Joseph Holston’s visual chronicle of African American life gives us a vast collection of works that traverse terror, triumphs, and a penultimate combination of the two, the Underground Railroad. Amy Kaslow Gallery proudly presents “Joseph Holston: Black Lives, A Retrospective,” a distillation of the artist’s past half a century of creativity: his finest screenprints, etchings, and oils on canvas depicting simple, daily doings of men, women and children. Using rich color combinations or tone on tone pigment, Holston’s black musicians and chess players pop from the paint’s surface. Some subjects are playful; others poignant; all are alluring.
Holston’s growth as an artist dovetails with the nation’s agitation over civil rights. Part of the Great Migration, his parents came from Tennessee and settled on Hawkins Lane, a rare and remarkable community of former slaves started at the turn of the twentieth century, and located in metropolitan Washington DC’s Chevy Chase, Maryland. A determined student in the advertising art program at Washington, DC’s Chamberlain Vocational High School, Holston worked at the Hecht Co. on F Street and at Sears & Roebuck, at the time America’s most viewed advertising. He sealed his commitment as an artist following study in New Mexico with American painter Richard Goetz.
Joseph Holston is a highly collected American painter whose work is at the Smithsonian American Art Museum; the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC; Library of Congress Fine Print Collection, and other institutions.
