ART CITIES: N.York-McArthur Binion

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.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Lehmann Maupin Gallery Archive

In an art world still grappling with the boundaries of abstraction and identity, McArthur Binion stands as a singular figure. “Stuttering: Standing:Still II”, his new exhibition offers one of the most compelling late-career surveys in recent memory. It is Binion’s first solo presentation in the city in five years, and a moment of critical reevaluation that aligns with wider institutional attention to his work.

Spanning more than five decades, Binion’s practice has persistently defied easy categorization. Though rooted in the formal legacies of minimalism and postwar abstraction, his paintings resist the narrative that these movements are neutral, universal, or detached. Instead, Binion asserts that Black lived experience, memory, and autobiography are central to modernism’s evolving language. “Stuttering: Standing:Still II”marks that insistence with both historical depth and formal innovation.

Long celebrated for his abstract, grid-based works, Binion has developed a visual language that weaves minimalist geometry with intensely personal history. Each painting emerges from a structured interplay of repetition, rhythm, and meticulous mark-making—qualities that recall formalist concerns but also resonate with lived experience and embodied time. Within these fields of interlocking lines and colored strokes, the artist embeds photocopied personal documents—birth certificates, address books, pages from encyclopedias and jazz records—creating what he has termed the “under-conscious” of the work.

Unlike the cool austerity often associated with minimalism, Binion’s painted grids function like palimpsests: rigorous yet intimate, repetitive yet responsive. The visible marks carry the cadence of a lifetime of making, similar to the improvisational structure of jazz—Binion himself describes his introduction to abstraction through the music and spirit of bebop, rather than formal art history.

“Stuttering:Standing:Still II” arrives in the wake of a significant run of institutional engagements: most recently “Notes on Form (Intimate Structures)” at Georgetown University (2025), a survey that foregrounded Binion’s personal lexicon of abstraction; and “Minimal” at the Dia Art Foundation, which traced the diversity of minimalist art from the 1960s to the present.

These exhibitions underscore a broader disciplinary shift: scholars and curators are increasingly situating Binion not at the margins of modernism, but at its core. His work reorients minimalism away from narratives of objectivity and neutrality toward a practice lived through embodied history, cultural memory, and collective experience.

Among the highlights of “Stuttering:Standing:Still II” are several new works from Binion’s “Under:Ground” series, which extend his long-standing interest in shaped canvases. These pieces continue to layer personal texts beneath formal surfaces while evoking themes of grounding, lineage, and memory. Binion’s early life—born in Mississippi in 1946 and raised on a farm—remains a conceptual cornerstone of his work. As in earlier bodies of work, everyday symbols like a list of root vegetables he wrote in the 1980s become metaphors for persistence, origin, and buried knowledge.

Complementing this material is the debut of new works from Binion’s “Self:Portrait” series, which mark a striking evolution in his practice. Where earlier works often concealed identity beneath dense grids, these paintings place biographical markers—personal documents and texts—on the surface. Freed from the exclusive restraint of his muted palette, these newer compositions embrace vivid color and heightened energy, asserting presence without compromising the formal rigor that defines his work.

Binion’s work insists that abstraction need not be divorced from autobiography—that the personal can be instrumental to formal innovation. His paintings operate simultaneously as abstract compositions and personal archives, challenging historic notions of minimalism as purely impersonal or detached. In doing so, Binion stakes a distinct claim within the canon: rigorous, thoughtful, deeply human.

Photo: McArthur Binion, dna:study, 2025, Ink, paintstick and paper on board, 48 x 40 x 2 1/4 inches, 121.9 x 101.6 x 5.7 cm, © McArthur Binion, Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin Gallery

Info: Lehmann Maupin Gallery, 501 West 24th Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 5/3-18/4/2026, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.lehmannmaupin.com/