The Whitney is ground zero for promoting and preserving the legacy of this iconic genius. Its holdings comprise 3,100 works and represent 10 percent of the entire collection. The first painting purchased was Early Sunday Morning (1930). It is a study in isolated storefronts, a horizontal view where a barber pole and a fire hydrant seem to be stand-ins for an absent populace. It’s as good a place as any to begin our journey to understand Hopper’s obsession with the city.

Dressing for Carnival,(1877) features a Black man being sewn into his Harlequin costume by family members for a traditional African celebration. Is this a promise of better times for these former slaves, which the wall notes suggest? Perhaps. A helpful hint to visitors would be to let the magnitude of the art speak for itself first, then use the history lesson as needed. A good example is The Cotton Pickers (1876).  A pair of hardy muscle-bound women fills the canvas. Their dark forms cut into the foreground, contrasted by the clusters of snowy cotton in their shoulder bags. The image needs no explanation.

Every year the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum features works by students graduating from the Master of Fine Arts program in the College of Communication, Architecture + The Arts at Florida International University. This year, the museum is featuring the work of Dianna Grace and Elizaveta Kolesnikova. Grace is informed by immersive spaces and engages in innovative experimentation with materials. Kolesnikova's current work presents Peruvian cultures and traditions.

His creative process is a mixture of works on paper, acrylic paint, found objects and non-toxic hot glue, which creates a three-dimensional effect on any surface that gives a sense of realism and presence in his artwork. Darrell refers to this optical artistic illusion as “Definism,” which in his opinion portrays various differences in human nature from life’s everyday dramas to humankind’s quest to understanding the self.

Eventually, Murphy started selling his art at local retailers and galleries. By 2010, Murphy stopped looking for employment as an architect and concentrated on his art, working out of a studio in his home that he shares with his architect wife. His “Forgotten Modernism” series -- currently featured at Gallery 30 South – which is an ongoing catalog of modern architecture, focuses not just on the masterpieces of 20th-century California, but also the middle-class dwellings that helped define the spirit of the West Coast.

Washington’s “The Continual Struggle: The American Freedom Movement and the Seeds of Social Change,” is an ongoing body of artwork documenting the Civil Rights Movement and America’s historical struggle against segregation and other forms of race-based injunctions. The 23-piece exhibit vividly recalls a time when people were willing to go into the streets to protest injustice and inequality, according to the artist’s website. “With this exhibit, I hope to elicit the raw emotions from the atrocities African Americans struggled with in years past and bring them to the forefront in today’s cultural lessons,” Washington said.

Paul Luikart is a writer and artist living in Chattanooga. He is fascinated by the role that paint plays and what it can do in the process of making a painting. Characteristic of Luikart’s work is the thick application of paint, sometimes applied with palette knives and brushes, and sometimes with old baseball cards and scrap mat board. Bold colors, long drips down the canvas, and layers upon layers give the paint its own say, so to speak, in his creations.

At once restrained and exuberant, Smith transforms compositions of comestibles, silverware, cutlery and plates into tableaus teeming with resonance and eloquence. “Food is something we all have a relationship with,” said Carrie Mae Smith. “My work examines and re-examines these familiar subjects, experimenting with composition, brushstrokes, light and shadow, inviting the viewer to fill in the blanks of both form and context.” 

While we understand that these works are fastened to the canvas, that the paint is permanent once dried, there is an ever-evolving quality to their surface—one seems to not only respond emotionally, but the paintings themselves react optically to the colors and light around them. Stripped of narrative and void of external references, what remains is pure and intense color. In an age where artists are constantly exploring new mediums and trying to break away from what has already been done, Eric Freeman finds his mode of expression by pushing through the traditional medium of oil on canvas. 

Unlike some who have thrown up their hands in understandable despair, the shootings and the plight of black men in Chicago and elsewhere have sparked Gay's imagination and creativity. She used her skill as a painter to provoke members of the black community to take a new look at what is happening to their sons, not to look away. Gay's paintings also bid the black community to look at black men as human beings and fathers.