Oil on masonite board, 1958. 508x610 mm; 20x24 inches. Signed in oil, lower left recto. Signed, titled and dated in ink, verso.
Provenance: the estate of the artist.
This urban abstraction is a striking mid-career painting by this Washington, DC painter. In 1951, Dempsey became associated with the Washington, DC school with his inclusion in the first Annual Exhibition of the Loïs Mailou Jones & Céline Tabary Studio Group, which also included Delilah Pierce and Alma Thomas. He was also included in the 10th Annual Exhibition of American Art in 1952 at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, where he won the purchase award. Dempsey traveled to Haiti and Jamaica in the 1950s and '60s, and many of his later oils and watercolors are organic abstractions of the local color and scenery. However, this mid-century abstraction reflects the geometry of the city, similar to his Cityscape, also 1958, illustrated in Cedric Dover's American Negro Art, which includes several examples of his paintings.
