Frank Wimberley b. 1926, Pleasantville, NJ

Over the course of a career spanning more than sixty years, Frank Wimberley has regarded abstract painting as a continuous adventure. Born in 1926, he is a well-known presence in the New York art world and an important figure in African American art since the 1960s. Acclaimed for his dynamic, multi-layered, and sophisticated paintings, Wimberley is among the leading contemporary artists working in the Abstract Expressionist tradition. What has always excited him is taking the theme or feeling of his very first stroke and following it to its particular conclusion, “very much like creating the controlled accident.” His improvisational method is akin to jazz—an important part of his life and a recurring theme in his art. Despite the spontaneity of his process, Wimberley makes each decision deliberately, remaining respectful of what emerges and where it is going; he enjoys the surprise of arriving at definitions that seem to come to life on their own. Similarly, his works engage viewers through their strong physicality and unpredictability, as well as their insights into the ways that pictorial experiences are perceived and understood.

 

While growing up in the New Jersey suburbs, Wimberley was drawn to art and music. His parents encouraged his interests. His mother, a ceramicist and pianist, involved him in her work and allowed him to pursue his own glazing experiments. His father gave him a trumpet that he used in “a band of sorts.” In 1945, after serving in the army, Wimberley entered Howard University in Washington, D.C., where he studied painting with three of the most influential African American artists of the mid-twentieth century: James Amos Porter, James Lesesne Wells, and Loïs Mailou Jones. Porter, also an art historian, wrote the first critical analysis of African American artists and their work. Wells, primarily a graphic artist, was active in the Harlem Renaissance. Jones, a Paris-trained artist influenced by the Harlem Renaissance, was a textile designer and illustrator as well as a painter. While at Howard, Wimberley also became immersed in jazz—listening to it and playing it himself—which later led to long friendships with legendary jazz musicians Miles Davis, Ron Carter, and Wayne Shorter. After two years, Wimberley decided to move on, believing he was “ready to teach himself.”

 

At first, Wimberley became a ceramicist, following his mother’s path. His main influence was the tactile and sculptural pottery of Peter Voulkos. However, on discovering that Voulkos was also a painter, Wimberley realized that he did not need to be committed to one medium, and instead “could do several.” In the 1950s, while living in Queens with his wife, Juanita, and son, Walden, he worked the night shift at a local post office. This freed him to paint and take care of Walden during the day, while Juanita was at work. The post office provided him “with money—and time,” which he felt was “the most important thing.”

 

In 1960, Frank and Juanita began vacationing in Sag Harbor, on the East End of Long Island. In 1964, they bought land, and a year later designed a modernist, sky-lit home. The low, dark-brown building was noted “for its Japanese simplicity, its monotones of angled gray deck, low black fences, and enclosed squares or river stones relieved by three vertical wooden sculptures in red, blue, and green, suspended from the overhang of the roof.”1 Frank was drawn to the long legacy of artists’ communities on the East End as well as Sag Harbor’s history as a place where Americans of African descent had lived continuously since first settling in the area in the 1600s. In Sag Harbor, he found an affinity with local artists, including Herman Cherry, Rae Ferren, and Bunny Dell, whom he felt were “tremendously helpful.” He recalls: “I learned how generous most artists can be when faced with common problems.” Miles Davis was one of the strongest supporters of Wimberley’s art, purchasing his pottery, assemblages, and wood constructions and encouraging other jazz musicians to collect his art as well, including Julian “Cannonball” Adderly, “Teo” Macero, and Tony Williams.

 

In 1969, when few African American artists were able to exhibit their work, Wimberley was included in a group exhibition at C.W. Post College, in Brookville, New York—the first public display of his work. Over the next decade, he took advantage of numerous opportunities to show his art, participating in exhibitions at the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, New York (1971) and the Penthouse Gallery of the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1972). His first solo exhibitions were in 1973, at the Black History Museum in Hempstead, New York (which opened in 1970 and is now the African American Museum of Nassau County), and at Acts of Art Gallery in downtown New York. Owned by artists Nigel L. Jackson and Pat Grey, Acts of Art was an important venue associated with the Black Arts Movement in the 1970s. In 1974, Wimberley had solo shows at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, and again at Acts of Art, where he displayed collages, drawings, and paintings.

