James Little

Born in Memphis, Tennessee in 1952, James Little received a BFA from the Memphis Academy of Art (1974) and then an MFA from Syracuse University (1976). Little’s commitment to understanding of the artwork of his predecessors inspired his own disciplined formalism – in his own words: “a formalism that has more to do with the rehabilitation of the medium and identifying what makes great painting great… Take painting and try to do something heroic and successful and ambitious.”

Once labeled a “defiant abstractionist,” Little has mastered the application of oil paint and beeswax to create lush pictorial effects for his paintings, void of any sense of horizon or landscape. Painting in encaustic, Little applies up to twenty layers of paint over the course of three months. The artist’s affinity for the “alchemy” of his technique mirrors his formalist interests in “flatness, the flat plane, and materials that keep illusions at bay.” Little confronts color with two concerns: “How to make it flat and how to make it interesting. Color has to have some humanity in it.”

Little is based in New York and has been exhibited nationwide since the mid-1970s. His work was included in the 2022 Whitney Biennial. Among his awards and honors, Little has received the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award in Painting in 2009 and the Pollock-Krasner Award in 2000. His work is included in numerous significant public and private collections, among them The Menil Collection (Houston, TX); The Newark Museum, NJ; The New Jersey State Museum (Trenton, NJ); and The Studio Museum of Harlem, New York. Little is also an instructor at the Art Students League.