In Western art, the relationship between figure and ground has long informed creative practices across mediums and media. Through strategies like illusionism and abstraction, the use of multiple perspectives, and by disrupting the flatness of the picture plane, artists have manipulated composition, dimensionality, and perception to distinguish between forms and their background while affirming their mutual entanglement.

Informed by cultural historian Sarah Lewis’ concept of “groundwork aesthetics” and drawn from the Henry’s collection, this exhibition explores figure-ground relationships within broader contexts of social tension. The works on view have mostly been made within the past 30 years—a period in which hard-won civil rights and claims to self-determination have been undone across the United States in ways that disproportionately impact Black, Brown, and LGBTQ+ lives, as well as marginalized communities more widely. How might art negotiate conditions that threaten the artist’s capacity to stand their ground? Directly or more obliquely, these works—whether monumental or intimate—emerge against the racialized and political forces that continue to transform the conceptual and literal ground of art.

Learn more about the Henry’s collections here.