 

In February 1979, Wimberley participated in a show at Guild Hall Museum of the Eastville Artists, an informal council of African American artists on Long Island’s East End devoted to promoting the arts. Other council members included Alvin Loving, Robert Freeman, Nanette Carter, and Gaye Ellington (Duke Ellington’s granddaughter). Reviewing the show, Helen Harrison noted that Wimberley had “embraced a cool, formal vocabulary in his assemblages of paper and found objects.” She observed that several of the works included “scraps of used canvases, suggesting the rejection of a previous mode of expression.” She added that Wimberley was searching “but cautiously.”2 Later that summer, when Wimberley was included in an exhibition at Peter S. Loonam Gallery in Bridgehampton, Harrison found his collages “busier but just as controlled in their composition.”3

 

Texture took a particularly important role in Wimberley’s art beginning in the 1970s. At the time, he was creating collages from scrap cardboard, paper, cloth, and metal, using these materials to explore contours and spatial arrangements. In the next phase of his work, he incorporated three-dimensional found objects. By the late 1980s, he was focused on paintings conceived with a sculptural sensibility, applying pigment in a thick and pliant manner and raking and abrading methods to build substance. Reviewing Abstract Energy Now at the Islip Art Museum in June 1986, Harrison wrote that “line and gesture” were “elegantly balanced” in Wimberley’s painting A Few Choice Things, which was illustrated in her New York Times review. She remarked that the painting’s title underscored “the fact that abstract art, even at its most spontaneous and intuitive is more choice than chance.”4 Critiquing Wimberley’s solo show at the Fine Arts Gallery, Long Island University, Southampton, the art historian Phyllis Braff noted that, like many abstract artists, Wimberley relied “on color, brushwork, and form, to invent a universe of visual sensations,” yet his originality was most evident in the way he builds “emotional content with both color and a daring, experimental use of mass.” She observed the “sophisticated control that runs through these exuberant paintings.”5

 

From the 1990s into the 2010s, Wimberley continued to build on earlier explorations while pursuing new directions. His work of the early 1990s demonstrates his command of an array of materials, including steel-wire brushes, spatulas, and pumice. By the decade’s end, he often simplified his compositions, focusing on a particular inquiry until he reached a sense of resolution.

 

At the turn of the new century, Wimberley was receiving widespread recognition. In 1997, he had solo shows at the Islip Art Museum on Long Island, and June Kelly Gallery in New York. In the catalogue for the latter, Rose Slivka—an important figure in American crafts—described Wimberley as an artist who expressed jazz through swift brushwork and the spontaneous gesture but was also “very much a formalist and craftsman.”6 In 1998, Wimberley received a Pollock-Krasner Fellowship. In 1999, a retrospective of his work was held at Adelphi University, and in 2000, his painting, Twilight Squall, was acquired by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York. When Wimberley had another show at June Kelly in 2001, Grace Glueck stated in her New York Times review that his paintings “are good to behold: beautifully brushed and infused with a light that magnifies their intensity.”7 Another retrospective of his art was presented in 2004 at the Sage Colleges in Albany, New York. In the exhibition catalogue, Jim Richard Wilson characterized Wimberley’s recent work as “classical,” explaining that “it is expression informed by reflection. It is apart from dominant contemporary trends. It is historically informed without being nostalgic. This work is sincere art in a time of disingenuous artifice.”8 At the June Kelly Gallery in 2007, Wimberley exhibited some of his largest paintings. In that catalogue, Phyllis Braff noted that he had “been coaxing expressive content from art’s key components” throughout his career and observed that the new works revealed “fresh, innovative probing . . . with many works taking on a special resonance.”9

 

In 2010, Wimberley won the annual Guild Hall Artist Members Exhibition, selected by Ben Genocchio, former art critic for the New York Times. His work was subsequently shown at the museum in 2012–2013. In the accompanying catalogue, Eric Ernst summarized the artist’s distinctiveness, writing: “Frank Wimberley’s paintings have an excitement and energy that breaks the boundaries of the canvas. His art exudes depth and passion that invigorates the viewer. One cannot help but be drawn into the lushness of the paint and the way that it is masterfully handled by this amazing artist.”10

 

 

In recent years, Wimberley’s work has continued to receive significant recognition. In 2021, he had a solo exhibition at the Arts Center at Duck Creek in East Hampton, New York, and was included in Creating Community: Cinque Gallery Artists at the Art Students League. In 2023, his art was featured in Collection Highlights: African American Art at the Greenville County Museum of Art in South Carolina. Currently, his work is featured in Acts of Art and Rebuttal in Greenwich Village, a group exhibition at the Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Gallery at Hunter College in New York.

 

Frank Wimberley is included in numerous museum and corporate collections: the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; Brooklyn Union Gas Company, New York; Cleary Gottlieb, New York; Coca Cola Bottling Company, Philadelphia; David C. Driskell Art Center, University of Maryland, College Park; the Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia, Athens; Guild Hall Museum, East Hampton, New York; James E. Lewis Museum of Art, The Carl Murphy Fine Arts Center, Morgan State University, Baltimore, Maryland; the John and Vivian Hewitt Collection, Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts and Culture, Charlotte, North Carolina; the John Hoskins Estate, Atlanta University, Georgia; Islip Art Museum, New York; Long Island Museum of Art, Stony Brook, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York; PepsiCo, Purchase, New York; Pitney Bowes, Stamford, Connecticut; the Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri; Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the Valentine Museum of Art, Brooklyn, New York; WarnerMedia, New York; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut.