Modern Heroics: African American Expressionism at The Newark Museum of Art

This exhibition showcases The Newark Museum of Art’s rich holdings of modern and contemporary African American art. Building on the Museum’s early and sustained history of collecting and exhibiting art by living African
American artists, it includes paintings, and sculpture works by both studio trained and self-taught artists, exploring common strategies and themes that reflect pioneering and inventive studio practice across generations and
diverse cultural influences. Encompassing both abstract and figurative styles, Modern Heroics highlights the continued vitality of expressionist strategies—strong and emotionally direct narrative subjects, the

Modern Heroics investigates expressionism as an important tendency in modern and contemporary art, one that African American artists have embraced with creativity and invention. Rarely exhibited paintings by Norman Lewis, Purvis Young, Thornton Dial, and Emma Amos are presented alongside works by Bob Thompson, Romare Bearden, Mickalene Thomas, Sam Gilliam, and Shinique Smith. With an emphasis on storytelling and the artists’ direct physical engagement with materials, this show explores expressionism beyond the canonical movements of Abstract Expressionism—which dominated American Art in the mid-twentieth century—and Neo Expressionism in the 1980s