Sept. - Oct. 1969
Four currents in contemporary art are dealt with here - to varying degrees of success. The mood is one of up-to-the-minute immediacy, the scale is monumental and the impact varies from work to work.
Sam Gilliam sends bars of color fleeting across surfaces of flimsy irridescence. These are lyrically activated seas of color space. Steve Kelsey plays optical games with spheres of color. They dart across his canvases in horizontal spurts of energy or obscure themselves serially in cloudy spatial mists.
Heaps of chain strewn around the gallery are attributable to Melvin Edwards. The sculptor also shows a sinister two-part pyramid of barbed wire and a cylindrical, suspended construction enigmatically entitled Remember.
Most vigorous to this viewer were the paintings of William T. Williams. In Red's Dream space is clenched between a vivid criss-cross of stridently colored bars. The tautly interwoven flat shapes seem to tensely and deliberately congeal and lock in space. The mood is one of vitality compressed and controlled - violence checked strikingly designed. [Studio Museum in Harlem. June 1 - 13]
