Modernist Painting by Robert Threadgill. Oil on canvas, “Two Chairs”, estate stamped verso, from artist’s estate.
Robert Allen Threadgill. African-American Painter / Commercial Artist / Furniture Designer / b. 1930 Salisbury, NC d. 2018 Atlantic City, NJ.
Robert Threadgill was born in 1930 in North Carolina. His family, seeking employment during the Great Depression, moved to Atlantic City, NJ in the mid 1930s. Threadgill attended the Atlantic City schools where he excelled as a track athlete, and later enrolled at the Pratt Institute in New York City from which obtained a B.F.A. in Industrial Design. While in New York he met and then married Marilyn (Wynns) Threadgill, a fellow artist (Sculptor) and student at the City College of New York. Threadgill worked in New York for the IBM Corporation as a director in the graphic arts department, and later worked in furniture design for the Danish Design Center. In 1993, the Threadgill family was relocated to Georgia, a period during which the artist became politically energized after meeting the first black mayor of Atlanta, Maynard Jackson, and noted Civil Rights leaders such as John Lewis and Julian Bond. Threadgill returned to Atlantic City in 2001 where he taught High School.
During the 1960s Threadgill exhibited at the Ligoa Duncan Gallery in NYC, where he won a prize (1965), the Raymond Duncan Gallery in Paris (1966), the Lincoln Institute (an all-black boarding high school in Shelby County, Kentucky), and in 1972 and 1973 at the Acts of Art Gallery, in Greenwich Village, NY. Acts of Art, Inc. was owned by artists Nigel L. Jackson and Pat Grey, and specialized in showing art by African Americans. Acts of Art was an integral part of the Black Arts Movement in the 1970s
In the early 2000s Threadgill exhibited with the Hultzman Gallery, and at the Atlantic Cape Community College, along with his wife artist Marilyn Threadgill. The African American Heritage Museum of Southern NJ conducted a retrospective exhibition in 2021. The artist’s works are included in the National Archives in Washington, DC; The Sorbonne, Paris; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and within the archives of Acts of Art, Inc., among other collections.
Robert Threadgill paintings from the 1950s and 1960s include portraits, self-portraits and nudes rendered in a manner that can be described as modernist and characterized by brooding undertones. Works from the 1980s and 1990s showcase such disparate themes as commercialized sexuality, traditional southern food, alcohol, and negro spirituality.
Threadgill’s large canvasses parade this material with bold coloration, and unabashedly mix abstraction, expressionism, pop art, and even elements of brutalism and graffiti art in a shout for the viewer’s attention. During this period, the artist also created a series of large oil paintings of individual wooden chairs. Threadgill’s “chair portraits” echo the loneliness of many of his earlier works, the provocative empty seats suggesting that a sitter has already left - or has yet to arrive. On the surface, the stolid furniture bears little connection to Threadgill’s frenzied works of the same period. A further read reveals that the quiet, empty chairs and the wild, chaotic images are complimentary components within Threadgill’s larger artistic vision.

Excellent estate condition