Creative freedom as a form of resistance
This week we welcome Cullen Washington Jr., an African American abstract painter. A native of Louisiana, he lives and works in Queens.
Washington was the inaugural recipient of the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation residency at the International Studio and Curatorial Program, and was awarded both a grant and a fellowship by the Joan Mitchell Foundation in New Orleans. He has been an artist in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, Yaddo and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.
Cullen’s work is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem as well as the Joyner/Giuffrida Collection. He has shown at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and the Queens Museum and had a solo show at the University of Michigan Museum of Art. Washington has been reviewed in Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art, Art:21, The New York Times and The International Review of African American Art.
What does it mean for a Black man to paint the sublime? In Washington’s words:
“For my grandfather, the Rev. Joseph Robinson — a sharecropper born in 1886, just 20 years post-Emancipation— even entertaining the sublime felt like a kind of heresy. But for me, his grandson, making an abstract landscape painting is the purest form of protest.
“Nature poses an existential question: Where does humankind belong in the world? Today that question mutates: what would a world without humans look like? For Black artists working with land, these queries carry extra weight. How do you reckon with having been forced to toil [in] a place you were never allowed to own? How do you translate that history into the image of a sky at dusk?
“As race constrains Black artists within the pressures and contradictions of postcolonial life, I keep returning to a simple, urgent challenge: How do I portray the feeling of a sunset — its light, its loss, its claim — without erasing the labor and history beneath it?
“In just two generations, my grandfather Rev. Robinson’s grandson — me — has gained the privilege to stand in the landscape and translate that encounter into paint. That very freedom to create is itself an act of protest: it declares my presence and insists on my right to define myself, to claim vision and to belong to the land. My work exists in conversation with this legacy: a dialogue between dispossession and imagination, between inherited memory and liberated form.”
