DAN CHRISTENSEN (1942-2007)

Among America’s foremost abstract painters of the late twentieth century, Dan Christensen was devoted over the course of a forty-year career to exploring the limits, range, and possibilities of paint and pictorial form. A leading figure in the Color Field movement, he both carried on the legacy of this approach while stepping outside of it. Drawing from a wide variety of Modernist sources, he used many idiosyncratic techniques, often employing methods more commonly associated with the action painting methods of Abstract Expressionism. The result is a distinctive body of work that is original, surprising, and filled with pleasure in the act of painting. As the art historian Karen Wilkin has noted:

Each of Christensen’s quirky images can be read as a newly minted response to a different set of propositions and challenges (both aesthetic and material), yet at the same time, each announces his ongoing sense of connectedness to past and present. His sizzling paintings bear witness to a continuing conversation with both the history of abstraction and the contemporary vernacular of Christensen’s own day. . . . Christensen’s double allegiance to a dizzyingly broad spectrum of references (however loosely used) gives his art much of its energy and separates it from that of many of his contemporaries.[1]

At the same time, Christensen’s art reveals a continuity transcending his phases and series. He would often return to an earlier mark or theme, pausing to summarize and reconsider it while also synthesizing it into something new. Throughout his art, he was always backtracking and moving forward at the same time. Wilkin states: “Tracking the entire progression of Christensen’s oeuvre, we are aware . . . of an underlying tension between geometric order and passionate improvisation, a struggle, now evident, now veiled between what we might call the Apollonian and the Dionysian.”[2]

In the late 1960s, Christensen’s art was championed by important curators, critics, and art dealers. Many of his important paintings were placed in major museum collections throughout the United States. In 2009, his multifaceted oeuvre was showcased in the traveling retrospective, Dan Christensen: Forty Years of Painting, organized by the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art (Kansas City, Missouri). The exhibition made a convincing case for a heightened appreciation of Christensen’s work and his significant place in postwar abstraction. As noted in a review in Artforum of his Kemper show, the critic Peter Plagens observed “He was . . . gutsy enough to try almost any way—from grids of muted color blocks to ropy, aerobatic, candy-color sprays—of combining those elements to arrive at some sort of visual poetry.”[3]  

Early Years
Daniel James Christensen was born in Cozad, Nebraska, in 1942.[4] There his mother taught art and math and his father was a farmer. His family moved often, and in his teens, in the various cities where they lived, he worked at odd jobs, while listening at night to music, including soul, blues, jazz, and pop. At age sixteen, he left home to attend a commercial art school in Denver. This plan did not work out, but it had a lasting impact on him. In Denver, he had the opportunity to see the work of Jackson Pollock, which stayed in his mind in the years that followed. After high school, he attended Chadron State College in northwest Nebraska. There he studied with William Artis, a ceramist and illustrator. In 1960, he enrolled at the Kansas City Art Institute, where he was classically trained in figural rendering, receiving instruction in drawing from Wilbur Niewald and painting from Robert Barnes. Valedictorian of his class, he graduated with his B.F.A. in 1964.

After being awarded a fellowship to Indiana University, Christensen worked there as a graduate assistant, while continuing to focus on the figure, which he treated abstractly. In the summer of 1965, he moved to New York. There he found himself at the center of a dynamic, collaborative art scene. Abandoning figural art, he joined other young artists in challenging the status quo and seeking to change the course of art. His friends included Walter Darby Bannard, Jack Bush, Robert Goodnough, Brice Marden, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Larry Poons, Peter Reginato, Michael Steiner, Peter Young, and Larry Zox. Gathering in each other’s studios, congregating at Max’s Kansas City—the newly opened bar on Park Avenue South that was the nucleus of the New York avant-garde—and visiting galleries, the artists encouraged and built on each other’s discoveries. It was within this context that Christensen began to use the spray gun in his art. This was an era before the airbrush became a popular artist’s tool, and he purchased his spray gun from an auto-body retouch shop. He was among the first artists to explore this medium, setting precedents for others who would use it subsequently, including the graffiti painters of the 1980s. His work came to epitomize the Color Field movement, which freed art from representation, subjectivity, mass, and volume to explore the purity of color and materials and their consequences.

