Claremont, CA– The Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College opens two new exhibitions celebrating the legacy and contemporary practice of California Hard-Edge painting, a movement that brought clarity and rigor to mid-twentieth-century abstraction. June Harwood: Paintings and Tracing the Edge are on view from August 23, 2023, to January 7, 2024, with a press preview at 10:30 am on Wednesday, August 23. The opening reception for both exhibitions will be Saturday, September 9, 2023, from 4 to 7 pm, starting with a panel featuring Jackie Amézquita, Linda Arreola, Aryana Minai, and Kristopher Raos, all contemporary artists exploring the boundaries of Hard-Edge painting.
June Harwood: Paintings is the first survey of California Hard-Edge painter June Harwood. Harwood (1933–2015) was born in New York and moved to Los Angeles after completing her BFA at Syracuse University in 1953. She earned an MA from California State University, Los Angeles, in 1957. While working as a teacher at Hollywood High School and then as a professor at Los Angeles Valley College, Harwood refined a style of abstraction and compositional precision that she had started developing around 1960. This style eventually became known as “Hard-Edge,” a term coined in 1959 by critic and curator Jules Langsner (whom Harwood married in 1965), which is characterized by flat planes of color defined by sharp borders, uniform paint application, bold colors, and pure abstraction.
Throughout her five-decade career, Harwood produced bodies of work defined by different permutations of color, shape, and energetic movement. June Harwood: Paintings emphasizes the serial nature of her work, making it possible for viewers to see her ideas emerge and develop over time. From the angular Sliver and curvilinear Colorform paintings, which cemented her place in the California abstract art scene, to the dynamic Loop paintings that appear to pulse and dance, the exhibition captures the breadth of the artist’s vision and practice. June Harwood: Paintings charts the evolution of her abstraction, chronicling her move to and away from organic forms, fragments, and wholes, and bright to muted palettes.
The companion exhibition Tracing the Edge brings together the work of leading historical Hard-Edge painters in the Benton’s collection—including Karl Benjamin and Fredrick Hammersley—with that of four contemporary artists based in Southern California who are expanding the idea of abstraction. Often drawing on visual traditions outside of European modernism and infusing abstraction with social commentary, Jackie Amézquita, Linda Arreola, Aryana Minai, and Kristopher Raos use shape, texture, color, and material to engage questions of class, spirituality, memory, and politics. In contrast to Hard-Edge’s reputation as formal, cool, and removed, these contemporary works draw close to the world, using abstraction itself to jumble and reorganize the boundaries between tastes, places, times, and states of mind.
A press preview for both exhibitions will be held at 11 am on Wednesday, August 23. Coffee and tea will be provided at 10:30 am, followed by gallery viewing. Please RSVP to caroline.eastburn@pomona.edu.