Arts & Music DES MOINES, IOWA – As a local custom frame retailer and art gallery, The Great Frame Up in West Des Moines enjoys supporting the visual arts. This month we introduce readers to a modern painter and artist originally from Macon, Mississippi– McArthur Binion. Career In her recent article, Hilarie M. Sheets shares, “McArthur Binion had been creating art almost completely under the radar for four decades, handling his own occasional sales and raising two children in Chicago on a teacher’s salary.” Now Mr Binion — at age 72— has received a graduate degree from the prestigious Academy Cranbrook of “Nobody’s going to tell me what to say about my work . . . For me, if it wasn’t going to be on your own terms, it’s not worth it.” - Mr. Binion, New York Times March 24, 2019 McArthur Binion (born 1946) is an American artist based in Chicago, Illinois. He holds a BFA from Wayne State University (1971) in Detroit, Michigan and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. He has been a Professor of Art at Columbia College in Chicago since 1992. Early life McArthur Binion was born in 1946 on a cotton farm in Macon, Mississippi. He began picking cotton at age 3 as one of 11 children. By 1951, his family of 18 had moved to Detroit where the adults found jobs in an auto plant. In 1973 McArthur Binion moved to New York, where he lived until his move to Chicago in 1991. Art. Museums and international collectors are embracing his artwork. His large canvases, minimalist grids painted in oil stick over collages of personal documents, are fascinating and engaging. “With his work selling for up to $450,000 he can easily travel first class.” Sheets writes. Work McArthur Binion’s work primarily consists of minimalist abstract paintings, created using crayons, oil stick and ink, often on rigid surfaces such as wood or aluminum. For many years, Binion has been incorporating laserprints as a collaged ground on top of which he applies other mediums. Binion says that what he takes away from minimalism in his creative process is “that you want to do your own stuff in your own image.” His work has been compared to Dorothea Rockburne, Robert Mangold, Robert Ryman and John’s “The Dutch Wives” paintings at times. McArthur Binion identifies as a “Rural Modernist,” and says that his work “begins at the crossroads—at the intersection of Bebop improvisation and Abstract Expressionism.” His work is influenced by modernist artists such as Kasimir Severinovich Malevich, Piet Mondrian, and Wifredo Lam. He is considered “expressionistic”. McArthur Binion’s gridded abstract paintings have garnered significant attention. In his most recent exhibition (the DNA Study series), Binion’s paintings aren’t fully abstract, but attempt to talk about the black experience and his personal history at the same time. Acting as a kind of template for gridded marks in black, white and occasionally brightly colored oil-paint-stick layered on top, are pages from Binion’s 1970’s handwritten phone books, passport ID and negatives of his birth certificate. To fully experience McArthur Binion’s artwork the observer must get close to the piece of art. Underneath the horizontal and vertical lines of various hues there is a story that is being told to the audience. McArthur Binion painstakingly combines his personal story with abstract shapes and patterns. Ghost: Rhythms, . . . shows the influence of action painting, Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism. McArthur Binion pulls stylistic tropes common to folk artists as well, borrowing quilting patterns, layering photographic imagery and motifs and grids. He does all this while using one implement: his characteristic “crayon,” or paint stick, which allowed him to move past oil paint. May 2019 The URBAN EXPERIENCE 9
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