Grids and Bars, 1965–1967
Christensen’s first series were Minimalist works consisting of rectangular bars in ordered yet irregular patterns. He started these images with studies on graph paper, which he then transferred to canvas, creating them with acrylic paints in blacks and muted colors. In their notational qualities, the works relate to sheet music, while their syncopations and recurring rhythms are visualizations of jazz, which was ongoing in the background in Christensen’s studio. These works initiated the patterning and repetition that he would use later in his circles and calligraphic marks. However, feeling restricted by his limited palette, he moved on in order to explore color.

Early Sprays, 1967–1968
Although a few artists had used the spray gun before Christensen adopted it—most notably Olitski who created his first sprays in 1965—Christensen delved more fully into the medium than his predecessors, seeking to explore the full range of its capacities for painting. His initial sprays continued from the Minimalism of the Grids and Bars. He controlled his paint in grids and ordered patterns with circles and loops that were responsive to the canvas edge. He compared their regularity and continuity to the infinity sign.[5] Inspired by visiting the Pollock retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1968, he changed course, creating his “spray loop” or “ribbon” series. This enabled him to move the spray more freely. These works consisted of free-flowing, spiraling designs, in which he left the cropping of his images to the end—the “editing” part of his process. Their vibrant looping lines and heightened color produced a psychedelic intensity evoking the culture of the late 1960s, a time of flower children, anti-Vietnam war protests, and the questioning of old rules.[6] A number of critics described these works as lyrical and viewed Christensen as a “romantic minimalist,” associating his sprays with the romantic tradition in art. 

Christensen’s early sprays struck a nerve in the New York art world, receiving a remarkable amount of attention. Between 1967 and 1970, they were not only featured in several solo exhibitions in New York galleries, but were also included in annuals at the Whitney, Guggenheim, and Corcoran museums. In 1968, they were on view in a group show at Galerie Ricke, Kassel, Germany, along with works by Noland and Morris Louis. In the following year, he was given a solo exhibition at Galerie Ricke, received a Theodoran Award from the Guggenheim Museum, and was represented in important exhibitions at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, Connecticut, the Saint Louis Art Museum, and Washington University Gallery of Art, St. Louis. In addition to coverage in many art journals, Christensen’s sprays were featured in articles in Newsweek, in 1968 and 1970, and Time, in 1969.[7] 

Plaids, Slabs, and Early Scrapes, 1969–1975
Eventually Christensen felt he had explored everything possible with the sprays. In a desire to “get more paint down on the canvas,” he turned to the use of window-washing squeegees, a tool traditionally employed in silk-screening, but which he used in a unique way to pull his paint across his canvas surfaces. Laying unstretched canvas on a wooden floor covered with carpet in order to absorb the paint, Christensen used rollers and squeegees to roll out large areas of enamel and acrylic in series known as his “plaids.”[8] Instead of masking out parts that would have created mechanical stripes, he kept his lines wavy and imprecise, a quality that becomes subtly apparent in observing his deceptively simple canvases in which the geometry is not rigid or overly controlled. Although Christensen would have composition in mind while working, the painting’s arrangement would emerge with cropping, in what he termed “the drawing phase.” Reflecting the ongoing dialogue in which artists of the time shared and played off of each other’s ideas, Christensen’s method belonged to the “paint and crop” technique championed by the noted art critic Clement Greenberg and used also at the time by such artists as Poons and Olitski. Christensen’s plaids introduced a new approach to geometric configuration, providing an antidote to the systemic methods of Minimalism.

