Sam Middleton (1927-2015)

Sam Middleton was born in New York City and grew up in Harlem near the Savoy Ballroom. This notable venue provided much inspiration for his future collages. His love of classical and jazz music was integral to his very life - he was known to carry an unwieldy turntable and collection of records wherever he traveled.

Middleton joined the Merchant Marines in 1944. Between voyages, he rented a loft in Greenwich Village, meeting and befriending a small group of African American artists, which included Walter Williams, Clifford Jackson, Harvey Cropper, and Herb Gentry - all of whom would expatriate to Europe in the next decade. In the early 1950s, Middleton was part of New York’s Cedar Tavern scene, which included his friends Robert Motherwell and Franz Kline. Kline encouraged Middleton to apply to the John Hay Whitney Foundation and to seek artistic success outside of New York.

Middleton received a scholarship for one year of study at the Instituto Allende in San Miguel. Otherwise, he was largely self-taught. It was there in 1957 that he began experimenting with collage. His work was shown at the Contemporary Arts Gallery in 1958 and again in 1960. The Whitney Museum of American Art showed four of his works in Young America 1960: Thirty American Painters Under 36.

Between 1959 and 1961, Middleton lived in Europe, exhibiting in Spain, Sweden, and Denmark. Much of his artistic material was gleaned from ephemera he collected as he moved from city to city. While living between Stockholm and Copenhagen (1960-1961), Middleton’s collages continued to evolve as he began incorporating gouache and other media into his works.  Despite the improvisational nature of his work - like the jazz musician, he was quite meticulous and practiced with his technique and composition.  In addition to working his craft, Middleton completed a thorough treatise on the history and utilization of collage as a medium.

By 1962, Middleton was living in Amsterdam, where he became acquainted with Dutch typographer, curator, and director of the Stedelijk Museum, Willem Sandberg.  He was introduced to the world of the CoBRA art movement, which included American sculptor Shinkichi Tajiri, Dutch painter Jef Diederen, and other multi-disciplinary artists and graphic designers. He self-published the book Impressions From My Atelier/ Sam Middleton in 1967, which included “A Round Poem to Collage” and eight works of his art, each illustrated and accompanied by a poetic phrase.

After acquiring a farmhouse in Oterleek, North Holland, he began to bring the flat polders (land reclaimed from water) of the Netherlands near the North Sea into his collages, which resemble aerial views of the land etched with the geometry of human intervention. Middleton remained in the Netherlands for the rest of his life. He showed extensively there and in other locales throughout Europe, but less in the United States. In 1970, his work was shown in the exhibition Afro-American Artists Abroad at the Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas, Austin and in 1983, the Studio Museum in Harlem held the exhibition An Ocean Apart: American Artists Abroad which also included Herb Gentry, Cliff Jackson, and Walter Williams.

His work is found in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art,NY; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, NL; Fisk University, Nashville, TN; Brooklyn Museum, NY, as well as many others.

REF:

Julie L. McGee, “Sam Middleton: Freedom’s Song” in “Riff: African American Artists and the European Canon, “Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 4, no. 1 (Spring 2018), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.1628.

Lock, Graham. “Sam Middleton: The Painter as Improvising Soloist.” The Hearing Eye: Jazz and Blues Influences in African American Visual Art, Oxford University Press, New York, NY, 2009, pp. 120–133.

An Ocean Apart: American Artists Abroad: Held October 8, 1982-January 9, 1983, at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. The Museum, 1982.

Bush, Teresia. “Sam Middleton Rediscovered.” The International Review of African American Art, vol. 19, no. 2, 2003, pp. 2–8.