LOUISVILLE, KY.- This summer, the Speed Art Museum presents Louisville’s Black Avant-Garde: Gloucester Caliman (G.C.) Coxe, the third installment of its signature exhibition series highlighting the founding artists of the Louisville Art Workshop – a 1960s, Black-led arts collective that shaped the art scene in Louisville by fostering community and advancing the careers of artists excluded from museums and galleries. The first major solo museum exhibition of experimental abstract artist Gloucester Caliman (G.C.) Coxe (1907-1999), Louisville’s Black Avant-Garde: Gloucester Caliman (G.C.) Coxe showcases works from throughout Coxe’s career alongside new art historical scholarship and is on view from June 7 through September 7, 2025.

Comprising nearly two dozen works, the retrospective examines Coxe’s artistic output over the course of his 40-year career, highlighting his experimental practice and the atypical materials and techniques used in his works. Coxe frequently utilized wire, clay, and other materials to create sculptural elements and add three-dimensional effects to his paintings, including heavily layering paints to create a vibrant interplay of colors across his canvases. A nonconformist with an eye for fabrication, thanks to his training in carpentry and experience as a theatre set builder, Coxe was known to stretch his own canvases, mix his own colors, and build his own frames.

Louisville’s Black Avant-Garde: Gloucester Caliman (G.C.) Coxe marks not only the artist’s first major solo exhibition, but also the first presentation of Coxe’s work at the Speed, and the first time in decades—if ever—that many of the works in the exhibition are on public view. It primarily features work on loan from private collections, including those of Coxe’s close friends, alongside three works from the Speed’s permanent collection–two from Coxe’s Exodus series and one from his Still Life series. While an influential figure in Louisville’s artistic history with an underground following in the contemporary art market, Coxe’s works are hard to come by, as he was never represented by a commercial gallery. Accompanying the exhibition is a fully illustrated catalogue—the first publication exploring Coxe’s oeuvre in depth, featuring extensively researched and reproduced archival materials on his life and work, including past writings by fellow artist and friend Dr. Robert L. Douglas (1934-2023), as well as new writings commissioned by the Speed.

“G.C. Coxe was one of the leading members of Louisville’s thriving creative culture in the mid-20th century, and an incredible abstract experimentalist painter. He was a leader among his peers, a mentor to the next generation, and an innovative artist, and we’re proud to finally present the first retrospective of his works at the Speed Art Museum,” said Speed Art Museum Director Raphaela Platow. “This long-overdue exhibition brings together works from many different collections, demonstrating the breadth and depth of Coxe’s impact on Louisville’s artistic community as both a painter and a connector.”

After the dissipation of the Gallery Enterprises, an artist collective established in 1957 by luminaries Sam Gilliam and Bob Thompson among others, Coxe joined Fred and Anna Bond, alongside the late Professor Robert L. Douglas to create the Louisville Art Workshop in 1966. The Bonds generously provided the physical space in which artists like Coxe and others were able to make and exhibit their art. The Workshop, as it was called, offered a supportive forum for artists to hone their technical skills, network, and build audiences in a time when Black artists were denied access to museums and commercial galleries. Through a community-focused mindset, the group flourished with a progressive atmosphere that challenged the artistic and cultural norms of the time, and was notably one of the few racially integrated artistic groups of the period.

Coxe had a wide-ranging background in the arts before co-founding the Louisville Art Workshop. As a young child, he and his three brothers were taught the fundamentals of drawing by their father, who worked as a Presbyterian minister and school principal in addition to being an accomplished watercolorist. As an adult, Coxe made a living working as an illustrator at the Fort Knox Training Aid Center and as a display artist for the Lyric and Grand (Colored) Theaters. In 1955 at age forty-eight, he became one of the first Black artists to graduate with a degree in Fine Arts from the University of Louisville. Throughout his multifaceted career, Coxe served as a mentor to many of the younger members of the Louisville Art Workshop, including William Duffy and sculptor Ed Hamilton, earning Coxe the moniker “the Dean of African American artists in Louisville.”

“G.C. Coxe is an essential figure not only for his experimental works that pushed the boundaries of form and technique during his time, but also for his role as a trailblazer and mentor to his fellow artists. In his time as a founding member of the Louisville Art Workshop and in the decades beyond, Coxe helped to shape the creative landscape of Louisville and create opportunities for future generations of artists to flourish,” said Speed’s former Curator of African and Native American Collections fari nzinga. “His influence has made lasting ripples throughout our community, and it is an incredible honor to highlight his legacy through a major exhibition and publication.”

This presentation continues the Louisville’s Black Avant-Garde series’ efforts to contextualize the Louisville Art Workshop's historical importance and abiding impact on the cultural life of Louisville, building on the Speed’s efforts to highlight the diversity of Kentucky’s artistic traditions and showcase artists who have been historically underrepresented in the Museum’s collections. The series was inaugurated in June 2023 with a survey of artist, educator, and scholar Professor Robert L. Douglas, followed by sculptor, draftsman, and teacher William M. Duffy.

Louisville’s Black Avant-Garde: Gloucester Caliman (G.C.) Coxe is organized by the Speed Art Museum and curated by fari nzinga, former curator of African and Native American Collections at the Speed, with support from Sarah Battle, research curator at the Speed and formerly associate projects manager for academic programs and publications at 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.