Christensen stopped creating plaids when he had achieved his goals and in response to the opportunities afforded by the gels and mediums that were being invented in the 1970s, which could thicken and extend paints, producing impasto effects that did not require expensive pigments. He used window-washing squeegees for his slab and scraped paintings, but created more varied, textural, painterly surfaces, letting the paint pool and manipulating it with rake-like tools, including trowels and scraping knives.

Calligraphic Stains, 1976–1988
In the calligraphic stains, created from 1976 through 1988, Christensen continued to experiment with new pigments and solvents.[9] By combining acrylics that could be thinned to the consistency of watercolor washes with “tension breakers,” he was able to disperse paints readily so that they could be absorbed into his canvases. Moving the paint with sticks, brushes, and turkey basters, he produced calligraphic “drawings.” He finished his works by pouring paint around this framework and manipulating it further. The stains straddled the line between the flatness of Color Field painting and the gestural action of Abstract Expressionism. In 1979, the poet and critic John Ashbery described Christensen’s color as “smoldering and sensuous,” and stated that had extended “the language of modernism in a more traditional and serious way.”[10]

Sprays and Orbs, 1988–1994
When Christensen returned to the spray gun in the late 1980s, he looked back to his early sprays of the 1960s, re-exploring the union of color and form, line and paint. Here, instead of looping the spray across the surface, he set spherical shapes in auras of light. Rendered with iridescent paint, the works consist of “spray portraits,” in which concentric circles are cropped at the edges of work, and single or multiple spots against shimmering fields of light. While formally innovative, the new sprays tap into many traditions in art of the cosmological and celestial. While evoking atomic energy and molecular matter, their blazing orbs of light evoke the Pythagorean harmony of the spheres.

Late Calligraphic Stains, Rhymers, and Last Loops
In the first few years of the new millennium, Christensen revisited and reinvented earlier stylistic dimensions of his art. In late calligraphic stains he used the drizzle and dragged marks of his Pollock-influenced art of the late 1960s, but with more openness and pleasure in the spirit of the automatic works of Miró. The lines loop and re-loop with exuberance but also with calligraphic fluidity. In the rhymers in his Rhymewriter series, Christensen updated his first loop sprays with new intense colors and whorls that are energized and free, recalling yet breaking from the carefully contained images he created when he first experimented with the spray gun. His last loops are among his most dynamic, formed by a wielding of the spray with a consummate muscular motion. The onomatopoeia in titles such as Yellathrilla and Reddzilla convey Christensen’s total merging of himself and his art.

Christensen, who began visiting eastern Long Island in the 1960s, lived in East Hampton until his death in 2007. He is survived by his widow, the artist Elaine Grove, and their two sons James and William.

Christensen received a National Endowment Grant in 1968 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1969. His paintings are held in over thirty museum collections, including the Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Denver Art Museum; the Detroit Institute of Arts; the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; the High Museum, Atlanta; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.;  the Indianapolis Museum of Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, Germany ; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City; Princeton Art Museum, New Jersey; the Saint Louis Art Museum; the Seattle Art Museum; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; the Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne, Germany; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and many others. Berry Campbell Gallery in Chelsea represents Christensen’s estate.

Lisa N. Peters, Ph.D.
© Berry Campbell

[1] Karen Wilkin, “Dan Christensen: Continuity and Change,” in Dan Christensen: Forty Years of Painting, exh. cat. (Kansas City: Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art), p. 33.
[2] Wilkin, p. 35.
[3]  Peter Plagens, “Dan Christensen: Forty Years of Painting,” Artforum (May 2009).
[4] On Christensen’s early life, see Sharon L. Kennedy, “Charting His Course: Dan Christensen’s Early Years,” in Dan Christensen: Forty Years of Painting, pp. 10–16.
[5] Christensen, interview by David Reed, in Sammlung Rolf Ricke: Ein Zeitdokument/Rolf Ricke Collection—A Document of the Times, ed. Christiane Meyer-Stoll (Ostfilden, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2008), p. 244.
[6] As noted in “An Interview with Elaine Grove: Dan Christensens Plaids and Their Context,” in Dan Christensen: The Plaid Paintings, exh. cat. (New York: Spanierman Modern, 2009), p. 6.
[7]  Douglas Davis, “The New Color Painters,” Newsweek, May 4, 1970, p. 84; Larry Aldrich, “Young Lyrical Painters,” Art in America (November–December 1969), pp. 104–13.
[8]  See Dan Christensen: The Plaid Paintings.
[9] See Lisa N. Peters, Dan Christensen: The Stain Paintings, exh. cat. (New York: Spanierman Modern, 2011).
[10] John Ashbery, “Out of Left Field,” New York Magazine, April 2, 1979, p. 68.

