ART EXHIBITION | JOSEPH HOLSTON: BLACK LIVES, A RETROSPECTIVE

Joseph Holston’s visual chronicle of African American life traverses terror, triumphs, and a remarkable combination of the two, the Underground Railroad. Amy Kaslow Gallery proudly presents “Joseph Holston: Black Lives, A Retrospective,” the distillation of the artist's past half century of creativity. His finest screenprints, etchings, and oils on canvas show simple, daily doings of men, women and children.
Using rich color combinations and tone on tone pigment, Holston’s figures pop from the surface. Some subjects are playful; others poignant; all are alluring. A pig-tailed girl in a sundress; a standing nude in a swirl of muted greens; a pianist at the keyboard are among Holston's abstract, almost cubist figures fitted with exaggerated arms and cocked heads. His brush also pivots toward realism, with the striking “Miz Emily” leaning on a walking stick in the wide open field and a probing face of poverty called "Black Boy" that was commissioned from a New York Times photograph and made its way back to the painter after its owner passed.
Holston’s growth as an artist dovetails with the nation’s agitation over civil rights. Part of the Great Migration thrusting rural southern Blacks to northern urban areas, his parents came from Tennessee and settled on Hawkins Lane, a rare community that former slaves started at the turn of the twentieth century. In metropolitan Washington DC’s Chevy Chase, Maryland, where covenants banned Blacks, Catholics, and Jews from living among whites, the still unpaved and now historically protected Hawkins Lane is where Holston grew up and where he loved to wander the woods. As a young boy, he traveled to Rockville for the closest all Black school until formal segregation ended in 1956; indeed the Holston children were in the first classes to racially integrate the region's schools. From DC’s Chamberlain Vocational High School, Joseph Holston took his advertising art skills to the Hecht Co. on F Street and to Sears & Roebuck, the nation's most popular illustrated catalogue. He sealed his commitment as an artist following study in New Mexico with American painter Richard Goetz.
Fast forward fifty years. With commanding pieces installed in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, Baltimore Museum of Art, Library of Congress Fine Print Collection, and other public collections around the United States, Joseph Holston has released these striking works from his personal collection for this important retrospective and sale. We are coordinating this exhibition with the Katzen Arts Center at American University, now hosting “Joseph Holston: Call and Response.”

Amy Kaslow Gallery
7920 Norfolk Avenue, Bethesda, Maryland 20814
Open Tuesdays - Sundays 12pm - 6pm.
www.amykaslowgallery.com
Follow us on Instagram to learn about upcoming events: @AmyKaslowGallery

Host or Publisher Amy Kaslow Gallery