Painter Cynthia Hawkins makes his own rules through abstraction

In recent art history The grid remains constant. She is cherished by artists for her rigid order, which are painted, carved and weaved. Many critics claim that the grid is ruthless. Art historian Rosalind Krauss famously wrote that grids “are what they were born after art.”

But when Cynthia Hawkins draws her grids, they tend to bend and stretch and then completely disassemble in a lot of warm circles and lines. Her paintings (six feet or higher) are thrilling, her grids superimposed on roaring tones, dazzling tones like pink and yellow. Hawkins’ paintings ignore Klaus’s motto, showing how artists look when using rational tools can only subvert them.

Her abstract paintings contain many levels: grids on the top of a monochrome, shapes floating on the grid, lines extending above these shapes. Many artists thought carefully about how they arranged so much visual material, but instead of pregnant with her work, Hawkins preferred to let her ideas run freely on the canvas. “I like this way of dealing with abstraction,” Hawkins said recently in a studio in Poughkeepsie, New York. “I make the rules.”

Hawkins, 75, has been setting his own rules since the 1970s, but it hasn’t been much of the art world’s attention until recently. Her paintings are in the exhibition above Midtown (Jam) at the Museum of Modern Art, the iconic New York gallery run by Linda Goode Bryant, and Hawkins made her sculptures and paintings in the late 1980s and early 1980s. The gallery’s representatives were after the Moma exhibition, with top collectors such as Paula Cooper in New York, Kaufmann Repetto in Milan, Hollybush Gardens in London, and Los Angeles stars and Komal Shah, starting line-up to buy her work. In 2024, the Center for Arts, Research and Alliances awarded her legacy award. This fall, she will appear among the Binary in St. Paul and be in the exhibition at Harlem’s Studio Museum, dedicated to the former artists who live.

But in some circles, Hawkins has always been a key figure. Above Midtown, meeting other artists: David Hammons, Howardena Pindell, Vivian E. Browne. 1987-88 Residence at the Studio Museum led to the museum purchasing one of her works, and she has long been active in the community around Kenkeleba House, an artist-run New York alternative space dedicated to the support of black artists. Sculptor Janet Olivia Henry recently made a diorama in honor of her friendship with Hawkins, who was founded in jam.

Now, Hawkins’s works have begun to appear at expos such as Miami Beach Arts and Auctions in Basel, such as Christie’s, and a 1989 painting sold last year for nearly $120,000, overestimating its overestimation.
However, Hawkins remained modest about her art and its recent reception. “I hate to say that, but when people like it, it feels good.”

The artist’s home is too Modesty, her studio is located at the end of a narrow, narrow driveway. She and her husband John started working from scratch in 2024 to build the studio, a garage-like structure with tall shelves for her paintings, drawers with drawings on the table, and some other furniture. She spent the day there, making multiple paintings at a time. A strong work ethic is necessary for her prolific output and to keep her recent rapid rise. She has participated in three solo shows since early 2024 and this summer she prepares for her fourth show at Hollybush Gardens in September. I said, it must be ground. She calmly replied, “It doesn’t feel like that.”

Around the studio are several ongoing internal works that will be shipped to London in August. She estimated that it would take about two weeks to produce a painting. Besides painting, she said, “There is a little bit more to look, walk around, look, decide the form, all of these things.” (In between, there are some binge-going YouTube videos, though she tried not to overdo her habits.)

On the table around her studio, sitting on worn dough sticks, Hawkins dragged semi-hard paint on the canvas, and brushes of various sizes arranged in the pan. Among her tools and materials is the volume of prints of news reports, including about “oumuamua”, a mysterious interstellar object that was first discovered in 2017. She seems to suggest that she might play the “shape of ouumuamua” and use it in one of her paintings, like the rocks she saw while on vacation in Wales.

Hawkins divided her work process into two stages. “The first half of the painting is very spontaneous and very intuitive,” she said. “The first color on the canvas is just a placeholder. It lets me know: I’ve started. “After painting her first form with oil, Hawkins will reach what she calls “a bag of tricks: all these sketches I found in nature,” such as the outline of the boulder, but she said, “everything can change until the second half,”

In June, she was still in that first half for her new work “The Map Necessary for a 4D Walk”. Based on a similar titled painting from the late 1970s, the series found Hawkins from an old apartment in Manhattan to a subway station near the island map, and then tilted the city’s grid to make it look distorted. The interfering grids of these canvases represent the streets of New York. “New York used to have an organized way of laying out, but could manipulate that organization,” Hawkins said. The resulting work is about the flow of time and the organization of space, and abstraction can go a long way in diverting our perception of the two.

