Night Journey belongs to Bowling’s Map series, a group of mostly abstract paintings composed of broad fields of color into which the artist placed the continents of Australia, South America, and Africa. Here, the barely discernible shapes of South America, in red at center left, and Africa, in blue and pink at center right, hover in a luminous but moody composition, which he created primarily by pouring various layers of diluted paint onto his canvas while adeptly controlling the final staining effect. The yellow area evokes the Atlantic Ocean and, more significantly for Bowling, the Middle Passage, the forced sea journey endured by enslaved people taken from West Africa to the Americas and West Indies.
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Inscription: Signed and dated (verso): FRANK bowling / 1969 / 70
the artist, New York and London (sold to Mohr); Maddy and Larry Mohr, New York (until 2011; their gift to MMA)
Brooklyn Museum. "Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties," March 7–July 6, 2014, unnumbered cat. (p. 24).
Hanover, N. H. Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. "Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties," August 30–December 21, 2014, unnumbered cat.
Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin. "Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties," February 8–May 10, 2015, unnumbered cat.
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. "Afro-Atlantic Histories," October 24, 2021–January 23, 2022, unnumbered cat. (fig. 6).
Washington, D.C. National Art Gallery. "Afro-Atlantic Histories," April 10–July 17, 2022, unnumbered cat.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. "Frank Bowling's Americas," October 22, 2022–April 9, 2023.
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. "Frank Bowling: The New York Years 1966–1975," May 20–September 10, 2023.
Rasheed Araeen. The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post-war Britain. Exh. cat., Hayward Gallery. London, 1989, ill. p. 4.
Richard J. Powell. Black Art and Culture in the 20th Century. New York, 1997, p. 138, colorpl. 92.
Cheryl Finley. "Committed to Memory: The Slave Ship Icon in the Black Atlantic Imagination." PhD diss., Yale University, 2002, p. 243, fig. 3-30, dates it 1968–69.
Kobena Mercer inFault Lines: Contemporary Art and Shifting Landscapes. Ed. Sarah Campbell Gilane Tawadros. Exh. cat., La Biennale di Venezia, Venice. London, 2003, p. 141, dates it 1967–69.
Kobena Mercer. "Black Atlantic Abstraction: Aubrey Williams and Frank Bowlin." Discrepant Abstraction. Ed. Kobena Mercer. London, 2006, pp. 183, 199–202, 223, ill. p. 198 (color), locates it in a private collection.
Mel Gooding. Frank Bowling. London, 2011, pp. 66–67, ill. (color).
Dorothy C. Rowe. "Nonsynchronous Cartographies: Frank Bowling's Map Paintings." Small Axe 41 (July 2013), p. 268, fig. 7 (color).
Kellie Jones inWitness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties. Exh. cat., Brooklyn Museum. New York, 2014, p. 22, fig. 12 (color).
Catherine Spencer. "Covert Resistance: Prunella Clough's Cold War 'Urbscapes'." British Art in the Nuclear Age. Ed. Catherine Jolivette. Farnham, 2014, p. 192 n. 41.
Imelda Barnard. "Making It New." Apollo 185 (June 2017), p. 74.
Celeste-Marie Bernier. Stick to the Skin: African American and Black British Art, 1965–2015. Oakland, 2018, pp. 104–105.
Cheryl Finley. Committed to Memory: The Art of the Slave Ship lcon. Princeton, 2018, pp. 158, 234, 236.
Indie A. Choudhury. "Frank Bowling's White Paintings." Nka 45 (November 2019), pp. 38, 41, ill. p. 42 (color).
Randall Griffey. "Art World: What Art Defined the Civil Rights Era? We Asked 7 Museum Curators to Pick One Work That Crystallized the Moment." news.artnet.com. January 20, 2020, ill. (color).
Eddie Chambers. World is Africa: Writings on Diaspora Art. London and New York, 2021.
Kobena Mercer. "The Longest Journey: Black Diaspora Artists in Britain." Art History 44 (June 2021), pp. 486–87, dates it 1969.
Mel Gooding. Frank Bowling. London, 2021, pp. 14, 69, ill. p. 73 (color).
Murray Whyte. "Frank Bowling's Pivotal Show at MFA." Boston Sunday Globe (October 30, 2022), p. N6.
Sarah Roberts in Reto Thüring and Akili Tommasino with Debra Lennard. Frank Bowling's Americas: New York, 1966–75. Exh. cat., Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Boston, 2022, pp. 105, 146, colorpl. 12.
Julian Lucas. "A Visionary Show Moves Black History Beyond Borders." newyorker.com. May 4, 2022, ill. (color).
William Orpen (British, Stillorgan, Ireland 1878–1931 London)
ca. 1910
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