Geometric Rhythms

Our Museum’s permanent collection includes many examples of artworks that utilize repeated shapes to create a sense of driving rhythms, syncopations, and melodic phrases—from a ninth-century BCE Greek vase to a work on paper by UK Professor Emeritus Arturo Alonzo Sandoval. The use of hard-line forms across so many cultures and time periods suggests that abstraction is a universal visual language with roots in vibrant textile traditions. Kuba ceremonial panels inspired Beatrice Riece’s drawings, while the patterns in Alan Shields’s fabric work suggest that American quilting must be in conversation with Elsworth Kelly’s minimalism.

Kelly’s Dark Blue and Red and Theodoros Stamos’s Double Orange Sun-Box were donated to the Museum in 1976, when the university started building the Singletary Center. These geometric abstractions are uniquely suited to this Museum as they echo the shapes of the window, floors, walls, and ceiling tiles in a way that heightens sensitivity to the gallery architecture. Artworks by George Rickey, Louise Nevelson, and Fred Sandback deploy dynamic geometries in architecture to create actual and implied movement. Additional artists featured include Kimber Smith and John Strickland.