Cynthia Hawkins in 'Not All Travellers Walk Roads – Of Humanity as Practice'

Cynthia Hawkins’s painting is a profound case of artistic experimentation, which manifests in a particular way in each of her works – each one different and diverse, yet unified in their creative drive. Her practice unfolds like a continuous exercise, perhaps aimed at developing skill or building a repertoire and vocabulary around what captivates her. Movement and the notion of process guide the artist – a continuous process she has pursued since the 1970s.

Hawkins’s primary artistic interest lies in abstraction. And for her, it is not merely a practice of abstract painting, but of abstraction itself. Her relationship with abstraction is long-standing, and for her, it is also an act of resistance, insofar as abstraction requires from the viewer a sustained and attentive gaze.

With an artistic career spanning more than five decades, Hawkins has lived through a moment in the United States art context in which “abstraction performed crucial work within and upon the flows of Black culture by opening it to the same contingencies that fragmented modernist culture, providing it with visual and verbal languages for deviation – languages that distanced themselves from tangible references identifiable with mass politics.”1 Her production and presence in that scene can be understood within a broader framework of abstraction, community, and Blackness.

The elements that make up Hawkins’s paintings – lines, shapes, colors – are, and continue to be, living developments of earlier drawings, such as mathematical notations and algebraic references, practiced on the surface of the canvas. Over time, these transformed into new situations and fields touched by abstraction, such as science, literature, philosophy, and music – always gravitating toward organic geometric abstraction.

It is no coincidence that historic works like Air Smart (1975) and Stars that Fell into the Sea (1975) bear such titles. This notion of geometric abstraction arises from her engagement with the material of painting – as an investigation, for instance, into the depth of the canvas, where the weight and lightness of the compositional elements both accumulate and float.

—André Pitol, Translated from Portuguese by Sergio Maciel