© Berry Campbell

CV

1942, born Cozad, Nebraska
2007, died East Hampton, New York
1964, BFA, Kansas City Art Institute, Missouri

SOLO EXHIBITIONS
Noah Goldowsky Gallery, New York, 1967.
Galerie Ricke, Cologne, Germany, 1968.
Noah Goldowsky Gallery, New York, 1968.
Andre Emmerich Gallery, New York, 1969.
Nicholas Wilder Gallery, Los Angeles, 1970.
Andre Emmerich Gallery, New York, 1971.
Galerie Ricke, Cologne, Germany, 1971.
Andre Emmerich Gallery, New York, 1972.
Nicholas Wilder Gallery, Los Angeles, 1972.
Edmonton Art Gallery, Edmonton, Alberta, 1973.
Andre Emmerich Gallery, New York, 1974.
Greenberg Gallery, St. Louis, Missouri, 1974.
Jared Sable Gallery, Toronto, Ontario, 1974.
Rothman’s Art Gallery, Stratford, Ontario, 1974.
Andre Emmerich Gallery, New York, 1975.
Andre Emmerich Gallery, New York, 1976.
Douglas Drake Gallery, New York, Kansas City, Missouri, 1976.
Watson/ de Nagy Gallery, Houston, 1976.
B.R. Kornblatt Gallery, Baltimore, Maryland, 1977.
Douglas Drake Gallery, Kansas City, Missouri, 1978.
Gloria Luria Gallery, Miami, 1978.
Meredith Long Contemporary Gallery, New York, 1978.
Meredith Long Gallery, Houston, 1978.
Douglas Drake Gallery, Kansas City, Missouri, 1979.
Meredith Long Gallery, Houston, 1979.
Meredith Long Gallery, New York, 1979.
Douglas Drake Gallery, Kansas City, Missouri, 1980.
Meredith Long Gallery, Houston, 1980.
Meredith Long Gallery, New York, 1980.
University of Nebraska, Omaha, 1980.
Douglas Drake Gallery, Kansas City, Missouri, 1981.
Gallery 700, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 1981.
Gloria Luria Gallery, Miami, 1981.
Harcus Krakow Gallery, Boston, 1981.
Meredith Long and Company, Houston, 1981.
Salander-O’Reilly Galleries, Inc., New York, 1981.
Douglas Drake Gallery, Kansas City, Missouri, 1982.
Ivory/Klimpton Gallery, San Francisco, 1982.
Salander-O’Reilly Galleries, Inc, New York, 1982.
Carson-Sapiro Gallery, Denver, Colorado, 1983.
Lincoln Center Gallery, New York, 1983.
Salander-O’Reilly Galleries, Inc, New York, 1983.
Bank of America, San Francisco, 1984.
Douglas Drake Gallery, Kansas City, Missouri, 1984.
Edwin A. Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita State University, Kansas, 1984.
Il Punto Blue, Southampton, New York, 1984.
Lincoln Center Gallery, New York, 1984.
Meredith Long and Company, Houston, 1984.
Salander-O’Reilly Galleries, Inc, New York, 1984.
Douglas Drake Gallery, New York, 1987.
Lincoln Center Gallery, New York, 1987.
Douglas Drake Gallery, New York, 1988.
Vered Gallery, East Hampton, New York, 1989.
Vered Gallery, East Hampton, New York, 1990.
Douglas Drake Gallery, Kansas City, Missouri, 1991.
Salander-O’Reilly Galleries, Inc, New York, 1991.
ACA Galleries, New York, 1993.
Eva Cohon, Gallery, Chicago, 1993.
Vered Gallery, East Hampton, New York, 1993.
Douglas Drake Gallery, Kansas City, Missouri, 1994.
ISM, Seoul, Korea, 1994.
CS. Schulte Galleries, Millburn, New Jersey, 1995.
Jaffe Baker Blau, Boca Raton, Florida, 1995.
CS. Schulte Galleries, Millburn, New Jersey, 1998.
Dorothy Blau Gallery, Bay Harbor Islands, Florida, 1998.
Salander-O’Reilly Gallery, New York, Paintings from the 90s, 1999.
CS. Schulte Galleries, Millburn, New Jersey, 2000.
Salander-O’Reilly Gallery, New York, 2000.
Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio, Dan Christensen: A Forty Year Survey, 2001 – 02.
Parrish Museum of Art, Water Mill, New York, Selections from a Retrospective, 2002 – 03.
Lizan-Tops Gallery, East Hampton, New York, 2003.
Ed Thorp Gallery, New York, Re/View, 2004.
Elaine Baker Gallery, 9 Paintings at Lizan-Tops Gallery, 2004.
Skot Foreman Gallery, Atlanta, Georgia, A Survey of Paintings and Graphics, 2005.
Pamela Williams Gallery, Amagansett, New York, 2006.
LewAllen Contemporary Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Dan Christensen: PURE PAINTING, A Forty-Year Retrospective (1966-2006), 2007.
LewAllen Contemporary Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Lyrical Spray Canvases, 1960s to the 1990s, 2009.
Spanierman Modern, New York, The Plaid Paintings, 2009.
Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri (traveled to Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, Nebraska), Dan Christensen: Forty Years of Painting, 2009 - 10.
LewAllen Contemporary Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Bars and Scrapes, 2011.
Spanierman Modern, New York, The Stain Paintings, 2011.
Spanierman Modern, New York, The Early Sprays, 1967 – 1969, 2012-13.
LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, New Mexico, The Orb Paintings: 1992-1996, 2013.
Spanierman Modern, New York, Sprays and Stains, 2014.
Berry Campbell, New York, Retrospective, 2015.
LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Atmospherics, 2015.
Berry Campbell, New York, Late Calligraphic Stains, 2017.
Berry Campbell, New York, Early Spray Paintings (1967-1969), 2019.

