Since the 1970s, Cynthia Hawkins has investigated the potentials of abstract painting. While often beginning a work or series with a predetermined concept or strategy, Hawkins’s process-oriented practice simultaneously embraces the improvisational to create a systemized space for her continually evolving vocabulary. 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, where she had her first solo exhibition in 1981–as well as the women artists’ circle she was an active member of, which hosted weekly shares, critiques, exchange, and amplification of each others’ work. An important glimpse into Hawkins’s creative process and artistic community, Art Notes, Art is richly illustrated with works by the artist produced during this key period–some of which are now lost–photographs and ephemera, and a visual archive of contemporaneous work by her peers.

Cynthia Hawkins was born in 1950 in Queens, New York. She has exhibited widely in New York and the United States throughout her career and has presented one-person exhibitions at Just Above Midtown, New York (1981); Frances Wolfson Art Center, Miami (1986); Cinque Gallery, New York (1989); Queens College Art Center (1997); Buffalo Science Museum, Buffalo (2009); STARS, Los Angeles (2022); and Ortuzar Projects, New York (2023). She was included in the survey exhibition Just Above Midtown: 1974 to Present at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2022). Hawkins’s work is in numerous public collections, including The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York; Kenkeleba Gallery, New York; The La Grange Art Museum, Georgia; and the Department of State, Washington, D.C. She has received numerous awards, including the Helen Frankenthaler Award for Painting (2023); the Black Metropolis Research Consortium Fellowship (2009); The Herbert and Irene Wheeler Grant (1995); and the Brooklyn Museum Art School Scholarship (1972). She received her doctorate in American Studies from the University of Buffalo, SUNY, with a dissertation titled, “African American Agency and the Art Object, 1868-1917,” and until recently was the gallery director and curator at the Bertha V.B. Lederer Gallery, SUNY Geneseo, New York