Hawkins has begun to wonder if the tones of these works are no different. “I’m still deciding whether I should leave this green or take out some green,” she said. Chapter 4: Maps required for a walk 4D, #5.

In the mid-20th century, her work was like a return to the heyday of formalism, when critics praised the artists, who, like Hawkins, paid special attention to depth, color and geometric shapes. Today, formalism has become a taboo. Does she think she is a formalist? “I yes She said, adding, “but I don’t like perfect things at all. That was so frustrating. ”

At the opening ceremony of MoMA’s 2022 performance Regarding jam, Hawkins meets the gallery’s founder Kobe for the first time in decades. “She looked at me and she said, ‘Cynthia always does it her way.’ “It’s true, you know?” I don’t think I’m a rebel or something, but I won’t reject the answer, if you say no, I’ll go around the back or side. ”

Hawkins has been doing it in his own way for a long time. Her career followed an unusual arc, even though she was born in Queens in 1950, she spent very little time in New York City. Her family was the first to go to college, and she attended Queens College in the mid-1970s. She will undoubtedly learn anything other than art. She recalled her classmates. “I can never understand.”

She won the BFA in 1977 and life has since taken her outside the city. Over the past fifty years, she has taught at SUNY ROCKLAND Community College, SUNY GENESEO and other schools. She received her master’s degree from the Maryland School of Art in Baltimore in 1992, and from 2000 to 2003, she was the director of the Cedar Crest College Museum in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Then, from 2007 to 2021, she directed the Gallery of SUNY Geneseo. She received her Master of Museum Studies in 2008 from Seton Hall University in New Jersey. “I have to compete with young people,” she said she decided to get a degree in the field.

Recently, Hawkins returned to his PhD in American Studies from SUNY Buffalo. Her 2019 paper is titled “African American Agents and Art Objects, 1868-1917.” Her studio in Poughkeepsie, can take a two-hour train from Manhattan and then take a short drive, the closest studio she has ever been to the art hub for quite some time. Why did she spend so long outside of New York? “It’s real accident,” she said.

Her initial decision to become an abstract painter was also unplanned. As an undergraduate, Hawkins started not with abstraction, but with symbols, repeatedly drawing the gymnasts using parallel bars and balance beams. She was dissatisfied with the results and she allowed the images to gradually separate, forming fields of intersection lines. These early works recall the tree paintings of Piet Mondrian of Dutch modernism, which Hawkins, along with Hans Hofmann and Johannes Vermeer, continue to see as influence.

After graduating from college, Hawkins became interested in black holes, fourth dimensions and algebra. Between 1979 and 1981, she briefly turned to sculpture, indicating that she had entered the medium above Midtown early. Then, in the early 1980s, she returned to painting and made works filled with arrows and other symbols. She later threw some older 3D works in the moving house, anyway, as she Art notes, artHere is her 2024 diary centered on sculpture, “I used to and continue to be a painter.”

Many of Hawkins’ paintings since the 1980s were intentionally mysterious: she used it as an inquiry into the thoughts and phenomena she wanted to know. For example, her 1986 series Survey on Green is a group of slender canvases that explore their nominal tones through other tones, one of which consists primarily of violet. “I was like, ‘Hello, what would green be?’” Hawkins recalled. “I thought it was a very difficult color, so I made 10 paintings.”

Over the decades since, Hawkins continues to challenge himself through painting. But to alleviate the difficulties, she often finds entertainment in low-bang and smaller-scale works. With a smile, she took some prints out of the studio drawer. They look like paintings arranged nearby, except for the sparse and looser prints, curved lines accompanying less floating shapes. If she didn’t do enough new work to support a solo exhibition every six months, she said: “I’ll do some prints and do more on paper. I’ll be happy.”

A version of this article appears in the Top 200 Collectors Question of the Year, titled “Cynthia Hawkins Painting”.