Self Portrait in Black, 2012 Oil on canvas Collection Godwin-Ternbach Museum, Gift of Dr. John Hunter and Dr. Harold Kooden, 2024.2.16

Family, Identity, & Culture celebrates the art of noted painter John Hunter, in a retrospective spanning two decades of artistic inquiry focusing on race, gender, and family history. This is the first museum retrospective of works on canvas and paper framed by Hunter’s identity as a gay man of African American descent. Lyrical oil paintings and works on paper deal with themes simultaneously personal and universal in works that often mourn or celebrate life’s central issues. Hunter’s humanistic approach, of a Renaissance scholar and curator, author and artist, to paintings steeped in the history of art are informed by a unique sensibility. Family photographs, research trips to Africa, sketches of well-known works of art by Manet to Picasso, contribute to powerful paintings marked by fluid brushstrokes and a delirious use of color. One understands how an artist can absorb all the lessons of art history yet filter that knowledge through a particular lens. 

Family, Identity, & Culture is divided into six themes that preoccupy John Hunter: Origins/Family, Racism/Living While Black, Africans/Ancestors, Colonialism, Familia, and Culture/Identity.  As well as Hunter’s own investigations into his immediate birth family, for example, his “Familia” series extends to lovers and friends in the domestic relationships of gay adulthood, born of choice, not biology. These evocative works explore the often-tenuous bonds of human relationships marked by illness, loss and the passage of time, while others suggest harmony, growth, and evolution. Hunter’s seminal compositions recapture the idea that painting is still an essential mode of expression.

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