Craft Around the Country

Material Abstractions Expands the Canon of Abstract Art

On view now at the North Dakota Museum of Art in Grand Forks, the exhibition centers BIPOC artists and their material innovations to augment art-historical understandings of abstraction.

By Jon Spayde
August 4, 2026

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Photo courtesy of the North Dakota Museum of Art

Samuel Levi Jones, look both ways before you cross my mind, 2024, deconstructed Harvard Classics on canvas, 40 x 70 x 2 in.

There’s a storyline in Western art history about abstraction: It started with Wassily Kandinsky (or maybe Hilma af Klint) in the early 20th century; climaxed at midcentury with the likes of Jackson Pollock, Willem De Kooning, and Mark Rothko; and gets revived from time to time.

Material Abstractions, a new show at the North Dakota Museum of Art in Grand Forks, demonstrates just how limited that Eurocentric narrative is.

According to Anna Sigrídur Arnar, the museum’s modern and contemporary art curator, abstraction long predates Kandinsky. It has been a resource for Indigenous and artists whose work is based in cultural traditions for centuries—artists who work with materials associated in the West with craft. And among artists today, there are active abstractionists who explore the cultural associations and sensory pleasures of these materials in their work.

Material Abstractions, which runs through October 4, gathers 29 pieces by 24 of these contemporary artists. In these works, drawn mainly from the museum’s collection, wool, wood, hemp, bamboo, clay, metal oxides, glass, leather, mirrors, old books, animal bones, seashells, and other materials express a range of meaning in abstract art.

Photo courtesy of the North Dakota Museum of Art

Kenny Nguyen, Endless No. 2, 2023, hand-cut silk fabric, acrylic paint, and canvas, mounted on wall, 84 x 63 in.

Kenny Nguyen’s Endless No. 2, for example, is a silk tapestry that combines headlong boldness of design with an evocation of the role of silk in the traditions of Vietnam, where the Charlotte, North Carolina–based artist was born.

For Centerfold, South African artist Usha Seejarim crafted two imposing oval panels that mirror each other. They’re entirely made of closely-packed clothespins. “The artist has talked about how she started turning to these materials after she became a mother, and clothespins became part of her everyday life,” says Arnar. “They add up to an abstract form, but Seejarim didn’t disguise them. They’re part of the meaning of the piece.”

Nigerian American artist Adebunmi Gbadebo, who lives and works in Philadelphia and New Jersey, contributes a dark brown, helmetlike ceramic form to which she has added strands of Black hair to cracks that occurred in the firing. It’s made of soil from the ground of the South Carolina plantation where her mother’s ancestors were enslaved.

“I wanted to show that materials have a language,” says Arnar. “In their tactile qualities, but also in where they come from—a language that carries knowledge, that can carry a message.”

Photo courtesy of the North Dakota Museum of Art

Adebunmi Gbadebo, In Memory of Henry Patterson, Born 1871, Died 8.30.1936, Someone I Have Loved Has Gone Away, And Left Me Lonely Day by Day, I Often Think of His Return, But I Know That His Stay Was Just Begun, 2021, True Blue cemetery soil and human hair, 19.5 x 24 x 19.5 in. In the background: Esteban Ramón Pérez, Baptism (Distressed), 2024, leather, acrylic, steel, and nylon, 104 x 104 in.

Photo courtesy of North Dakota Museum of Art

Usha Seejarim, Centerfold, 2026, wood clothespins, metal wire, steel, 8.5 x 94.5 x 6 in.

Jon Spayde is a writer and editor in Saint Paul, Minnesota. A former contributing editor to American Craft, he writes on art, psychology, education, and personal growth for a number of regional and national publications.

Learn more about Material Abstractions online.

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