April 24: Cynthia Hawkins—Art Notes, Art
Presented by 192 Books, Cynthia Hawkins in conversation with Donna De Salvo to discuss her book Art Notes, Art (CARA, 2024)
This event will take place in person at Paula Cooper Gallery at 534 West 21st Street on Thursday, April 24th at 6:00 PM ET. Seating is limited and will be first come, first served. The discussion will also be streamed directly on this page. There is no login required. A recording will be archived.
Books will be available for sale after the conversation.
Cynthia Hawkins—Art Notes, Art (CARA, 2024)
Since the 1970s, Cynthia Hawkins has investigated the potentials of abstract painting. From 1979 to 1981, important early years in the elaboration of her work, Hawkins documented these developments in a journal. A record of routine and the everyday, the journal also gathers sketches, notes for new and in-progress works, and responses to contemporary art and criticism, bringing the artist’s process, experimentation, and reflections on materials, formalism, abstraction, and figuration into relief. Art Notes, Art also offers a picture of the burgeoning Black-owned gallery scene in 1970s and ’80s New York that Hawkins was an important participant in—including Cinque Gallery, Kenkeleba Gallery, and Just Above Midtown—as well as the women artists’ circle of which she was an active member.
Photo by Todd Fleming
Cynthia Hawkins (b. 1950, Queens, New York) received a BA in painting from the Queens College, City University of New York in 1977 and an MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art in 1992. In the 1970s and 1980s Hawkins was an important member of the communities surrounding the Black-owned New York galleries Just Above Midtown, Cinque Gallery, and Kenkeleba Gallery, where she had multiple one-person exhibitions. In 2022, she was included in the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces. Hawkins has received numerous awards, most recently the Helen Frankenthaler Award for Painting in 2023.
Photo by Gabriela Herman
Donna De Salvo is the senior adjunct curator, special projects at Dia Art Foundation. Known for her close collaborations with artists and context-driven approaches to exhibitions, she’s worked extensively with Steve McQueen, Walter De Maria, Roni Horn, among others. De Salvo is a noted scholar on Andy Warhol and has lectured, written, and curated extensively on the artist’s work. She has held curatorial and senior leadership positions at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Tate Modern. De Salvo returned to Dia in 2020 where she worked as a curator from 1981–1986.