Louisville's Black Avant-Garde: Gloucester Caliman (G.C.) Coxe
JUNE 7 – SEPTEMBER 7, 2025
The third in the Louisville’s Black Avant-Garde series, this exhibition will focus on G.C. Coxe, “the Dean of African American artists in Louisville.” In 1955, at age forty-eight, Coxe became one of the first Black artists to graduate with a degree in Fine Arts from the University of Louisville. He became a co-founder and integral member of the Louisville Art Workshop (1966 – 1978) and mentored younger artists like Ed Hamilton and William Duffy.
Coxe was an abstract painter who experimented with form, while often using unconventional materials. Perhaps due to his time as a display artist for the Lyric and Grand (Colored) Theaters, or his twenty years of experience as an illustrator at the Fort Knox Training Aid Center, Coxe always stretched his own canvases, mixed his own colors, and made his own frames. Through loans of important works in both private and public collections, the Speed will present a retrospective exhibition of this important and prolific artist.
Louisville’s Black Avant-Garde is curated by fari nzinga, curator of African and Native American collections, with support from Sarah Battle, research curator at the Speed, formerly of the National Gallery of Art, whose oral history research project, Painting a Legacy: the Black Artistic Community in Louisville, 1950s-1970s, provided a scholarly foundation for the exhibition.
Exhibition Sponsors
Additional Support by:
Alyce Weixler
Exhibition Season Sponsors
Cary Brown and Steven E. Epstein
Debra and Ronald Murphy
Sociable Weaver Foundation