GROUP EXHIBITIONS
Bianchini Gallery, New York, 1966.
Noah Goldowksy Gallery, New York, 1966.
Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio, 1966.
Galerie Zwirner, Cologne, Germany, 1967.
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Annual, 1967.
Galerie Ricke, Kassel, Germany, 1968.
Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, 1968.
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Recent Acquisitions, 1968.
The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, Connecticut, Highlights of the 1968 – 69 Art Season, 1969.
The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Biennial, 1969.x
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Theodorian Award Group, 1969.
Washington University Gallery of Art, St. Louis, Missouri, Here and Now, 1969.
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Annual, 1969.
Everson Museum, Syracuse, New York (traveled to the University Art Gallery, Albany, New York), Contemporary American Painting & Sculpture from the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Eugene M. Schwartz, 1969 – 70.
The Katonah Gallery, New York, Color, 1970.
Locksley Shea Gallery, Minneapolis, Minnesota, Young Artists/New York, 1970.
Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, New York (traveled to Dayton Art Institute, Ohio), Color and Field, 1890 – 1970, 1970 – 71.
The DeLuxe Theater, Houston, The DeLuxe Show, 1971.
Noah Goldowsky Gallery, New York, Group Show, 1971.
Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan, Art of the Decade 1960 – 70: Paintings from the Collections of Greater Detroit, 1971.
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Lyrical Abstraction, 1971.
Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, New York (traveled to The Baltimore Museum of Art; Milwaukee Art Center, Wisconsin), Six Painters, 1971 – 72.
Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Abstract Painting in the 70s, 1972.
Sales & Rental Gallery, Nelson Gallery, Kansas City, Missouri, Color-Field Painting to Post-Color Abstraction, 1972.
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Annual, 1972.
The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, Connecticut, 1973.
Moore College of Art, Philadelphia, Paintings, 1973.
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Biennial, 1973.
Douglas Drake Gallery, Kansas City, Missouri, Contemporary American Colorfield Painting, 1974.
Greenberg Gallery, St. Louis, Missouri, 1974.
B.R. Kornblatt Gallery, Baltimore, Maryland, 1975.
Grey Art Gallery, New York University, New York, Report from SoHo, 1975.
Museo Bellas Artes, Caracas, Venezuela, El Lenguaje del Color, 1975.
Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Freedom in Art, 1976.
Douglas Drake Gallery, Kansas City, Missouri, Bannard, Christensen, Olitski, Poons, 1977.
Douglas Drake Gallery, Kansas City, Missouri, Works on Paper, 1977.
Edmonton Art Gallery, Alberta, New Abstract Art, 1977.
The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, Connecticut, Collector’s Choice, 1977.
Brooks Memorial Art Gallery, Memphis, Tennessee, American Masters of the Sixties and Seventies, 1978.
University of Nebraska, Omaha, Expressionism in the 70s, 1978.
Zolla/Liberman Gallery, Chicago, Intrigue in Form and Structure, 1979.
Carson-Shapiro Gallery, Denver, Colorado, Dan Christensen/Carl Gliko – Recent Paintings, 1980.
Salander-O’Reilly Galleries, Inc, New York, Works on Paper, 1980.
Harcus Krakow Gallery, Boston, Works on Paper, 1981.
Museum of Modern Art, New York (traveled to The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, La Jolla, California), New Work on Paper I, 1981.
