Cynthia Hawkins (b. 1950)

Hawkins has always been intrigued with space - both known and unknown. Her stylistic meanderings always come back to the same essential truth, that is,  picturing planar realities on canvas…Hawkins utilizes a highly developed vocabulary whose meaning is evinced through a long and deliberate search through the development of her body of work.

Thelma Golden, Cynthia Hawkins, International Review of African American Art, v. 9, no. 2, October 1990: 21-24.

Thinking about the Currency of Meaning. 

Just prior to the advent of Currency of Meaning series of paintings I had been deeply involved in pure expressionism. In the late 1970s I was reading Hans Hoffmann’s Search for the Real; it was always with me and I aligned my painting practice with Abstract Expressionism. At the same time, Piet Mondrian’s early drawings and painting of trees offered an epiphanic realization of the possible evolutionary tracks one drawing or one painting could move one forward. 

By late spring in 1989 my painting, Plato’s Cave, brought a closure to overt expressionism, the moment arrived when I required, and my work required deeper research in signs and symbols and numbers. Philosopher Susan Langer’s insightful book Philosophy in a New Key was critical to that shift in my practice. Understanding and meaning could be inferred by the mere suggestion of a form or a fragment of a symbol. 

I searched for ancient symbols and their meanings, forms as simple as a circle, a triangle, numbers 1 through 9. Currency of Meaning is evidence of the evolutionary track  possible particularly when expressionism, form, symbols, and numbers came together to assert new meaning, and suggests a new language.

Cynthia Hawkins was born in 1950 and grew up in Flushing, NY where she began a lifelong passion for history and art. She received a BA in studio art from CUNY, Queens College, an MFA from Maryland Institute, College of Art, an MA in Museum Studies from Seton Hall University, and earned her PhD in American Studies from the University of Buffalo, SUNY. She is currently serving as gallery director and curator at the Bertha V.B. Lederer Gallery at SUNY Geneseo.

Her work has been shown in solo exhibitions since 1974 and included the shows:

Cynthia Hawkins: Drawings, Paul Klapper Library, Queens College, Flushing, NY, 1974

The Art of Cynthia Hawkins, 1984-1986, Frances Wolfson Art Center, Miami-Dade Community College, 1986

Cynthia Hawkins: New Works: The Currency of Meaning, Cinque Gallery, NY, 1989

Cynthia Hawkins: Meditations: Works on Paper, Essex Community College, MD.

Cynthia Hawkins: Clusters: Paintings and Drawings, Wilmer Jennings Gallery at Kenkeleba House, 2004.

Hawkins’ work has also been featured in the Atlanta Life National Art Competition and Exhibition, 1983, 1985,1990; Progressions: A Cultural Legacy, Clocktower Gallery, PS 1, NY, 1986; Black Women in the Arts, Montclair State College Art Gallery, NJ, 1990; The Studio Museum in Harlem: 25 Years of African-American Art, NY, 1994; Just Above Midtown Gallery, Peg Alston Fine Arts, and Rush Arts Gallery, NY; and in 2020 was featured in the The Currency of Meaning and Other Tales at the Wilmer Jennings Gallery at Kenkeleba House.

In 1990, the journal, The International Review of African American Art published the issue, African American Women Artists: Another Generation in which Thelma Golden wrote about Hawkins and the Currency of Meaning Series.

The Currency of Meaning series is numbered sequentially implying its contents’ obvious idiosyncratic order.  The series reads visually like a book, each element of each canvas a sentence or a phrase, every work a paragraph adding to the whole.  Hawkins’ ruminations here are concerned with meaning- its value (currency) and its power.  Her work reflects the residue of her readings about figurative art.  These readings, which emphasize the nature of abstraction in figurative art appear to have lead Hawkins to the conclusion that abstraction is not the literal opposite of figuration, but a stylistic and cognitive consummation.  The meaning(s) one gains is/are both the subjective and individual interpretation of the artists’ intentions. Meaning, then, is the fundamental facet in this series of works.