Colored Surfaces and the Shape of Sound
Color and Sound in Abstract Art
Color plays an important role in abstract art that shapes form, mood, and meaning. Abstract art can also reflect a deep, symbiotic connection with music and sound. Artists—understanding that color and sound are both experienced through patterns, frequencies, and emotional resonance—sometimes turn to music not only as inspiration but as a vital component of their creative process. Some artists use color as a visual experience, while others explore its symbolic and historical meanings.
I’ve never bothered painting the ugly things in life. People struggling, having difficulty. . . . No. I wanted something beautiful that you could sit down and look at.
Alma Thomas, 1979
Color and Innovation
The basic artistic practice of applying colored pigment to a surface varies widely. Artists such as Sam Gilliam, McArthur Binion, and Alma Thomas may focus on a single color or a rainbow of vibrant hues. All three artists, however, are very deliberate in their mark making. Gilliam, after painting the canvas of Blackberry, Bar and Green, marked the surface using a shag rug rake to create texture and pattern. Binion presses wax-based crayons onto a surface to build up texture and form, his repetitive mark making emphasizing color, shape, and materiality. Thomas fills the canvas with mosaic-like dabs of color.
Blue Feather by Gregory Coates
Gregory Coates uses unexpected materials to create mixed-media abstract art with strong visual and spiritual meaning. In 2007, while grieving his father-in-law’s passing, Coates began incorporating feathers in his work. By painting the feathers in a singular, bold color he aims to subvert or radicalize the material. Of his use of color, Coates states, “I have been using color mostly as seduction. I don’t really think about it. I want the color to seduce the viewer to investigate the materials.”
Blue Feather by Gregory Coates, 2013.
Featured Constellation
Redbone – Colored China Rags
by Juana Valdes
Juana Valdes’s Redbone invites viewers to consider how skin tone is valued. The term ‘redbone’ refers to both lighter-skinned Black people and the materiality of bone china, the porcelain ceramic that is used often for dinnerware and prized for its white color, strength, and resilience. In this work, rags made from china are pigmented to reflect the varied range of Black skin tones. They also symbolize the prevalence of domestic work often performed by women of color in upper-class households and institutions. The natural chipping of the glaze applied to the china symbolizes the body’s deterioration due to labor and aging.
Racial Identity and Color
For some artists, the use of color can carry layered significance—evoking racial identity, referencing the insidious nature of colorism, or reclaiming the richness of the color black itself. Whether applying pigment with expressive intensity or arranging hues with calculated precision, these artists reveal how abstraction offers a framework for both visual experimentation and cultural expression.
Janice by Alvin Demar Loving Jr., 1970.
Al Loving’s Janice
Al Loving received early acclaim in his career for his investigations into the geometry of the square through the manipulation of light, color, and form. From his arrival in New York in 1966 until 1971, he produced crisp, hard-edged abstractions based on cubes and other geometric forms. In Janice, he lined the bright yellow cube with a rainbow of colors that emphasize the edges and corners of the shape and provide depth to the artwork. A year following its completion, Loving abandoned his hard-edged style, citing its lack of meaningful connection to relevant social and political issues of that era.
Maputo #5 by Alvin Demar Loving Jr., 1993.
Al Loving’s Maputo #5
Al Loving struggled to reconcile the nonobjective nature of his work with the turbulent political and social era of the 1960s and 1970s. When referring to this lack of visual connection, he stated, “I felt stuck inside that box. . . . I mean, this was 1968—the Democratic [National] Convention, this was the war—and I’m doing these pictures.”
In his later work, Loving created paper collages that incorporated African concepts of geometry, life, and growth into curvilinear, dynamic compositions.
Untitled 206 (Lampblack series)
by Mary Lovelace O’Neal
Untitled 206 (Lampblack series) by Mary Lovelace O’Neal, ca. 1970.
In 1968, Mary Lovelace O’Neal began working with a rich, velvety pigment called lampblack. Here, she replicates the deep black using charcoal and pastel. The black foundation gives way to straight lines and even to emerging colored forms, like the circle. As an artist deeply engaged in the Civil Rights Movement, O’Neal produced work using black pigments in part as a response to the Black Arts Movement and its social and political focus. The pure abstraction of this piece complicates the concept of Blackness as both a color and a social construct.
Lyrical Variation
Artists such as Felrath Hines and Jennie C. Jones connect their interest in color and sound with lyrical composition, geometric shapes, and material variations. Hines specialized in bold, geometric compositions with distinctive juxtapositions of color, which resonated with his interest in the tonal hues, rhythmic structures, and emotive qualities of jazz music. Jones encourages viewers to imagine sound through visual and textural means such as painted acoustic panels and architectural felt.
Untitled by Felrath Hines, 1989.
Felrath Hines's Untitled
Though Felrath Hines participated in the Civil Rights Movement, he felt little need to insert his political views into his art. He did not want to be relegated to the category of “Black artist,” which he saw as limiting. Known for his expertise as an art conservator, Hines was also a member of Spiral, a collective founded in 1963 by African American artists. The group met weekly to discuss and debate topics such as aesthetic practices and the artist’s role as an active agent in the struggle for racial equality, among other art-related issues.
Fluid Red Tone, Bass Clef by Jennie C. Jones, 2023.
Jennie C. Jones's Fluid Red Tone, Bass Clef
Jennie C. Jones focuses on relationships between modern abstract art and African American avant-garde music. Fluid Red Tone, Bass Clef is minimalist in its careful attention to color, line, and structure. Yet its vividness and variation, as well as the slight three-dimensionality, make a powerful visual statement. The title and materials reference the bright red hue of the artwork and the musical nomenclature of the bass clef.
Music and art and jazz are all a part of my whole life. . . . Every note has a color, and I think that I use those notes and those colors in my work as a painter.
Adger Cowans, 2024
Jazz: Shaping Sound
Untitled by Kenneth Victor Young, 1976.
Jazz Quartet by Norman Lewis, 1952.
Jazz and abstract art are closely linked through their shared intellectual rigor and emotive power. Both require a sophisticated understanding of structure, theory, and form in order to move beyond conventional practices.
In each field, practitioners draw upon an archive of knowledge—whether harmony and rhythm in jazz, or composition, color, and spatial relationships in abstraction—to construct complex works of art that integrate improvisation, experimentation, and critical thought.
Music as Metaphor
Inspirations in Song
Artists in this gallery transform music into color, form, and movement. While some artworks are named after songs, others are collaborations between artists and musicians that blur disciplinary lines. In these works, sound is seen, felt, and given shape. These songs were compiled to create a Revelation exhibit soundtrack.
Truckin by William T. Williams, 1969.
Blue Twirl by Sam Gilliam, 1971.
Swing Low by Richard Hunt, 2016.
Love Petals by Gordon Parks, 1993.