‘Frank Wimberley: Stratum At Duck Creek’

The Arts Center at Duck Creek will present the exhibition “Frank Wimberley: Stratum” opening Saturday, April 30, with a reception from 5 to 7 p.m. and running through June 5.

Wimberley (b. 1926, Pleasantville, New Jersey) is a well-known presence on the East End art scene and a major figure in African American art since the 1960s. A 2022 inductee into the Guild Hall Academy of the Arts, he has lived and worked in Sag Harbor since 1965. This show will celebrate the evolution of this nonagenarian’s distinguished career that spans more than six decades.

While Wimberley has created an abundance of vibrant abstract canvases throughout his extensive career, this exhibition will focus on works that seem to evoke the atmospheric qualities of the East End landscape, infused with the rhythmic cadences of the jazz music that is his lifelong passion. His spontaneous approach, analogous to jazz improvisation, results in gestural elegance and formal complexity. Blending paint with pumice, fabric and paper, and using tools like a palette knife and scraper, he creates richly textured, multi-layered compositions. The resulting topography in each work reads like an archeological dig through his processes.

Wimberley has made collages throughout his career, and several are included in the exhibition. In a video interview with Nanette Carter, the artist describes the ways in which the collage process contributed to the development of his painting practice: “I started to make collages in order to teach myself to paint, because painting is a construction of layers.”

On Sunday, May 15, Carter and Sylvester Manor’s Donnamarie Barnes will be at Duck Creek for a discussion about the “Artists of Eastville,” with Wimberley’s exhibition as backdrop.

The Arts Center at Duck Creek is at 27 Squaw Road in East Hampton. For further information contact duck@duckcreekarts.org.