Nina Freudenheim Gallery, Buffalo, New York, 1981.
Oil & Steel Gallery, New York, 1981.
Sarah Y. Rentschler Gallery, Bridgehampton, New York, 1981.
Sheldon Art Gallery, Lincoln, Nebraska, Kansas City, 1981.
University of Missouri, Kansas City, Dealer’s Choice, 1981.
Douglas Drake Gallery, Kansas City, Missouri, 1982.
Kenneth G. Heffel Fine Art, Inc, Vancouver, British Columbia, 1982.
Martha White Gallery, Louisville, Kentucky, Color II, 1982.
Meredith Long and Company, Houston, Americans on Paper, 1982.
Oil & Steel Gallery, New York, Contemporary Paintings and Sculpture II: 1950 – 1981, 1982.
The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio, 46^th Annual National Midyear Show, 1982.
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Miro in America, 1982.
University of Oklahoma, Norman, Points of View: 1982, 1982.
Adam L. Gimbel Gallery, New York, 1983.
Oil & Steel Gallery, New York, 1983.
P.S. 1, Brooklyn, Special Projects (curated by Dick Bellamy), 1983.
Sarah Y. Rentschler Gallery, Bridgehampton, New York, 1983.
Baruch College Gallery, New York, 1985.
Douglas Drake Gallery, Kansas City, Missouri, 1985.
Museum of Modern Art, New York, Philip Johnson: Selected Gifts, 1985.
Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, Missouri, 1985.
Spencer Museum, Lawrence, Kansas, Pop Op Plus, 1985.
Vered Gallery, East Hampton, New York, 1985.
Douglas Drake Gallery, Kansas City, Missouri, 1986.
Guild Hall, East Hampton, New York, Artist of the Region Invitational, 1986.
Douglas Drake Gallery, New York, Opening Exhibition, 1987.
Graham Modern Gallery, New York, Gone Fishing, 1987.
Robert Kidd Gallery, Birmingham, Michigan, 1987.
Soghor, Leonard & Associates, New York, 1987.
Vered Art Gallery, East Hampton, New York, 10^th Season Gala Opening, 1987.
Galerie Rolf Ricke, Cologne, West Germany, Farbfeldmalerei New York 1968, 1988.
Vered Art Gallery, East Hampton, New York, 1988.
Deson-Saunders Gallery, Chicago, 1989.
Douglas Drake Gallery, New York, 1989.
Gloria Luria Gallery, Miami, 1989.
Meredith Long & Company, Houston, 1989.
Daniel Newburgh Gallery, New York, Before the Field: Paintings from the 60s, 1990.
Salander-O’Reilly Galleries, New York, 1990.
Salander-O’Reilly Galleries, Berlin, Germany, Berlin: Inaugural Exhibition, 1991.
Salander-O’Reilly Galleries, Beverly Hills, California, 1991.
Springs Art Gallery, East Hampton, New York, Present Tense, 1991.
CS. Schulte Galleries, South Orange, New Jersey, Celebrating Formalism, 1992.
Galerie Gerald Piltzer, Paris, Les Heros de la Peinture Americaine: L’exhibition Inaugurate, 1992.
Vered Art Gallery, East Hampton, New York, 1992.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Two Decades of American Painting, 1993.
Carl Solway Gallery, Cincinnati, Ohio, Eight Painters: Abstraction in the Nineties, 1993.
CS. Schulte Galleries, Millburn, New Jersey, Important Works by Modern Masters, 1993.
Douglas Drake Gallery, New York, Small Paintings: Big Issues, 1993.
Douglas Drake Gallery, New York, 1994.
Grey Art Gallery, New York University, New York, 1969: A Year Reconsidered, 1994.
Nicholas Alexander Gallery, New York, Seven Painters, 1995.
Gershwin Gallery, New York, New York – Abstract, 1997.
OK Harris Gallery, New York, The Fanelli Show, 1998.
P.S. 1, New York, Richard Bellamy Memorial Show, 1998.
Salander-O’Reilly Gallery, New York, Abstraction II, 1998.
Side Show Gallery, Brooklyn, Regatta 98, 1998.
Gershwin Hotel, New York, The Art of Absolute Desire, 1999.
Portland Art Museum, Oregon, Clement Greenberg: A Critic’s Collection, 2000.
