Thomas Sills

Thomas Sills was born and raised in Castalia, North Carolina. He was born to a family of eleven and would later live with one of his older brothers in Brooklyn. Before he got involved with painting, he worked in a greenhouse in Raleigh, North Carolina, where the color around him made a strong impression on him. He received as much of a formal education as a black child could in rural, segregated North Carolina. Once in New York, he would work as a doorman at Paramount Theater at Dekalb and Flatbrush Avenues in Brooklyn. He returned to Raleigh from 1947-1948 to assist one of his brother's cleaning and pressing service before returning to Brooklyn. Then he worked on the docks as a stevedore three days a week and the rest of the time at a liquor store in Greenwich Village.

Sills spent most of his creative life in New York City, deeply rooted in the artistic trends as well as cultural issues from the early 1950s to 1970s. He knew Willem de Kooning who visited his studio and told him not to throw anything away before anyone had seen it.

Others in the NY circle gave him advice. At the time of his first solo show, Barnett Newman sent him a letter of congratulations.[2] His friendships with Newman and Mark Rothko placed him at the intellectual center of the Abstract Expressionist movement, but like de Kooning, Arshile Gorky and Franz Kline, Sills believed that it was not necessary to explain his art; he painted what he felt and it came from within.[2]

Sills began to experiment in art in the 1950s, about the time he married the mosaicist and art collector Jeanne Reynal, who was an important member of the surrealist movement in the United States. Self-taught and inspired by Reynal's collection of abstract art, he began working with the materials he found in her mosaic studio, but soon branched out to oil on wood as well as canvas. He originally used items such as magnesite, nails, dirt, rocks, enamel, housepaints, and other items onto wood while experimenting with his style.

Through his exploratory approach to materials, Sills was able to release phantasmical abstract paintings. Intrigued by the light quality of mosaics, a similar luminosity emerged in Sill's bright oil compositions. His provocative handling of color and innovative use of media attracted the attention of the New York avant-garde. His work was a rejection of the prim and proper of the European avant-garde that traditional dominated Western art. In Harold Rosenberg's The Tradition of the New, Sills would be a coonskinner like many other great American artists, an American avant-garde artist who wholesale rejected traditional art and went his own path.

Sills's regular presence in the art world of the 1950s through the early 1970s as an African-American painter situated him as an integral element of the mainstream and African-American art. Thomas Sills perceived his art to be beyond the political. He found in art a form of expression for the dynamism that escapes any formal constraints. Sills' work was highly intuitive and he too sought inspiration from indigenous art—in the 1950s he made frequent trips to Mexico to study the sculptures, frescos and architecture of Chiapas and the Yucatan. He would also travel widely around the world to Peru, England, Russia, France, Italy, Spain, and other countries, influencing his work.[3]

At the peak of his career in the 1960s and 1970s, his work was widely shown in museums. He had four solo shows at Betty Parsons Gallery, was regularly featured in art journals and is in museum collections. Today, there is a renaissance of the popularity of his works. He is being exhibited in many shows, most recently African American Abstract Masters at the Anita Shapolsky Gallery, New York and Abstraction Plus Abstraction at Wilmer Jennings Gallery at Kenkeleba, and Encore, Five Abstract Expressionists at Sidney Mishkin Gallery of Baruch College, The City University of New York in 2006.

His work has been acquired by over 30 museums, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum Modern of Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the High Museum of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Newark Museum.[4][5][6]

Thomas Sills died on September 26, 2000, in New York City at the age of 86.