Geometries at The Studio Museum in Harlem: 30 Artists on Line, Shape and Space

The Studio Museum in Harlem is presenting Geometries, a group exhibition on view through February 7, 2027. It takes one of the oldest branches of mathematics and treats it as an artistic question: how have artists used lines, shapes and the spaces between them to convey emotion, express identity or work through formal problems?

Geometry underlies much of how we perceive the world, from depth, volume and dimension to surface, measurement, distance and structure. The show recognizes that it can be grounded in rigorous reasoning, in sacred knowledge, or in the bodily experience of looking, and that each of these opens different formal, philosophical and spiritual avenues for an artist.

The thirty participants take varied positions. Some work in the language of Western geometric abstraction, stripping a composition down in search of something essential. Others question the supposed purity of geometry, tracing its links to African artistic traditions or confronting modernism and the burdens of representation placed on Black artists. Geometry also serves figuration: by breaking recognizable forms into elemental parts, artists can turn a nose into a triangle, a head into a cube, time into a circle, love into a single line. Painter Al Loving put it this way: "even a box can be a self-portrait."

The sources of imagery range widely, including grid-like city maps, West African textiles, patterned flowerheads and sonic vibrations. Artists carry these into a shared visual vocabulary, giving meaning to their materials and giving viewers new ways to read what they see.

The artists are Loretta Pettway Bennett, McArthur Binion, Sonia Boyce, Catti, Colin Chase, Emilio Cruz, Torkwase Dyson, Rico Gatson, Cynthia Hawkins, Leslie Hewitt, Steffani Jemison, Daniel LaRue Johnson, Jennie C. Jones, Caroline Kent, Norman Lewis, James Little, Al Loving, Howard McCalebb, Julie Mehretu, Odili Donald Odita, Senam Okudzeto, Adam Pendleton, Mavis Pusey, Jorge Luis Rodriguez, Thomas Sills, Shinique Smith, Alma Thomas, Stanley Whitney, Jack Whitten and William T. Williams. The exhibition is organized by Thelma Golden, Ford Foundation Director and Chief Curator, and Simon Ghebreyesus, Curatorial Assistant.