abstraction, an embrace of color and difference in scale, and an array of techniques used to apply paint and other materials to canvas, ranging from cloths and rugs, to masking with tape, squeegee-ing and smearing, and collaging. She has also worked in film and video, most notably for her 2005 exhibition Her Black Flags at the Mills College Art Museum in Oakland, CA, and in sculpture and installation. Artforum critic Naomi Fry, reviewing a 2007 show at Edward Thorp Gallery, cited the artist's interest in landscape as subject and noted that Sandström "also grapples here with painting’s essential difficulty in the face of the sublime. As the works consistently teeter on the verge of abstraction, the interplay between a more traditional naturalism and geometric fragmentation provides a salient tension."
Deborah Dancy, also known as Deborah Muirhead, is an American painter of large-scale abstractions in oil; she is also a printmaker and mixed media artist. Her work is also known to encompass digital photography. In 1981, she began to teach at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, where she taught painting for thirty-five years until her retirement in 2017. She has received awards such as a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, Women’s Studio Workshop Studio Residency Grant, and a YADDO fellowship.
Harriet Korman is an American abstract painter based in New York City, who first gained attention in the early 1970s. She is known for work that embraces improvisation and experimentation within a framework of self-imposed limitations that include simplicity of means, purity of color, and a strict rejection of allusion, illusion, naturalistic light and space, or other translations of reality. Writer John Yau describes Korman as "a pure abstract artist, one who doesn’t rely on a visual hook, cultural association, or anything that smacks of essentialization or the spiritual," a position he suggests few post-Warhol painters have taken. While Korman's work may suggest early twentieth-century abstraction, critics such as Roberta Smith locate its roots among a cohort of early-1970s women artists who sought to reinvent painting using strategies from Process Art, then most associated with sculpture, installation art and performance. Since the 1990s, critics and curators have championed this early work as unjustifiably neglected by a male-dominated 1970s art market and deserving of rediscovery.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
