FRESH PAINT
Reggie Burrows Hodges

The Parrish Art Museum and The FLAG Art Foundation continue their ongoing collaboration with the latest installation of FRESH PAINT, featuring a painting by the Bay Area-based artist Reggie Burrows Hodges (American, b. 1965). Labor: Sound Bath (2022) is part of Hodges’s Labor series, large-scale landscape paintings that celebrate the generative tradition of harvesting food from the earth while pointing to the agriculture industry’s historic and contemporary reliance on exploitative labor. This exhibition marks the first time that Labor: Sound Bath will be on view to the public.

FRESH PAINT is a rotating series of single-artwork exhibitions at the Parrish that spotlights new or never-before-exhibited works by both emerging and established artists. By circumventing traditional exhibition planning timelines—which can extend years into the future—FRESH PAINT provides a platform for artists to promptly showcase freshly created artworks and ideas, allowing for a more direct response to current issues and cultural movements. This approach fosters a timelier dialogue between the Museum, visitors, and our surrounding community. Presented in the Parrish’s Creativity Lounge located in the Lobby, FRESH PAINT is open to the public at no charge during regular Museum hours.

Each FRESH PAINT installation is accompanied by two sets of interpretative texts: one is a commissioned piece of writing by an invited author, critic, poet, or scholar; the other is a collaboration between members of the Parrish Teen Council ARTscope, a youth-focused educational initiative that offers participants a comprehensive exploration of the visual arts, career pathways, and practical experience in museum operations.

FRESH PAINT: Reggie Burrows Hodges is organized by Scout Hutchinson, Associate Curator of Exhibitions at the Parrish, in collaboration with Jon Rider, Director, and Caroline Cassidy, Director of Exhibitions, at FLAG.

Exhibition Support
FRESH PAINT: Reggie Burrows Hodges is made possible, in part, thanks to the generous support of The FLAG Art Foundation.

The Parrish Art Museum’s programs are made possible, in part, by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature, and by the property taxpayers from the Southampton School District and the Tuckahoe Common School District.

About Reggie Burrows Hodges
Born in 1965 in Compton, CA, Hodges grew up in Los Angeles, New York, and Washington, DC. He studied theater, film, and African American studies at the University of Kansas, where he also played competitive tennis. He later moved to New York and began performing with the reggae dub band Trumystic; music and sound continue to be influential to his life and work. He began painting and drawing consistently when he moved to Maine in 2008.

Hodges always begins his canvases by coating them with a layer of black paint. Building from this dark surface, he works color into the composition with loose, impressionistic brushwork, out of which forms gradually emerge in the shadowy negative space. Whether rendering landscapes, interior spaces, sporting events, or maritime scenes, Black subjects are central to Hodges’s work. Composed of the flat black ground, his figures lack distinguishing features—a technique Hodges employs, in his words, “to enroll the Black figure as a stand-in for humanity.” By this method, the figures that populate his paintings become visual points of concentration amidst the vibration of color and texture that defines their contours.

Hodges has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at institutions such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2023–24); the Addison Gallery of American Art​, Andover, MA (2023); and the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, ME (2021–22). His work is held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Studio Museum in Harlem; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. He is the recipient of awards such as the Jacob Lawrence Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2021) and the Joan Mitchell Painters & Sculptors Grant (2020).

About The FLAG Art Foundation
The FLAG Art Foundation is a non-collecting, nonprofit exhibition space that mounts solo, two-person, and thematic group exhibitions centering on emerging and established artists from around the globe. Organized by a diverse community of curators and thinkers within and beyond the art world, FLAG opened to the public in 2008 and has staged over 100 exhibitions celebrating the work of nearly 1,000 artists. Committed to providing education and resources for its surrounding community, and across New York City, all exhibitions and programs—including artist talks, artist-led workshops, and guided tours for school and museum groups—are free and open to the public.

The FLAG Art Foundation was founded by Glenn Fuhrman, an art patron and philanthropist, and alongside his wife Amanda, a Co-Founder of The Fuhrman Family Foundation. Fuhrman is a Trustee of New York-Presbyterian Hospital, New York, NY, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, and The Tate Americas Foundation, New York, NY, and is a Board Member of The Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, PA. He is also a Board Member of the 92nd Street Y, New York, and The Central Park Conservancy, New York, NY.