Circa 1989
February 9–April 2, 2022
MARCH is pleased to announce Circa 1989, featuring masterworks by Hawkins Bolden, Archie Byron, Thornton Dial, Richard Dial, Lonnie Holley, Ronald Lockett, Mary Tillman Smith, Gracie Scott, Georgia Speller, Henry Speller, Jimmy Lee Sudduth, and Mose Tolliver.
“When I heard that Birmingham was going to build a civil rights museum, that gave me what you call a stepping stone. From what I was hearing, the main players in the freedom struggle, the foot soldiers, was left out of the story. We need the leaders, but without the foot soldiers, the struggle and fight can’t be won. But where is the recognition for the soldiers?”
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Joe Minter
Untitled, c. 1989
Paint on wood
75 x 27 x 27 inches
“We as people of Africa have a story to tell about a journey of four hundred years here in America. Kidnapped from the motherland of Africa, placed in chains and shackles, uprooted from family into slavery. Fifty-four thousand shiploads of men, women, children—three hundred packed into the bottom of a ship for a trip across the Atlantic Ocean to America. Of one hundred million African people taken into the Western Hemisphere, seventy-five million missing—only twenty-five million made it alive in the Middle Passage to America. What happened to the seventy-five million missing Africans?”
–Joe Minter
“(Bolden) is a constant listener, reaching to receive the right material to catch the perfect sound … when a man have toiled over something and been conducted by the spirit of what he’s used to hearing, the different sounds he makes in the quiet of himself, the different things that he hear from within that quietness of himself, allow him to create the perfect, that others can receive. He does that so that others can see.”
–Lonnie Holley
Hawkins Bolden
Untitled, c. 1980s
Big Wheel with carpet
26 x 17 x 7 inches
Archie Byron
Untitled, 1988
Sawdust and glue relief with pigment on wood
46 x 35 inches
“It is a kind of banal campaign rhetoric about intrinsic human worth and beauty become genuine artistic visionariness, inflected with the un-utopian notion that difference may be endemic to the human project—that we are all united by certain bonds and disunited by certain bonds. (Byron’s) vision is not of the blazing light of the sun, but of an alternate sunburst and sunrise of the muddy water, moving the world’s many soils toward the sea.”
–Paul Arnett, Souls Grown Deep Volume I, 2000
“Richard Dial’s sculptures give new life to the dead metaphors of chair legs and arms, at the same time transforming these seats into personifications of tradition.”
–Robert Hobbs
Richard Dial
Untitled, 1988
Welded steel with paint
43 x 20 x 24 inches
“Art is the evidence of my freedom.”
– Thornton Dial

Thornton Dial
Untitled (Slave Ship), 1988
Enamel on metal
60 x 124 x 10 inches
Lonnie Holley
With Our Birth, 1991
Enamel on panel
28 x 38 inches
“(Holley) makes the kind of sculpture–and produces the kind of music–that changes people. It gets into their emotional and intellectual core and forces them to rethink art and history, as well as their own assumptions about how the world works.” –Jonathan Curiel, SF Weekly, 2017
“Observing Light’s paintings piece by piece is perhaps less productive than considering them as part of an elaborate polyptych, for together they become part of an animated visual parable.”
–Ashton Cooper, Artforum, 2020
Joe Light
Imagineable Flower, 1989
Enamel on wood
36 1/2 x 48 inches
“(Lockett’s) development was characterized by a decisive change from a period of boldly representational art into a cycle of work that was much more abstract, or at least more metaphorical than literal. And yet even in this fact lies a quality that places the artist in two worlds.”
– Paul Arnett, Souls Grown Deep Volume II, 2000

Ronald Lockett
Untitled (Rebirth), c. 1989
Enamel on wood
24 x 52 inches
Gracie Scott
Lee County, Alabama (Nine Patch variation quilt), c. 1990
Synthetics and cotton thread
80 x 61 inches
“Quilting is a deeply pragmatic art. Its ethical qualities resonate with contemporary concerns around reuse and recycling, artisanal production and collaboration. Yet this humble art can generate sublime results.”
–Ellen Mara De Wachter, Royal Academy of Art, 2020
“The assertive, individualistic, essentially democratic spirit of Smith’s paintings is as enticing as their bright colors and bold, totemic forms.“
– Edward M. Gómez, Hyperallergic, 2019

