At 75 years old, abstract painter Cynthia Hawkins has spent decades challenging artistic conventions through her vibrant, large-scale paintings that transform rigid grids into jubilant celebrations of color and form. Her work, which often measures six feet or more, features warped and stretched grids that dissolve into warm circles and lines painted in dazzling hues of pink and yellow. After years of working outside the mainstream art world, Hawkins has recently gained significant recognition, with her paintings appearing in major exhibitions and commanding impressive prices at auction.
Hawkins' approach to abstract painting deliberately subverts traditional artistic rules. Speaking from her studio in Poughkeepsie, New York, she explains her philosophy: "I like this way of working with abstraction. I make the rules." Her paintings contain multiple layers – grids atop monochromes, floating shapes, and intersecting lines – all composed spontaneously rather than through careful advance planning. This method allows her ideas to run free on the canvas, creating works that art historian Rosalind Krauss might find surprising, given her famous assertion that grids represent art turning its back on nature.
The art world's recognition of Hawkins accelerated significantly after her inclusion in the Museum of Modern Art's 2022 exhibition about Just Above Midtown (JAM), the iconic New York gallery where she first showed her work in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Following the MoMA exhibition, prestigious galleries began representing her work, including Paula Cooper in New York, Kaufmann Repetto in Milan, Hollybush Gardens in London, and Stars in Los Angeles. Top collectors like Komal Shah started acquiring her paintings, and in 2024, the Center for Art, Research and Alliances honored her with its Legacy Award.
Despite her recent commercial success – a 1989 painting sold at Christie's for nearly $120,000, quadrupling its high estimate – Hawkins remains remarkably humble about her newfound recognition. "I hate to say this, but it feels nice when people like it," she admits. Her work now appears at major art fairs like Art Basel Miami Beach, and this fall, she will participate in the São Paulo Biennial and an exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem dedicated to past artists in residence.
Hawkins has always been a significant figure within certain artistic circles, particularly those connected to Just Above Midtown, where she met influential artists like David Hammons, Howardena Pindell, and Vivian E. Browne. A 1987-88 residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem led to the museum acquiring one of her works, and she has long been active in the community surrounding Kenkeleba House, the artist-run alternative space dedicated to supporting Black artists. Sculptor Janet Olivia Henry recently created a diorama commemorating her friendship with Hawkins, which began at JAM.
Her modest home studio, built from scratch in 2024 with her husband John, reflects her unpretentious approach to art-making. The garage-like structure features tall shelving units for paintings, tables with drawers for prints, and few other furnishings. Despite having three solo exhibitions since the beginning of 2024 and preparing for a fourth at Hollybush Gardens, Hawkins maintains that her prolific output "doesn't feel like a grind." She estimates it takes about two weeks to complete a single painting, including time for "looking, walking around, looking, deciding on forms, all that kind of stuff."
Her studio reveals the tools and inspiration behind her work: worn-down oil bars that she drags across canvases, brushes of varying sizes, and printouts of news stories including one about 'Oumuamua, the mysterious interstellar object discovered in 2017. She incorporates shapes from diverse sources, from the outlines of rocks seen while vacationing in Wales to forms found in nature, which she keeps in what she calls her "bag of tricks."
Hawkins divides her painting process into two distinct phases. "The first half of the painting is very spontaneous, very intuitive," she explains. "The first color on the canvas is just a placeholder. It lets me know: I've started." During this initial phase, she works with regular oil paint, allowing for changes and adjustments. The second half involves finishing her translations of natural forms and applying oil bar, which is harder to remove and represents her final commitments to the composition.
Currently, she is working on new entries in her ongoing series "Maps Necessary for a Walk in 4D," based on drawings she made in the late 1970s. These works plot her route from her old Manhattan apartment to a nearby subway station, then tilt the city's grid to create distorted perspectives. "New York at one point became laid out in an organized way, but that organization can be manipulated," Hawkins explains. The resulting paintings explore the flow of time and organization of space through abstraction.
While her work might recall the formalist movement of the mid-20th century, with its attention to depth, color, and geometry, Hawkins embraces the label with qualifications. "I am a formalist," she states, "but I am not at all into things being perfect. That would be too frustrating." This philosophy reflects her lifelong approach to making art on her own terms, as confirmed by Linda Goode Bryant, founder of Just Above Midtown, who told Hawkins at a recent MoMA opening: "Cynthia is always doing it her own way."
Hawkins' career has followed an unconventional path, spending little time in New York City despite being born in Queens in 1950. As the first in her family to attend college, she enrolled at Queens College in the mid-1970s, where art was her obvious choice. "People would always wonder what to paint," she recalls of her fellow students. "I could never understand that." After earning her BFA in 1977, she took teaching positions at various SUNY campuses and other institutions over five decades.
Her educational journey continued throughout her career: she earned an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore in 1992, an MA in museum studies from Seton Hall University in 2008, and a PhD in American studies from SUNY Buffalo, completing her 2019 dissertation titled "African American Agency and the Art Object, 1868-1917." She also served as museum leader at Cedar Crest College in Pennsylvania from 2000 to 2003 and directed SUNY Geneseo's gallery from 2007 to 2021.
Her transition to abstract painting happened organically during her undergraduate years. Initially focused on figuration, particularly drawings of gymnasts using parallel bars and balance beams, she became displeased with the results and allowed these images to gradually dissolve into fields of intersecting lines. These early works recalled paintings by Dutch modernist Piet Mondrian, whom she continues to cite as an influence alongside Hans Hofmann and Johannes Vermeer.
After college, Hawkins developed interests in black holes, the fourth dimension, and algebra, which influenced her artistic development. She briefly explored sculpture between 1979 and 1981, showing these works at Just Above Midtown before returning to painting in the early 1980s with pieces filled with arrows and symbols. As she wrote in her 2024 book "Art Notes, Art," a collection of diaries from her sculpture period, "I was and continue to be a painter."
Many of Hawkins' paintings from the 1980s onward function as investigations into ideas and phenomena she wanted to understand. Her 1986 series "Investigation into Green" exemplifies this approach – a group of slender canvases exploring the titular color through other tones, including one piece composed mainly of violet. "I was like, 'Hello, what can green be?'" Hawkins recalls. "I thought it was a really hard color to work with, so I made 10 paintings."
While maintaining her rigorous exhibition schedule, Hawkins finds time for smaller-scale works that provide relief from the demands of producing large paintings. She creates prints that mirror her paintings but in sparser, looser formats with sinuous lines and fewer floating shapes. "If I weren't making enough new work to support one solo show every six months," she explains, "I would be doing some prints, a little more work on paper. I would be having a little fun." This balance between serious artistic inquiry and playful experimentation continues to drive her work as she maintains her position as an artist who, after decades of making her own rules, has finally received the recognition her innovative approach deserves.
