Cynthia Hawkins: Art Notes, Art Book Launch

Please join us to celebrate the release of Art Notes, Art, available for pre-order here.

Cynthia Hawkins will be in conversation with her friend Janet Olivia Henry, who is among the artists featured in the publication.

About Art Notes, Art
Since the 1970s, Cynthia Hawkins has investigated the potentials of abstract painting. While often beginning a work or series with a predetermined concept or strategy, Hawkins’s process-oriented practice simultaneously embraces the improvisational to create a systemized space for her continually evolving vocabulary. From 1979 to 1981, important early years in the elaboration of her work, Hawkins documented these developments in a journal. A record of routine and the everyday, the journal also gathers sketches, notes for new and in-progress works, and responses to contemporary art and criticism, bringing the artist’s process, experimentation, and reflections on materials, formalism, abstraction, and figuration into relief. Art Notes, Art also offers a picture of the burgeoning Black-owned gallery scene in 1970s and ‘80s New York that Hawkins was an important participant in—including Cinque Gallery, Kenkeleba Gallery, and Just Above Midtown, where she had her first solo exhibition in 1981–as well as the women artists’ circle she was an active member of, which hosted weekly shares, critiques, exchange, and amplification of each others’ work. An important glimpse into Hawkins’s creative process and artistic community, Art Notes, Art is richly illustrated with works by the artist produced during this key period–some of which are now lost–photographs and ephemera, and a visual archive of contemporaneous work by her peers.

About Cynthia Hawkins
Cynthia Hawkins was born in 1950 in Queens, New York. She has exhibited widely in New York and the United States throughout her career and has presented one-person exhibitions at Just Above Midtown, New York (1981); Frances Wolfson Art Gallery, Miami (1986); Cinque Gallery, New York (1989); Queens College Art Center (1997); Buffalo Museum of Science, Buffalo (2009); STARS, Los Angeles (2022); and Ortuzar Projects, New York (2023). She was included in the survey exhibition Just Above Midtown: 1974 to Present at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2022). Hawkins’s work is in numerous public collections, including the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York; Kenkeleba Gallery, New York; the La Grange Art Museum, Georgia; and the U.S. Department of State, Washington, DC. She has received numerous awards, including the Helen Frankenthaler Award for Painting (2023); the Black Metropolis Research Consortium Fellowship (2009); The Herbert and Irene Wheeler Foundation Grant (1995); and the Brooklyn Museum Art School Scholarship (1972). CARA presented Hawkins with its annual Legacy Award in October 2024. She received her doctorate in American Studies from the University of Buffalo, SUNY, with a dissertation titled, “African American Agency and the Art Object, 1868–1917,” and until recently was the gallery director and curator at the Bertha V.B. Lederer Gallery, SUNY Geneseo, New York.

Hollybush Gardens, London, will present her work in a two-person exhibition opening in January 2025 as part of CONDO. This collaborative presentation between Hollybush Gardens and Gordon Robichaux, New York, brings together paintings and works on paper by Hawkins with works by Janet Olivia Henry. Hollybush Gardens will also dedicate a one-person exhibition to Cynthia Hawkins in autumn 2025.

Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, will present a one-person exhibition of work by Cynthia Hawkins in the spring, on view March 27 through May 3, 2025.

About Janet Olivia Henry
Janet Olivia Henry (b. 1947; East Harlem, New York) is an artist and educator who lives and works in Queens, New York. She was educated at the School of Visual Arts and the Fashion Institute of Technology, and received a fellowship in education from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In partnership with filmmaker Linda Goode Bryant, Henry designed and produced Black Currant, a magazine that highlighted the experimental work of artists who were showcased by the Just Above Midtown gallery (JAM). She was a member of the Women’s Action Coalition (WAC), a feminist open alliance that sought to address issues of women’s rights through direct action. She participated in WAC’s drum core and currently co-leads a Project EATS drumming group. Henry is a life-long educator and has worked at the New York State Council on the Arts, the Studio Museum in Harlem’s education department, the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning, the Lower Eastside Girls Club, Children’s Art Carnival, and the Brooklyn Heights Montessori School.

Henry has exhibited work at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; New Museum, New York; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Newark Museum, New Jersey; Artists Space, New York; P·P·O·W Gallery, New York; and Just Above Midtown, New York. Her work has been reviewed and featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Hyperallergic, and Smithsonian Magazine, among others.