Image: Vaughn Spann, ‘Oracle’, detail, 2020, polymer paint, mixed media, canvas on wood panels. © Vaughn Spann, courtesy of the artist and Almine Rech. Photo: Dan Bradica
‘Beyond Boundaries: Black Abstraction in the Elliot and Kimberly Perry Art Collection’ is on view at the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture in Charlotte, North Carolina, through August 30, 2026. Presented as an examination of the Perry collection, the exhibition places Black abstraction at its center and considers how artists use material, color, and medium to convey histories that extend beyond figurative representation.
The exhibition has been on view since May 8. Its premise challenges the positioning of abstraction outside—or apart from—Black artistic histories, describing Black abstraction as a field that developed both alongside and in opposition to dominant art-historical narratives. The works assembled in Charlotte frame abstraction as a site of intellectual and formal experimentation.
Rather than treating abstraction as detached from social or historical meaning, ‘Beyond Boundaries’ emphasizes the ways physical substances and visual decisions can encode experience. The exhibition’s description identifies material, color, and medium as vehicles through which histories are carried, while also pointing to the limits of figuration as the sole means of representing those histories.
Artists included in the presentation include Jadé Fadojutimi, Theaster Gates, and Rick Lowe. An installation view from the exhibition also identifies works by Desmond Lewis and Vaughn Spann, alongside Lowe. The range of names presented in the available exhibition material indicates a collection shaped around contemporary approaches to abstraction rather than a single medium or formal vocabulary.
The exhibition takes place at the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture, a Charlotte institution whose name reflects its focus on African-American art and culture. The center’s presentation of the Perry collection gives the works a setting in which abstraction is addressed not as a marginal category, but as a central strand of Black artistic production and inquiry.
‘Beyond Boundaries: Black Abstraction in the Elliot and Kimberly Perry Art Collection’ remains on view at the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture in Charlotte through August 30, 2026.
