New programming at the Modern Museum of Fort Worth showcases international artists

Aubrey Williams is dead, Frank Bowling is alive and the two British Guyanese abstract expressionist painters are on display at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in “Feeling Color: Aubrey Williams and Frank Bowling.”

The inaugural show in the new Platform series showcases international artists to local audiences with new insights, perspectives and occasional nods to the collection. Curator María Elena Ortiz is still riding high from last year’s “Surrealism and Us: Caribbean and African Diasporic Artists Since 1940.”. She continues the theme of inserting artists from other countries into the mid-twentieth century art movement. She has another reason. The permanent collection’s strengths include Abstract expressionist paintings, including by Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko.

But neither Bowling, who is in his 90s, nor Williams, who died in 1990, are in the permanent collection. (The Dallas Museum of Art owns Bowling’s Marcia H Travels from 1970, an example from his famous map painting series.) Ortiz, a specialist in Latin and Afro Caribbean art, organized Feeling Color to wedge them between their American and European peers.

The two artists are brought together because of their shared history: they left the same country for the West within a year of each other, became globetrotting painters and advocated for the inclusion of Black and diasporic artists into public life. They weave color, biography and colonialism onto their canvases.

But the two in style and approach couldn’t be more different.

Williams paints with emotions. He comes across as charming and introspective. He described how he was “feeling color” when painting his series inspired by the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich. The two on display, The Symphony No. 11, opus 103 (Shostakovich) (1981) and The Symphony (1985) show an artist who paints freely and swiftly and, in his case, conveying his emotional response to one of his favorite composers.

With the Olmec Then and Now series, he pulls from his time as an agricultural worker among the indigenous Warrau Amerindians, his interest in pre-Columbian sculpture and a fractured relationship with his home country’s government. He defines his canvases with bold colors and strokes to flesh out his experiences.

Bowling paints with the rhythm of a gruff intellectual. He is plenty concerned with colonialism and history. But he also likes challenging the limits of painting. For his lauded “Maps paintings” about the Global South and colonialism, he stains, pours and sprays paint on unstretched canvases of personal memories around stenciled outlines of South America, Africa and Australia. They refer to his Caribbean background and serve as a reminder of the legacy of colonialism and displacement.

The “pour paintings,” on the other hand, lack meaning and symbols. He poured paint onto canvases and let them flow, resulting in layers of contrasting colors taking different forms. He was playing with the process and not telling a story.

Williams didn’t receive the same respect in his lifetime as Bowling, who has remained popular among collectors since he shortly after he launched his career. Critic and writer Jessica Boyal argues that when Tate Britain acquired his archives in 2001, Williams was reintroduced to the public, which opened up more opportunities to showcase and study his work.

Now with the exhibit, they are both on equal footing as artists who maintained distinct styles.

The show runs through July 25.

This story was originally published April 21, 2025 at 11:42 AM.