For Art Basel Miami Beach 2022, Eric Firestone Gallery in Booth F2 will present a cross-generational group of painters, sculptors, and collage artists including Ellsworth Ausby, Judy Bowman, Sally Cook, Abigail DeVille, Martha Edelheit, FUTURA2000, Sana Musasama, Joe Overstreet, Pat Passlof, Jeanne Reynal, Thomas Sills, Paul Waters, Peter Williams, and Nina Yankowitz.

These postwar and contemporary figures use radical color, intuitive poetics, and inventive techniques to highlight Black American history, women’s perspectives, and their personal experiences. Abigail DeVille and Peter Williams are also the subjects of current exhibitions at Eric Firestone Gallery’s spaces in New York City, on view through December 23, 2022.These postwar and contemporary figures use radical color, intuitive poetics, and inventive techniques to highlight Black American history, women’s perspectives, and their personal experiences. Abigail DeVille and Peter Williams are also the subjects of current exhibitions at Eric Firestone Gallery’s spaces in New York City, on view through December 23, 2022.

In addition, the Meridians section of Art Basel Miami Beach, curated by Magalí Arriola, will feature a monumental cut canvas collage painting entitled In the Beginning (1970) by Paul Waters. These presentations at Art Basel Miami Beach reflect Eric Firestone Gallery’s programmatic mission to showcase significant yet under-recognized art practices and forms across the 20th and 21st centuries.

Paul Waters (b. 1936, Philadelphia, PA) will be featured in Eric Firestone Gallery’s Booth F2 as well as the Meridians section curated by Magalí Arriola. Since the 1960s, Waters has made paintings by using scissors as a drawing tool and his fingertips as a brush. He collages painted hand-cut linen shapes onto primed canvas. These silhouetted forms appear as dancers, birds, female warriors, and natural elements as well as pure abstract shapes. Such symbols evoke African art and artifacts, Henri Matisse’s cut-outs, cave paintings, and Waters’ experiences as an African American artist living in New York during the Civil Rights Movement. 

Waters was also an arts educator and cultural organizer who curated historic exhibitions such as Black Artists: Two Generations (1971) at The Newark Museum of Art, NJ. His work was included in several important shows including Afro American Artists: New York and Boston in 1970 at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, MA. In 2022, Eric Firestone Gallery organized the first solo show on Waters in fifty years.