Lizan-Tops Gallery, East Hampton, New York, 2002.
Sideshow Gallery, Brooklyn, 2002.
Lizan-Tops Gallery, East Hampton, New York, 2003.
Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York, 2003.
Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, Lincoln, Nebraska, Big Canvas – Paintings from the Permanent Collection, 2003.
Sideshow Gallery, Brooklyn, 2003.
Guild Hall, East Hampton, New York, On the Books: Sculptural Collaboration, 2004.
Lizan-Tops Gallery, East Hampton, New York, Black and White, 2004.
Joan T. Washburn Gallery and Franklin Parrasch Gallery, New York, Wilder – A Tribute to Nicholas Wilder Gallery, 2005.
Pamela Wilson Gallery, East Hampton, New York, 2005.
Remy Toldedo Gallery, New York, Then and Now, 2005.
Sideshow Gallery, Brooklyn, Works on Paper, 2005.
Spanierman Gallery, East Hampton, New York, Art and the Garden: Post-War and Contemporary Paintings of the Garden, 2005.
Spanierman Gallery, East Hampton, New York, Artists and Nature on Eastern Long Island: 1940s to the Present, 2005.
Leif Hope’s Restaurant, East Hampton, New York, Group Show, 2006.
Spanierman Gallery, East Hampton, New York, Long Island Abstraction 1950s to Present, 2006.
Spanierman Modern, New York, On Paper – From Sketch to Showpiece, 2006.
Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, North Carolina (traveled to National Academy Museum, New York; Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe, Karlsruhe), High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting 1967 – 1975, 2006 - 08.
Elaine Baker Gallery, Boca Raton, Florida, 2008.
Hausler Contemporary, Munich, Loveparade 2, 2008.
Spanierman Modern, New York, Gallery Selections, 2008.
LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Hand to Paper: The Quiet Sublimity of Works on Paper, 2009.
Spanierman Gallery, East Hampton, New York, Gallery Selections, 2009.
Elaine Baker Gallery, Boca Raton, Florida, 2010.
LewAllen Galleries, Scottsdale, Arizona, New York Color Field, 2013.
Berry Campbell Gallery, New York, 2014.
Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York, 2014-2016.
Baker Sponder Gallery, Boca Raton, Florida, 25 Years 25 Artists, 2015.
Berry Campbell, New York, Summer Selections, 2015.
Berry Campbell Gallery, New York, Summer Selections, 2016.
Berry Campbell, New York, Summer Selections, 2017.
Sheldon Art Museum, Lincoln, Nebraska, nonObjectives, 2017.
MM Fine Art, Southampton, Long Island Painters, A Survey, 2018.
Cavalier Galleries, New York, 57^th Street: America’s Artistic Legacy, Part I, 2018.
Berry Campbell, New York, Summer Selections, 2018.
Columbia Museum of Art, South Carolina, A Life With Art | Gifts from Dwight and Sue Emanuelson, 2019.
American Fine Arts Society Gallery, New York, New York—Centric, [curated by James Little], 2019.
Berry Campbell, New York, Summer Selections, 2019.
Parker Gallery, Los Angeles, The De Luxe Show, 2021.
Karma Gallery, New York, The De Luxe Show, 2021.
Dayton Art Institute, Ohio, Changing Times: Art of the 1960s, 2021.
Sheldon Art Museum, Lincoln, Nebraska, Point of Departure: Abstraction 1958-Present, 2021.
Stamford Museum & Nature Center, Connecticut, Discovering Color: Two Decades of Abstraction, 2022.
Ashawagh Hall, East Hampton, New York, Community, 2022. (Organized by Berry Campbell)
Kinosaito, Verplanck, New York, Kikuo Saito and Friends: New York City Downtown and Beyond, 1970s and 1980s, 2023.
VSOP Projects, Greenport, New York, Rainbow Country, 2023.
Nassau County Museum of Art, Roslyn, New York, Seeing Red: From Renoir to Warhol, 2024.

