American artist James Little G’76 has donated an oil painting he created, “Euclidian Squares,” to the Syracuse University Art Museum’s permanent collection.
“James Little’s contributions to contemporary American art have made him a standout among our talented alumni artists. His gift to the Art Museum expands its already impressive collection and increases our students’ exposure to important and diverse artistic works,” says Vice Chancellor, Provost and Chief Academic Officer Gretchen Ritter.
Emily Dittman, interim director of the museum, says the acquisition “is truly transformational to the museum collection, as well as our community of emerging artists, scholars, University students and colleagues and the central New York area. ‘Euclidian Squares’ joins other abstraction works in the permanent collection and adds an important voice of a critical artist. We are truly grateful to James for his generosity and commitment to the museum.”
Painting image credit: James Little, “Euclidean Squares,” 2022. Gift of the artist.
One of Little’s “white paintings,” “Euclidean Squares” is an oval canvas placed in a handsome diamond-shaped frame. Featuring an off-kilter grid of squares, the painting rewards close looking by revealing its densely and carefully painted surface. To make the art, Little first laid down a ground using dark paint populated with multicolor speckles. He then masked off the surface before pouring a thick layer of white pigment onto the canvas, waiting until it partially dried to expose the grid pattern. Areas along the margin also highlight the oil paint’s material quality, with tiny peaks disclosing the paint’s tackiness when the grid is revealed.
For this and his other works, Little draws on the repetition seen in the different patterns that populate New York City, where he lives and works.
James Little. (Photo courtesy of Sophia Little ‘15)
In a 2022 interview with Memphis Magazine, he shared: “There’s no narrative [to my painting.] It’s based on imagination…” Little’s commitment to abstraction, therefore, depends on a nuanced and sophisticated understanding of an interplay of color and shapes that relies on color theory and design principles. It also is in line with the rich history of teaching abstraction in painting at Syracuse. While earning a master’s degree in fine arts at the University in the late 1970s, Little studied with George Vander Sluis; their paintings share a similar tactility in surface. As Little also says in a 2022 Artforum interview, “You have to constantly investigate and engage with the surface; the movement is perpetual—it won’t stop.”
“Euclidean Squares” will be on view in the 2024-2025 reinstallation of the Collection Galleries at the museum and anchor one of its thematic sections.
Dittman says the painting continues the important shift in the museum’s collecting plan over the past three years, which is a continuation of the museum’s strategic plan and reflects a commitment to collecting and preserving works of art as a research tool and serving as a community educational space with the power to reflect and shape society. Through a critical examination of the scope of the permanent collection, the museum recognized large gaps in the representation of all voices, cultures and themes practiced in the visual arts, Dittman says, and Little’s painting adds to the museum’s strength in abstraction while complementing paintings by Black abstract painters currently in the permanent collection. Dittman says this gift continues to expand the museum’s holdings of works of art that reflect the global community and examine interdisciplinary interests such as science, history, politics and social justice.
Little earned a bachelor of fine arts degree from the Memphis Academy of Art and a master of fine arts degree from Syracuse University. He is a 2009 recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award for Painting. His work is featured prominently in the 2022 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and it has been exhibited extensively in solo and group exhibitions around the world. Those venues include MoMA P.S.1 in New York; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas; Studio Museum in Harlem; St. Louis Art Museum; and the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C. His work has been included in “The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse” at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond.
Recent solo exhibitions include “Homecoming: Bittersweet” at Dixon Gallery & Gardens: Art Museum in Memphis and an exhibition at Kavi Gupta in Chicago. Little also participated in a 2022 historic collaboration for Duke Ellington’s Sacred Concerts series. His paintings are represented in numerous public and private collections, including the Virginia Museum of Fine Art; Studio Museum; the Menil Collection in Houston; Library of Congress; Maatschappij Arti Et Amicitiae in Amsterdam; Saint Louis Art Museum, Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse; New Jersey State Museum in Trenton; Tennessee State Museum in Nashville; Arkansas Arts Center in Little Rock; Newark Museum in New Jersey; and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.