Robert Carter and Charles White in Dialogue

Robert Carter and Charles White in Dialogue

February 18 through April 18, 2025

529 West 20th Street, 5th Floor, New York

Opening Reception: Thursday, February 20, 6-8pm

New York, NY…ACA Galleries is pleased to present Robert Carter and Charles White in Dialogue, an exhibition pairing works by two artists long recognized for their socially and historically engaged artistic practices spanning decades.

Both Carter and White were skilled from a young age, with even their childhood drawings reflecting keen observations and design talents. At age 17, both artists won prizes in recognition of their early work as artists–White won a scholarship to study at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he made his first lithograph, and Carter won the Scholastic Art & Writing Award, leading him to pursue his passions with further studies at Pratt Institute.

Inspired by Diego Rivera and other prominent Mexican Muralists, White said that he used his art to “say what I have to say” and “fight what I have to fight.” This bold and purposeful attitude in combination with an exquisite sensitivity for line, shape and tone makes White’s art both beautiful and evocative. His drawings, paintings and lithographs of African-American life, its triumphs and struggles, are rendered as visual poetry. In 1946 ACA Galleries presented the first solo exhibition of White’s work in New York. Mater Dolorosa, an oil from this original exhibition will be on view.

A traveling museum show of Carter’s work is concurrently on view at The Heckscher Museum of Art through May 25, 2025 and will be opening at the Cressman Center Galleries, University of Louisville August 1, 2025. His work will also be included in Norman Rockwell Museum’s upcoming traveling exhibition, Imprinted: Illustrating Race. In 2027 a retrospective exhibition will open at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky. This show will commemorate the museum’s 100^th anniversary and will also include Sam Gilliam, Bob Thompson and Kenneth Victor Young. Carter’s work is driven by a sensitivity to detail—grounded by his work as an illustrator—that serves as the legacy and abiding thread connecting the continuum of his art. The dignity of the human spirit reigns within the people of Carter’s compositions, uplifted by the skill of his hand and his keen understanding of the human experience.

Born 1938 in Louisville, Kentucky, Robert Graham Carter has been a celebrated artist and illustrator for more than 60 years. Carter received his Master of Fine Arts from Pratt Institute in New York in 1966 and was an illustrator for McGraw Hill and Simon & Schuster. He retired as a professor of art at Nassau Community College after 50 years, and has been a lecturer at numerous public schools, universities and private art organizations. Carter’s work is in the permanent collection of institutions across the United States including the Denver Art Museum, The Heckscher Museum of Art, Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, The Long Island Museum, National Memorial for Peace and Justice, The Petrucci Family Foundation, the Speed Art Museum and Yale Law School.

Born in Chicago just after the First World War, Charles White (1918-1979) is widely recognized for his contributions to American Socialist Realism. White’s boyhood drawings were early indications of his artistic talent and what would later develop into his social conscience. He eventually studied at New York’s Art Students League. White’s work at the League won him a place in the WPA’s Federal Art Project in 1940, where he was commissioned as a muralist. His first mural depicted a “History of the American Negro Press.” In 1941, Charles White won a Rosenwald Foundation grant to travel through the American south, rounding out his experience of African-American life and history. After settling in the Los Angeles area in 1956, he became a respected teacher at the Otis Art Institute, where he remained on the faculty from 1965 until his death. His work is in numerous public and private collections in the U.S. and abroad including the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Library of Congress, the Oakland Museum, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Howard University, Deutsche Academie der Kunst in Berlin, Warsaw’s Palace of Culture, Moscow’s Pushkin Museum and others. He has been the recipient of several awards in the United States and internationally, and was given an honorary doctorate from Columbia University.