The Natural World Refracted
Nature in Abstract Art
The natural world has long inspired abstract artists. Rather than imitating nature, the artists featured here translate landscape and nature into metaphor. They offer layered perspectives that transcend surface representation.
These works focus on the relationship between abstraction and rootedness. They reflect ancestral legacies while exploring the dynamics of migration and cultural reinterpretation. The artists here evoke the natural world as a spiritual and historical terrain—one that holds memory, trauma, and beauty in equal measure. They challenge us to see abstraction not as a removal from reality but as a reframing of it.
The land becomes a repository for memory in ways in which we can't look to books or history to tell us a story about a place. . . . This soil, this ground, this grain of rice, this strand of hair is sufficient to tell these stories.
Adebunmi Gbadebo, 2023
Enroute
by Radcliffe Bailey
Radcliffe Bailey was a versatile artist who incorporated African American memories into his multimedia works. In Enroute, Bailey references the Transatlantic Slave Trade and its legacy. He incorporates West African art and symbols with his own family photographs. The work evokes the watery world that connects the African continent with America. The railroad tracks conjure up the harrowing journey of the enslaved as they sought self-emancipation on the Underground Railroad. They also reference the First Great Migration (1910–1940) of African Americans leaving the South in search of better lives in the North.
Enroute by Radcliffe Bailey, 2000.
Ancestral Legacy
Theaster Gates and Adebunmi Gbadebo incorporate history into their abstract ceramic artworks. In his clay vessels, Gates explores objects that hold, contain, and bring people together. Gbadebo uses materials reclaimed from former plantations to commemorate the lives of her ancestors and restore Black subjectivity.
Both draw inspiration from David Drake, an enslaved potter from Edgefield, South Carolina. Drake produced large stoneware jars using local white kaolin clay, water from nearby rivers, and an alkaline glaze finish.
Black Vessel for the Traces of Our Young Lords and Their Spirits – Vessel #5. Theaster Gates, 2022
Theaster Gates’s Black Vessel for the Traces of Our Young Lords and Their Spirits – Vessel #5
Theaster Gates began transforming (or perfecting) his work in clay after his 1997 and 2004 visits to Japan. Since then, his clay pieces have often reflected a dialogue with Japanese art and a connection with historic African American potters. For Gates, working in clay has taught him that “ugly things, muddy things, or things that are unformed are just waiting for the right set of hands.” The title references the Young Lords Organization, a community-based advocacy group in Gates’s native Chicago.
Marie Elizabeth Venning, Fort Hill Plantation, Clemson University. Adebunmi Gbadebo, 2023
Adebunmi Gbadebo’s Marie Elizabeth Venning, Fort Hill Plantation, Clemson University
Adebunmi Gbadebo created Marie Elizabeth Venning after the discovery of more than 500 unmarked graves at Clemson University—formerly Fort Hill Plantation. The graves include those of the enslaved. She crafted this vessel from clay gathered from the True Blue Plantation (where her ancestors were enslaved) and hair from three contemporary African American women. The hair represents the lives of the enslaved and the loss of their bodies to the acidic South Carolina soil. Marie Elizabeth Venning (1842–1916) was born enslaved on the Fort Hill Plantation.
I Sang The Blues Black: 9 Holes
by Adebunmi Gbadebo
I Sang The Blues Black: 9 Holes by Adebunmi Gbadebo, 2019.
Adebunmi Gbadebo’s I Sang The Blues Black was inspired by the history of the True Blue Plantation—a major producer of rice and indigo dye on Pawleys Island and Fort Motte, South Carolina. Gbadebo’s maternal ancestors were enslaved at Fort Motte, and some descendants remain in that area today. Gbadebo incorporates indigo and rice in this series. Each artwork represents a symbolic portrait of one of her enslaved ancestors, connecting her art to the land and its history.
I think all art if it’s worth its salt has got to be universal. But it comes from a local source, you see. . . . It can be as local as all get-out, but it has to have this transcendental quality in order for it to be universal. . . . And this is the important thing.
Hale Woodruff, 1968
Exploring the Environment through Abstraction
Landscape with Kwame Nkrumah by Donald Locke, 1992.
Landscape with Kwame Nkrumah is Donald Locke’s homage to Kwame Nkrumah, the leader of Ghana, the first African nation to break free from British colonialism. The photocopied images include scenes of conflict, sculptures, other works of art, and Nkrumah himself. The artwork connects the African continent, Nkrumah’s Pan-African beliefs, and the African diaspora across Europe and the Americas.
Untitled (Green Landscape) by Hale Woodruff, 1969–70.
Hale Woodruff’s Untitled (Green Landscape)
Hale Woodruff is best known as a figurative and mural painter whose work documented and celebrated the social conditions and achievements of African American life and history. But he was also an active participant in New York’s Abstract Expressionist movement. Throughout his career, Woodruff worked in various styles—figurative, social realism, and abstraction—often combining these approaches, as evidenced in this painting.
Entropia: Construction by Julie A. Mehretu, 2005.
Julie A. Mehretu’s Entropia: Construction
Though best known for her abstract paintings and drawings, Julie Mehretu began producing prints in 2003. Like her works in other media, Entropia: Construction combines the tight architectural grid of a cityscape with wild, explosive forms that suggest tensions between land and urban infrastructure. Some of her pieces are inspired by the topography and activity of major cities such as Cairo, Baghdad, and her native Addis Ababa.