Rememberingstanleyboxer: A Retrospective

American artist Stanley Boxer (1926-2000) was well known for the exuberant qualities of his thickly brushed abstract paintings, but he also created equally energetic works on paper and sculptures throughout his career. The more than sixty works chosen for this retrospective, dating from 1946 to 2000, explore his manipulation of surfaces, textures, and colors in various media, and include both figurative and abstract compositions.

Born in New York City, Boxer began formal art training at the Art Students League after leaving the navy at the end of World War II. Boxer had his first one-person exhibition of paintings in New York in 1953, and his work has been shown regularly for over five decades by galleries and museums nationwide. Boxer’s work is in the permanent collections of many museums, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; and the Joel and Lila Harnett Museum of Art, University of Richmond Museums. He was a recipient of the Guggenheim fellowship and an NEA Award, and he was a member of the National Academy of Design.

Highlights of the exhibition include paintings, sculpture, and works on paper. In the paintings, mostly mixed media on canvas, Boxer combined diverse materials such as strings and pebbles with thickly applied paint to create complex abstract compositions of pattern, texture, and color. The 1985 painting Lacedplumeinabam shows his use of thick impasto of oil paint to create dramatic overall texture. He gave his paintings titles which were long, run-on sentences, inspired by the German language.

Organized by the University of Richmond Museums in collaboration with the Housatonic Museum of Art and the Boca Raton Museum of Art, the exhibition was curated by Elizabeth Stevens, an independent scholar, and coordinated by Richard Waller, Executive Director, University Museums. An illustrated catalogue, made possible through the generosity of Salvatore and Alice Federico and published by University of Richmond Museums, is available.

The exhibition is on view at the Joel and Lila Harnett Museum of Art, University of Richmond Museums, from August 20 to October 4, 2009. Following its venue at the Harnett Museum, the exhibition will be on view at the Housatonic Museum of Art, Housatonic Community College, Bridgeport, Connecticut, from February 11 to March 28, 2010, and then at the Boca Raton Museum of Art, Florida, from April 20 to June 13, 2010.