McArthur Binion - Re:Mine

Born in Mississippi in 1946, Binion lived in New York in the ‘70s and was loosely part of a group of African American painters who, despite the pressures to make artwork that was politically motivated, devoted themselves to abstraction. In 1973, he was included in the second show held at Artists Space organized by Sol LeWitt, Carl Andre, and Ronald Bladen. Binion’s distinctive insertion of narrative and personal history and his emphasis on content, distinguished his work from the more reductive Minimalist practices of other artists and continues to do so today.

Re:Mine refers to the artist’s practice of both hiding and excavating biographical information in his paintings, claiming and reclaiming personal and cultural history.
Copies of the artist’s birth certificate and pages from his address book are physically laid down as a self-described “under surface” of the paintings on which he applies multiple layers of paint stick in vertical and horizontal strokes. This “woven” application of paint, with black and other deep colors like umber, still permits residual images of the printed page to be seen in ghostly patterns. The accumulation of stroke after stroke of paint stick becomes a metaphor for artistic and manual labor and visually mediates between what is visible and invisible.