Oil on linen canvas, 1968. 991x1245 mm; 39x49 inches. Signed, titled, dated and inscribed "4407 Winnrose Louisville Kentucky 40211" in ink, verso, on the artist label affixed to the stretcher bar.
Provenance The artist. Private collection, Kentucky. Thence by descent to the estate. Private collection, California.
For four decades, G. (Gloucester) Caliman Coxe was considered the dean of African-American artists in Louisville, Kentucky, an art scene in the 1950s and 60s that included Sam Gilliam, Bob Thompson, and Kenneth Victor Young. Born in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, Coxe moved to Louisville in 1924 where his parents were accomplished watercolorists. He worked as an illustrator and display artist for the Lyric and Grand Theaters and an illustrator at the Fort Knox Training Aid Center, from which he retired after 20 years.
He then entered the University of Louisville to study visual art in his forties. He was one of the first African Americans to receive a Hite Art Scholarship and the first African American fine arts graduate. He exhibited throughout the South, including the 1972 solo exhibition Paintings by G. C. Coxe: 4 Phases at the Carl Van Vechten Gallery, Fisk University in Nashville, TN. His retrospective Rags and Wires, Sticks and Pantyhose Too was held at the Allen R. Hite Art Institute, The College of Arts and Sciences, University of Louisville in 1995.
Coxe will be the subject of a forthcoming solo exhibition held at the Speed Art Museum, in Louisville, Kentucky. Louisville's Black Avant-Garde: Gloucester Caliman (G.C.) Coxe is curated by fari nzinga, curator of African and Native American collections, with support from Sarah Battle, research curator at the Speed, formerly of the National Gallery of Art, whose oral history research project, Painting a Legacy: the Black Artistic Community in Louisville, 1950s-1970s, provided a scholarly foundation for the exhibition.