SELECTED COLLECTIONS
Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts
Albrecht Art Gallery, St. Joseph, Missouri
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York
Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin, Ohio
Art Institute of Chicago
Blanton Museum of American Art, University of Texas at Austin
Boca Raton Museum of Art, Florida
The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio
Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio
Dayton Art Institute, Ohio
Denver Museum of Art, Colorado
Detroit Institute of Arts Museum
Edmonton Art Gallery, Alberta, Canada
Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York
The Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, California
Greenville County Museum of Art, South Carolina
Guild Hall Museum, East Hampton, New York
Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York
High Museum, Atlanta, Georgia
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC
Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana
Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithica, New York
Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri
Ludwig Collection in the Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne, Germany
Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, Massachusetts
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University, St. Louis
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas
Mulvane Art Museum, Washburn University, Topeka, Kansas
Museum für  Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, Germany
Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale, Florida
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Museum of Nebraska Art, Kearney
Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina
Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, Missouri
Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas
Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, New York
Nickle Arts Museum, University of Calgary, Canada
Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, New York
Portland Art Museum, Oregon
Princeton University Art Museum, New Jersey
Robert Rowan Collection, Pasadena, California
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Santa Barbara Museum of Art, California
Seattle Art Museum, Washington
Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, Lincoln, Nebraska
Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
St. Louis Art Museum, Missouri
Telfair Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia
Toledo Museum, Ohio
Vero Beach Museum of Art, Florida
The Washington Art Consortium, Wastern Washington University, Bellingham
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Wichita Art Museum, Kansas

 
AWARDS
1968  National Endowment Grant
1969  Guggenheim Fellowship Theodoran Award
1986  Gottlieb Foundation Grant
1992  Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant