Memorial Service
Frank Wimberley (1926-2025)
Saturday, December 13, 2025, 1 pm
Berry Campbell
524 W 26th Street, New York
We invite you to join us for a remembrance of artist Frank Wimberley. Remarks will be given by Christine Berry, Nanette Carter, Corinne Erni, Arlene Bujese, Lisa Stenson Haggray, Sanjeanetta Harris, and Juanita Wimberley. Light refreshments will be served and jazz will be performed by musicians from The Juilliard School.
Berry Campbell is deeply saddened to announce the passing of Frank Wimberley, a beloved figure in the art world. As a key figure in African American art and a leading contemporary artist in the Abstract Expressionist tradition, Wimberley never lost his passion for experimentation and inquiry. The spontaneity of his process was akin to jazz—an important part of his life and a recurring theme in his art—but his method was unfailingly deliberate. As the art historian Phyllis Braff noted, “Wimberley has been coaxing expressive content from art’s key components: invented form and space; color and its vibrations; pigment and its viscosity, brush action and its gestural rhythms.”
In 1969, when few African American artists were invited to exhibit their work, Wimberley was included in a group exhibition at CW Post College, in Brookville, New York. However, in the next decade, he participated in shows, often including The Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, New York (1971), and the Penthouse Gallery, Museum of Modern Art, New York (1972). His first solo exhibitions were in 1973 at The Black History Museum, Hempstead, New York (now the African American Museum of Nassau County), which opened in 1970, and at Acts of Art Gallery in downtown New York. In 1974, Wimberley had solo shows at Union Theological Seminary, New York City, and again at Acts of Art, where he displayed collages, drawings, and paintings. In February 1979, he 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 members were Alvin Loving, Robert Freeman, Nanette Carter, and Gaye Ellington (Duke Ellington’s granddaughter). In 1998, he received a Pollock-Krasner Fellowship. Retrospectives of his work were held at Adelphi University in 1999 and at the Sage Colleges in Albany, New York, in 2004. In 2010, Guild Hall selected him for an annual prize exhibition. In 2022, he was inducted in the Guild Hall Academy of Arts by Eric Fischl. His work is represented in numerous museums—including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Georgia Museum of Art; Guild Hall, East Hampton; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Parrish Art Museum; the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; the Smithsonian American Art Museum; the Studio Museum in Harlem; and Yale University Art Gallery—along with other public and corporate collections.
