"I prefer painting that gives visual as well as spiritual pleasure and presents a sense of balance and harmony. In my view, an artist's work is to rearrange everyday phenomena so as to enlarge our perception of who we are and what goes on about us."
— Felrath Hines
This August, Schoelkopf Gallery will present a Spotlight exhibition of works by Felrath Hines (1913–1993). The presentation will feature five paintings from the 1950s and '60s.
Felrath Hines was an early member of the Spiral group, a collective of Black artists formed in 1963 to discuss art and its relationship to politics and the Civil Rights movement.
He was deeply committed to his own personal language of abstraction while absorbing influences from the many notable artists and contemporaries he encountered socially and professionally. Hines was a successful art conservator, which informed his practice and technique as a painter. Early in his career, Hines worked on the conservation of a Water Lilies painting by Claude Monet for The Museum of Modern Art. The influence of Monet is evident in Hines’ pastel palette and layered brush-work in his works from the 1960s.
Felrath Hines was born in Indianapolis, Indiana in 1913. He studied painting and design at the Art Institute of Chicago and Pratt Institute in the 1940s. He later served as a conservator at several institutions, including The Museum of Modern Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery. At one time, he also served as Georgia O'Keeffe's personal paintings restorer.
Today, his work can be found in the collections of numerous prominent institutions, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Phillips Collection, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Cincinnati Art Museum, among others.
