James Little

Kindly donated by the artist and Kavi Gupta

Too Close to Call (study), by 2022 Whitney Biennial artist James Little, depicts four pattern fields: the two on the opposite ends feature horizontal lines; in the middle left is a stacked series of chevrons; on the middle right is a series of three columns of stacked, slanted lines. Despite the abstract nature of the composition, the title Little gives it, which relates to the fragility of human perceptual ability, offers some hint of the subject matter that was on his mind while painting it. This painting also offers a luminous glimpse into Little's detailed and time-consuming process. Little is a methodical master, whose paintings frequently take as long as six months to finish as thick layers of handmade pigments are built up. The intensity and power of Little’s paintings can be credited to his devotion to experimentation with color relationships.

Little was featured prominently in the 2022 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, NY. Little’s striking presentation at the Biennial has been lauded globally by critics and curators alike, and has been recurrently highlighted by the New York Times, The Art Newspaper, ArtNews, Vogue, and others. Though these accolades are long overdue, Little’s work has been exhibited extensively in solo and group exhibitions around the world throughout his lengthy career, including the groundbreaking “Afro-American Abstraction” at MoMA P.S.1, New York, NY in 1980. This legendary show included many of the most important artists of their generation, including Ed Clark, Melvin Edwards, Sam Gilliam, David Hammons, Howardina Pindell, Martin Puryear, and Jack Whitten, among others, including Little himself, one of the standouts in the landmark show.

Little’s work has also recently toured with acclaimed exhibition “Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse,” which debuted at the Virginia Museum of Fine Art in 2021, curated by Curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver, VMFA’s Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, and traveled to the Contemporary Art Museum in Houston (2021) and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (2022). Little’s work in the 2022 edition of Aspen ArtCrush relates to the same body of work exhibited as part of that show. The same body of work was also featured prominently in a large solo retrospective of Little’s work at the Dixon Gallery & Gardens Art Museum (2022) in his hometown of Memphis, TN. Additional exhibitions in his history include the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY (most recently 2016); the Station Museum of Contemporary Art, Houston, TX (2007); the Alternative Museum, New York, NY (1982); and the Everson Museum, Syracuse, NY (1976), among others.

Upcoming solo exhibitions include Homecoming: Bittersweet, at Dixon Gallery & Gardens: Art Museum, Memphis, TN, with an accompanying catalogue, and at Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL, in 2022. In 2022, Little will also participate in a historic collaboration for Duke Ellington's conceptual Sacred Concerts series at the Lincoln Center, New York, NY, with the New York Choral Society at the New School for Social Research and the Schomburg Center in New York, NY. His paintings are represented in the collections of numerous public and private collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Richmond; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; DeMenil Collection in Houston; Library of Congress, Washington, DC; Maatschappij Arti Et Amicitiae, Amsterdam, Holland; Saint Louis Art Museum, Saint Louis; Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse; New Jersey State Museum, Trenton; Tennessee State Museum, Nashville; Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock; and Newark Museum, Newark. Little is a 2009 grantee of the Joan Mitchell Foundation award, and has been awarded numerous other grants, prizes, and honors throughout his career.

These vibrant studies on paper are the speculative fields where that spirit of intense experimentation plays out. The artist’s distinctive abstract aesthetic language, which is rooted in geometric shapes and patterns, flat surfaces, and emotive color relationships, is evident in these studies. As is his enduring interest in the complementary forces of simplicity and complexity.

“I’m not cutting edge,” Little says. “I’m just trying to stand up next to the great paintings of the past. It’s like building a building. The things that are going to make it stand are the same as they’ve always been. You have to have a solid foundation. I approach painting the same way.”