Nicole Woods

This project reexamines the career of African American painter Robert (“Bob”) Thompson (1937–1966) and the unique position he occupied within the 1960s North American avant-garde. The first book-length study on Thompson, it charts his brief but intense artistic life as an abstract figurative painter who referenced the Western tradition while creating work that does not easily fit into the established genres of the day nor accord any specific connection with Black artists of earlier decades. His use of de-volumized space, saturated colors, variations of Arcadianism, and rejection of traditional modeling all point to Thompson dismantling and reforming, not imitating, early modernist European paradigms. Many of Thompson’s best works merge religious and mythological imaginings into visionary clusters that evince a singular iconography buttressed by explosive pigment and flattened forms. This approach to abstraction and figuration asks us to reconsider the history of 1960s art as one governed by resolutely secular approaches (via Pop and Minimalism), to a more nuanced picture that includes eclectic and spiritualist styles. 

Exploring his prolific output across four thematic chapters, “Acid Visions” thus reconsiders Thompson’s cultivation of an artistic identity ambivalently suspended between Abstract Expressionism, Happenings, and figurative realism as it developed alongside an emerging postwar Black aesthetic. Indeed, Thompson’s paintings generate an array of differentiating, fantastical forms matched only by the cosmically inspired experimentations of Afrofuturist writers (like his friend, Samuel R. Delany) and other artists working across similar terrain. As a SAAM Senior Fellow, I will conduct original research into the Bob Thompson papers in the Archives of American Art, and I will inspect key paintings by Thompson in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Gallery of Art, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.