152

Willie Birch

(b. 1942)

The Future Home, Cross Road Baptist Church.

Gouache on paper with artist's papier mâché frame, 1986. 
Signed and dated in gouache, lower right.
Total 42 x 54 1/2 x 2 in. (106.7 x 138.4 x 5.1 cm.)

  • Provenance:
    Exit Art, New York. (gallery label).
    Private collection, New York (1992), thence by descent.
    Private collection, New York.
  • Exhibited:
    Willie Birch: A Personal of Urban America, Exit Art, New York, NY, March 25 - April 25, 1992. The exhibition traveled to Afro-American Historical and Cultural Museum, Philadelphia, PA.
  • Literature:
    Willie Birch, Papo Colo, William A. Fagaly, Jeanette Ingberman. Willie Birch: A Personal of Urban America, Exit Art, New York, NY, p. 13.
  • Notes:
    This large gouache painting is part of Willie Birch's seminal 1986-88 autobiographical series A Personal View of Urban America. It was one of a group of Birch's narrative works on paper in painted papier-mâché frames and his free-standing painted papier-mâché figures exhibited in the artist's 1992 important solo exhibition at Exit Art in Soho. The New Orleans native had earlier received the National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artist Fellowship Grant for 1984-85, and had been the artist in residence at The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York from 1977-78. Reviewing the exhibition, Roberta Smith described his work in the New York Times as "a storytelling art carried out with immense visual expertise." Birch moved back to New Orleans in 1994.

    Other paintings from this New York series are in the collections of the Art Council of New Orleans, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Washington State Arts Commission.

    The artist's first traveling retrospective opens at the California Museum of African American Art in Los Angeles on May 5, 2026, organized by the American Federation of the Arts and the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA).
  • Condition:
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April 2, 2026 12:00 PM EDT
New York, NY, US

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