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McArthur Binion — MFA (Painting, 1973)

Chicago-based artist McArthur Binion received his MFA in painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1973. Monochromatic, obsessively crafted and deeply personal, Binion’s pieces simultaneously connect to a legacy of modern mark-making and historical roots of the Deep South. Binion focuses on autobiographical abstraction that explores his personal history as an African American as well as his individual identity through sublimely patterned works that, upon close inspection, reveal layers of depth.⁠

Having developed a unique ability to transform minimalism into personal history, Binion combines collaged personal documents, from photocopies of his birth certificate and pages from his address book to pictures from his childhood and found photographs of lynchings, with oil stick to create autobiographical abstractions, as demonstrated in Modern Ancient Brown/screened. The striking combination of typeset and handwritten elements with gridded formalism poses critical questions about identity, community, and Binion’s personal history as a black man and artist. The poignant and charged images that constitute the tiled base of his work are concealed and abstracted by the paint. Upon close inspection, however, 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 past. The 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.

Binion says his paintings are concerned with how he might “bring something into being: not to have it fabricated but to work in an applied way.” In doing so, he tells his own life story, while subtly correcting the perceived sweep of art history.