Both Sides of the Line
Both Sides of the Line: Carmen Herrera & Leon Polk Smith celebrates the work of two of the most important American artists of the last century, Carmen Herrera (1915-2022) and Leon Polk Smith (1906-1996). In 1964, Carmen Herrera moved one block east of Leon Polk Smith in downtown Manhattan, forming a close friendship with Leon Polk Smith that lasted until Smith's passing in 1996. This is the companion volume to the exhibition that explores the deep and impactful relationship between Herrera and Smith, two artists who warrant further scholarly attention. Herrera and Smith enjoyed a close friendship despite their vastly different personal and artistic backgrounds. Smith, a gay man born to parents who he believed to have partial Cherokee ancestry in what was then Indian Territory (now Oklahoma), considered the flat, open plains of his childhood surroundings to be his formative aesthetic experience; Herrera, a married émigré from Havana, Cuba, who only became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1971, frequently cited her studies in architecture as the foundation of her process. Yet each recognized in the other an artist who was challenging the prevailing aesthetic trends of contemporary art while enduring the prejudices of an often sexist, homophobic, racist, and xenophobic art world. Herrera was frequently pigeonholed by identity-based frameworks which presented her work as that of a Cuban or female painter, while Smith's public identity was more ambiguous and a claim for Indigenous heritage was only made at the end of his career. Through a careful selection of works, this project examines the ways in which their approaches to chromatic abstraction differed from and reverberated with one another and more broadly, alongside the enormous contributions each made to art in America. Essays by Dana Miller, John Yau, and Nadiah Rivera Fellah consider the broader historical context of their work, take a closer look at hard-edged abstraction and the artists' identities, and position both artists' work in the context of the collecting histories of American art museums.