Sherron Francis: A Retrospective

Constant experimentation characterizes the art of Sherron Francis. Trained in the academic tradition in the Midwest, Francis settled in New York City in 1968. There she became an abstract painter at the center of the Color Field movement. Her works were in several solo and important group shows and received a significant amount of press attention. Many were purchased by corporate and private collectors (including Helen Frankenthaler and Clement Greenberg). However, in 2000, when the Greenwich Village building, where she lived and worked, was taken over by New York University, Francis left the New York art world behind, moving to the North Fork of Long Island, where she had summered since 1973. Her large body of work—some examples not seen for forty years and some never exhibited— deserves to be restored to its context and considered on its own terms. This exhibition reintroduces her intellectually conceived, radiant, and adventurous paintings, created between 1972 and 1981. Her oeuvre exemplifies the significant yet often forgotten contributions of American women artists to abstract painting movements in the late twentieth century.