Mary Tillman Smith
Untitled, 1988
Enamel on wood
24 x 48 1/4 inches
“Women are never subservient in these tableaux. They may menace; they often dominate.”
–William Arnett, Souls Grown Deep Volume II, 2000
Georgia Speller
Untitled (Nude Couple Touching Themselves), c. 1983-1986
Crayon and graphite on paper
18 x 12 inches
Henry Speller
Untitled (Man with Fancy Suit Between Two Women), c. 1983-1988
Crayon and graphite on paper
24 x 18 inches
“Though Speller eschews both traditional anatomical representation and placement, the
drawings adeptly present a series of social codes involving sex, music, and fashion—Saturday night sociology.”
–Hunter Braithwaite, Burnaway, 2019
“Sudduth was renowned for the effects he could produce with his own homemade paint, which consisted of mud blended with a variety of common substances—soot, axle grease, sugar, coffee grounds and much else—to lend it color and texture.“
–Margalit Fox, The New York Times, 2007
Jimmy Lee Sudduth
Untitled (Dogwoods Piled Up In A Bowl), c. mid 1980s
Mud, paint, pencil on wood
18 x 17 1/4 inches
“Tolliver has made a lasting contribution to the cultural memory of the South.”
–Jason Berry
Circa 1989
February 9–April 2, 2022
“When I heard that Birmingham was going to build a civil rights museum, that gave me what you call a stepping stone. From what I was hearing, the main players in the freedom struggle, the foot soldiers, was left out of the story. We need the leaders, but without the foot soldiers, the struggle and fight can’t be won. But where is the recognition for the soldiers?”
–Joe Minter
This moment provides the backdrop for Circa 1989, an exhibition featuring works by 11 Black southern artists working in the same region and from the same cultural impulse as Joe Minter when he began building his sprawling environment, the African Village in America. The collector and art historian William S. Arnett describes the landscape in Souls Grown Deep Volume 2: “From the late
1960s through the 1970s, after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., a remarkable cultural phenomenon unfolded in the southern United States yet went almost unnoticed. As if in unspoken response to a trumpet’s reveille, Black people throughout the region came out from their houses, or factories, or in from the fields, and intensified their creation of artistic environments, or “yard shows,” so the outside world could see what had been previously expressed in secrecy inside and behind their residences. It had been there for centuries, this yard-show tradition, but almost no one outside the culture knew about it, this not-for-our-eyes cubism, fauvism, expressionism, surrealism, dada, abstract expressionism, pop, minimalism, graffiti, postmodern, neo-this, neo-that, neo-everything. Or proto-everything.” Circa 1989 builds on this moment, exhibiting paintings, sculptures, and drawings made in the following decade, the fruits of this initial flowering, when the artists are at the height of their powers or pushing the boundaries of their works using new materials, scales, and concepts.
Paired alongside Joe Minter’s solo exhibition, We Lost Our Spears, Circa 1989 features masterworks by Hawkins Bolden, Archie Byron, Thornton Dial, Richard Dial, Lonnie Holley, Ronald Lockett, Mary Tillman Smith, Gracie Scott, Georgia Speller, Henry Speller, Jimmy Lee Sudduth, and Mose Tolliver. Despite geography and the limited technology of the era, many of the artists knew one another or had met at the introduction of Arnett and Lonnie Holley. As a result, they began to understand their respective places in this larger cultural moment, one that continues to be studied, published, and exhibited both in the United States and abroad. Indeed, the oft-held notion that these artists toiled in obscurity, outside the structures of society, friendship, and even patronage are not only wrong but evidence of stubborn attitudes regarding race, class, geography, and other circumstances of birth.
It has been just over thirty years since Joe Minter began work on his African Village in America, one of the last remaining yard shows in the southern United States. His contemporaries, many of whom are featured in Circa 1989, have mostly passed on to the next phase of existence, but their influence and historical importance continues to grow. It is our hope that these tandem exhibition open larger conversations about this essential period of modern American art history and the individual artists responsible for its naissance and evolution.

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Hawkins Bolden
Untitled, c. 1980s
Big Wheel with carpet
26 x 17 x 7 inches

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Archie Byron
Untitled, 1988
Sawdust and glue relief with pigment on wood
46 x 35 inches

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Thornton Dial
Untitled (Slave Ship), 1988
Enamel on metal
60 x 124 x 10 inches

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Lonnie Holley
With Our Birth, 1991
Enamel on panel
28 x 38 inches

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Untitled (Rebirth), c. 1989
Enamel on wood
24 x 52 inches

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Gracie Scott
Lee County, Alabama (Nine Patch variation quilt), c. 1990
Synthetics and cotton thread
80 x 61 inches

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Jimmy Lee Sudduth
Untitled (Dogwoods Piled Up In A Bowl), c. mid 1980s
Mud, paint, pencil on wood
18 x 17 1/4 inches

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Joe Minter
Untitled (U.S.A. 54,000 SHIPS, LOAD OF AFRICAN PEOPLE IN CHAIN IN SLAVERY), c. 1989
Paint on wood
75 x 27 x 27 inches

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Henry Speller
Untitled (Man with Fancy Suit Between Two Women), c. 1983-1988
Crayon and graphite on paper
24 x 18 inches

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Georgia Speller
Untitled (Nude Couple Touching Themselves), c. 1983-1986
Crayon and graphite on paper
18 x 12 inches

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Joe Light
Imagineable Flower, 1989
Enamel on wood
36 1/2 x 48 inches

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Thornton Dial
People Looking for the Tiger Cats / Tigers See So Many Faces They Don’t Know Which Way to Turn, 1988
Enamel on wood
24 x 72 inches

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Thornton Dial
Untitled, 1988
Enamel on wood
30 x 48 inches

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Thornton Dial
Untitled, 1989
Enamel on wood
48 x 60 inches