McArthur Binion’s love for art started by chance. As a delivery boy, he was asked to drop a package at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

”This was the first time I’d ever been in a museum. I went in, and that experience changed my life.”

Binion started drawing classes and worked uninterruptedly for two years.

”At one point, I slowly decided, okay, cool, I’ll bring elements of my personal life and place them underneath my work. And that became the undercurrent of the work because, for me, abstraction comes from someplace. And so I needed to find my place.”

McArthur Binion (b. 1946 in Macon, Mississippi) lives and works in Chicago, Illinois. He has gained recognition as an artist, writer and teacher. He became the first African American to obtain a master’s degree in fine arts in painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art (1973) and also holds a degree in creative writing. These dual passions – words and images – define his life and work today. In addition, music has had a significant influence on his practice. Binion’s works have been prominently included in the 57th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, VIVA ARTE VIVA, curated by Christine Macel.

McArthur Binion combines collage, drawing, and painting to create autobiographical abstractions of painted minimalist patterns over an “under surface” of personal documents and photographs. From photocopies of his birth certificate and pages from his address book to pictures from his childhood and found photographs of lynchings, the poignant and charged images that constitute the tiled base of his work are concealed and abstracted by grids of oil stick. The complexly layered works, from a distance, appear to be monochromatic minimalist abstractions that have led many to compare his work to that of Jasper Johns, Robert Ryman, or Brice Marden. However, while his contemporaries focused more on materiality, abstraction, and, in some cases, the social and political climate of the time, Binion’s works are intensely personal and deeply dedicated to the rigorous process of making a painting. Upon closer inspection, these monochromatic abstractions come into focus: the perfect grid becomes a series of imperfect, laboriously hand-drawn lines, behind which emerge intimate details of Binion’s identity and personal history. Binion’s gridded compositions impose rational order to the layers of personal history, allowing only fragments of information from his birth certificate to be read or details of his mother’s face to be identified—but never enough to be immediately legible. Having begun his career as a writer, Binion is highly influenced by language and music, as can be seen in his titles and the ways in which he layers information to be “read” rather than seen. The tension between the grid and the artist’s visible gestures is not unlike that of jazz music, which merges improvisation with the order of a musical composition.

Binion received his B.F.A. from Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, in 1971 and his M.F.A. from the Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI, in 1973. Select recent solo exhibitions of his work have been organised at Library Street Collective, Detroit, MI (2023); Museo Novecento, Florence, Italy (2020); the Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MI (2018); Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX (2012); and the University of Maryland University College Gallery, Adelphi, MD (2010).

Binion’s work is featured in several public and private collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, DC; Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills; Detroit Institute of Art, Detroit; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Kemper Museum of Art, Kansas City; Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson; New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans; Strauss Family Collection, Santa Fe; Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo.

McArthur Binion was interviewed by Anne Pontegnie in January 2025. The interview took place at Gallery Xavier Hufkens in Brussels, Belgium.

Camera: Yves Duytschaever

Edit: Signe Boe Pedersen

Producer: Marc-Christoph Wagner

Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2025

Louisiana Channel is supported by Den A.P. Møllerske Støttefond, Ny Carlsbergfondet and C.L. Davids Fond og Samling.