Black Form

With the support of the Herb Jackson and Laura Grosch Gallery Endowment and Davidson College Friends of the Arts, the Van Every/Smith Galleries at Davidson College are pleased to present Paul Stephen Benjamin: Black Form. The exhibition presents several new works in diverse media that continue Benjamin’s explorations of the color and the sound of black as conceptual entry points for dialogue around identity.

Benjamin draws on aspects of formalism and Minimalism to create his large-scale works that often rely on the arrangement of many like components. The square or grid recurs throughout, as in his installation of one hundred silkscreens in five rows of twenty entitled Black Thought, or the presentation of Sonata in Absolute Black: All the Black Keys, a multichannel video spanning thirty-six identical monitors in three rows of twelve. Further, repetition is a key part of the imagery itself, such as in the one hundred short, screen-printed phrases that all include the word black; a vinyl text installation that repeats three phrases hundreds of times across three walls; and thirty-six videos, each depicting a black man’s hand playing one of the thirty-six black keys on a piano.

We were delighted to engage Benjamin for this project, though we intended to display this work over a year ago. This exhibition was just one more thing upended by the COVID-19 pandemic. But now, the presentation seems even stronger and more important. The contradictory words we may use to describe the works on view in Black Form could easily describe our lives at the moment: at once both uniform and varied, apparent and obscure, urgent and languishing. We hope these characteristics, along with the overall meditative nature of the presentation, provide you with the opportunity to explore the works formally in terms of structure, materiality, and shape, while also inviting deeper, conceptual conversations around identity, race, and masculinity.

The brochure features an essay by Hallie Ringle, Hugh Kaul Curator for Contemporary Art, Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL.

Paul Stephen Benjamin was born in Chicago, Illinois and currently lives in Atlanta, Georgia. He holds a BA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an MFA from Georgia State University. Benjamin’s work has been widely exhibited throughout the US including at the Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma, WA; Zuckerman Museum of Art, Kennesaw, GA; ICA, Richmond, VA; Telfair Museum’s Jepson Center for Art, Savannah, GA, The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, Atlanta, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA, and upcoming as part of Prospect 5: Yesterday we said tomorrow, New Orleans, LA. Benjamin is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the Hudgens Prize, Southern Art Prize, State Fellow of Georgia, MOCA GA Working Artist Project, Artadia Award, a Winnie B. Chandler Fellowship, and a Hambidge Fellowship.

See the Virtual Tour here.