Opening reception with the artist: Thursday, March 5, 6–8 PM.
In advance of the opening reception, join us for a conversation between artist McArthur Binion and Jaynelle Hazard, curator, educator, and museum leader based in Washington, DC. RSVP Recommended as space is limited.
“Every painting I make is a self-portrait–not of my face, but of my labor, my memory, my life embedded in the surface.” – McArthur Binion
Lehmann Maupin is pleased to present Stuttering:Standing:Still II, an exhibition of new and recent work by McArthur Binion. Spanning a career of over five decades, Binion’s practice has consistently defied categorization. Renowned for his abstract, grid-based paintings that merge minimalist aesthetics with deeply personal history, Binion’s work continues to expand and reframe the language of abstraction and modernism. This exhibition marks Binion’s first solo presentation in New York in five years and his first late-career survey in the city. Institutions have increasingly recognized Binion’s work alongside a broader disciplinary reconsideration of abstraction’s history. To this end, Binion’s work insists that Black lived experience, memory, and autobiography are not outside modernism, but are in fact central to narratives of minimalism and abstraction.
Stuttering:Standing:Still II comes on the heels of a series of institutional exhibitions in 2025, including Notes on Form (Intimate Structures), a survey of Binion’s work at Georgetown University, Washington, D.C., curated by Jaynelle Hazard. Binion was also included in the recent exhibition Minimal, curated by Dia Art Foundation director Jessica Morgan, which featured works from the François Pinault Collection tracing the movement’s diversity from the 1960s to today.
Before gaining mainstream recognition, Binion developed a language that runs parallel to—but also critiques—dominant narratives of postwar abstraction. As Binion describes: “I didn’t come from art history, I landed there. If you look at it spiritually and in an unbiased way, [artists] went to jazz clubs and listened to bebop artists and learned to improvise abstractly…my work starts at that introduction.” Like jazz music, Binion’s work balances discipline and freedom. Structured by the modernist grid, his paintings unfold through intuitive, moment-by-moment decisions, allowing responsiveness and improvisation to emerge within a rigorous formal framework structured by repetition and sustained attention. His paintings often incorporate photocopied personal documents—birth certificates, address books, pages from encyclopedias, jazz records—embedded beneath layers of paint and wax; Binion refers to this biographical ground as the “under-concious” of the work. This fusion challenges the notion of minimalism as detached or impersonal, showing instead that rigor and intimacy can coexist. The repetitive marks, grids, and accumulations evoke labor, duration, and persistence, while the embedded texts anchor the work in biography and history. In this way, Binion’s paintings function simultaneously as abstract compositions and personal archives.
Stuttering:Standing:Still II will debut several new works from the artist’s Under:Ground series, which extends his long-standing interest in shaped canvases. Born in 1946 in Mississippi and raised on a farm, Binion’s early life continues to inform the material and conceptual foundations of his practice. In the 1980s, Binion penned a list of root vegetables, which remains pinned to his studio wall; in this body of work, it acts as a quiet yet persistent symbol. These everyday roots, according to Binion, relate to lineage, grounding, and the foundational elements of memory. As a Black child in the segregated South, Binion experienced a world where Black life was structurally pushed “underground”—socially constrained, politically suppressed, and rarely acknowledged in official narratives. In these paintings, handwritten documents are placed under layers of marks, suggesting that what shapes us most is often what we learn to keep beneath the surface and exploring how we carry these things forward without letting them disappear.
The exhibition also debuts new works from Binion’s Self:Portrait series. Departing from traditional Western portraiture, which seeks to reveal the subject, these works deliberately withhold. Here, Binion again paints atop personal documents, but the emphasis shifts. Instead of burying them completely, he lets their function as markers of identity come to the fore. In contrast to his past series—where identity is concealed beneath dense grids—these works assert presence on the surface, transforming restraint into a compelling declaration of self. These compositions also represent a striking evolution in the artist’s practice, moving beyond his characteristic muted palette to embrace a vivid, bold range of colors, infusing the works with heightened energy while maintaining the meticulous structure and rhythm that define his practice. Through his ongoing exploration of the “under-conscious,” where intuition, repetition, and personal history converge, the works on view bridge past and present while asserting Binion’s singular place in the canon.
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