James Little (painter)

James Little (born 1952) is an American painter and curator.

He is known for his works of geometric abstraction which are often imbued with exuberant color.

He has been based in New York City.

Little was born in 1952 in Memphis, Tennessee, and grew up in the segregated American South.

He is from an African American family.

He studied at the Memphis Academy of Art (now known as Memphis College of Art), while a student his work was praised and selected in 1973 for an exhibition at the Arkansas Arts Center by Gerald Nordland.

He received his BFA degree from Memphis Academy of Art in 1974.

In 1976, Little obtained his MFA degree from Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York.

Little cites Mitchell along with Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, Alma Thomas, and George L. K. Morris as among the artists whose work he most admires.

He has said of the modus operandi of his own work (that)......"Abstraction provided me with self-determination and free will. It was liberating. I don’t find freedom in any other form. People like to have an answer before they have the experience. Abstraction doesn’t offer you that."

Critic Karen Wilkin has called Little's work (as possessing of a) “ravishing physicality" and . . . "orchestrations of geometry and chroma to delight our eyes and stir our emotions and intellect...”.

Although Little has oft been labeled a hard-edge influenced painter, he himself has said otherwise.

In 1976, his work was the subject of the solo exhibition Paintings by James Little curated by Ronald Kutcha at the Everson Museum in Syracuse.

In 1980, Little's work was included in the exhibition "Afro-American Abstraction", curated by April Kingsley, at MoMA PS1.

In 2002, Little's large commission for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority was unveiled.

Riders at Jamaica Station now travel through his 85-foot-long environment made of 33 multicolored laminated glass panels in a prismatic design, each measuring at 17-feet tall by 5-feet wide.

His work is the subject of the 2005 paperback edition James Little: Reaching for the Sky which features 13 color reproductions of his pieces and essays by Robert C. Morgan, George N'Namdi, Al Loving, Robert Costa, Horace Brockington, and James Haritas.

What Only Paint Can Do, curated by Karen Wilkin, Triangle Arts Association, Brooklyn, NY It’s A Wonderful 10th, Sideshow Gallery, Brooklyn, NY 2007 Three One-Man Exhibitions: James Little, Aimé Mpane, George Smith, Station Museum of Contemporary Art, Houston, TX; brochure

The Noyes Museum of Contemporary Art, Oceanville, NJ Optical Stimulations: American Abstract Artists, Yellow Bird Gallery, Newburgh, NY 50 Plus, Holland Tunnel Gallery, Brooklyn, NY Raising the Bar: James Little and Thornton Willis, Sideshow Gallery, Brooklyn, NY A Century of African American Art: The Paul R. Jones Collection, University of Delaware, Newark, DE Abstract Identity, Pelham Art Center, NY Ajita – Unconquerable, The Station, Houston, TX; catalogue

500 Works on Paper, Gary Snyder Fine Art, New York

Amplified Abstraction, Chapel, Plantage, Doklaan 8-12, Amsterdam, Holland

Museum, Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY; catalogue

Dialog and Discourse, Dolan Center Gallery, Friends Academy, Locust Valley, NY Straight Painting, The Painting Center, New York

The Art of Absolute Desire, 450 Broadway, New York

The Power of Drawing, Westbeth Gallery, New York

Association, Barrett Art Center, Poughkeepsie, NY New York Eight, Luise Ross Gallery, New York

Works On, With and Made Out of Paper, Sideshow 195, Brooklyn, NY The African-American Fine Arts Collection of the New Jersey State Museum, New Jersey State

Museum, Trenton, NJ Postcards from Black America, curated by Rob Perrée, De Beyerd, Center for Contemporary Art

in Breda, Netherlands, and the Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, Netherlands; catalogue

de leugenaars/the liars (I) Helder en Verzadigd Clear and Saturated, Arti et Amicitiae, Amsterdam,

In 2009, Little won a Joan Mitchell Foundation award.

He has also been the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant.

In 2019 Little curated the exhibition "New York Centric" at the American Fine Arts Society gallery which included the work of multiple generations of abstract artists associated with the great Metropolis including Alma Thomas, Alvin Loving, Larry Poons, Stanley Boxer, Peter Reginato, Dan Christensen, Ronnie Landfield, Gabriele Evertz, Charles Hinman, Thornton Willis, Doug Ohlson, Robert Swain, and Ed Clark.

Beyond Borders: Bill Hutson & Friends, University Museums, Mechanical Hall Gallery, University of Delaware

Outside the Lines: Color Across the Collections, curated by Tricia Laughlin Bloom, organized by the Newark Museum, NJ Works on Paper: Selections from the Gallery, Louis Stern Fine Arts, West Hollywood, CA. of exhibitions, Mobile Museum of Art, AL; digital catalogue

In 2020, some of Little's large-scale black-tone paintings were shown in a two-artist exhibition with the work of Louise Nevelson, who was represented exclusively by the black colored sculptures, for which she is most known.

The exhibition titled Louise Nevelson + James Little ran from September 3, 2020 until October 28, 2020 at Rosenbaum Contemporary in Boca Raton, Florida.

Little's work was included in the 2022 Whitney Biennial.

Little currently teaches at the Art Students League of New York.

Little was formerly represented by the June Kelly Gallery in Manhattan and is now represented by Louis Stern Fine Arts in West Hollywood and the Kavi Gupta Gallery in Chicago where his work will be the subject of a forthcoming solo exhibition in November 2022.