BIOGRAPHY

George Nelson Preston (b. 1938, New York, NY) is an artist whose mixed-media, abstracted paintings are anchored by his profound scholarship in African art, years in Lower Manhattan’s avant-garde art scene, and extensive travels across the Atlantic world as an art historian, essayist, and curator.

Preston’s art practice is built upon a foundation of artistic and intellectual mentors and spaces, starting with his parents and his birthplace of Harlem, NY. Having grown up next door to the modernist history painter Charles Alston and meeting social realist painter Robert Gwathmey and expressionist sculptor Chaim Gross in high school, Preston’s early work probed racial themes. In the 1950s, Preston moved to the Lower East Side where he co-founded the Artist’s Studio at his storefront loft on 48 E 3rd Street and was a charter member of the Phoenix Gallery. The Artist’s Studio became a nucleus for New York’s Beat subculture and groundbreaking poets such as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and LeRoi Jones. The liberal brushwork and overlapping forms of Preston’s work from this time evoke free-verse, layered Beat poetry, reflecting Preston’s immersion in the Downtown Manhattan art scene of the midcentury.

In the 1960s, Preston’s work became influenced by his extensive travels on either side of the Atlantic Ocean. His travels in the Caribbean introduced him to cultural paragons such as Celia Cruz, Alicia Alonso, and Pablo Neruda. In the late 1960s, he conducted art historical and archaeological fieldwork across the Eastern Mediterranean and West Africa. Starting in 1987, Preston began collaborating with Brazilian institutions such as Museu de Arte de São Paulo and Museu Nacional de Belas Artes on curation, programming, and writing. His involvement in the Brazilian art scene led him to collaborate with Dr. Emanoel Araújo in the planning of the I Encontro Afro Atlântico at the Museu Afro Brasil in São Paulo in 2012, a seminal institution for the preservation and dissemination of Afro-Atlantic art and culture. In 2016, he was elected the Pierre Verger Chair of Rio de Janeiro Academia Brasileira de Belas Artes.

Preston’s recent output has focused on capturing the common spirit of the cultures he has encountered in his circumnavigation of the Atlantic. The artist sees the ocean as an “aqueous continent,” with its shores along the Caribbean, Brazil, Africa, and Europe serving as its borders. Building on the sweeping, expressionistic linework and daring paint drips of his earlier work, Preston delves into his own family history as well as themes of memory, historical trauma, and the complex legacy of the African diaspora. His simultaneous use of paper cut-outs, spliced and pasted quotations of European portraits, and African mask imagery reflects his extensive scholarship and travels.

Preston received a liberal arts BA in 1962 from the City College of New York, before earning an MA and PhD in art history from Columbia University in 1968 and 1973. Preston designed and curated the African Hall of the Brooklyn Museum in 1973, an exhibition which remained on view for ten years. In 2006, Preston co-founded the bi-local Museum of Art and Origins / Museu de Arte e Origins in Upper Manhattan and Santa Teresa, Rio de Janeiro with Dr. Dinah Guimaraens which makes public the artist’s own expansive, private collection of classical African art, East Asian works on paper, Amerindian First Nation art, eighteenth and nineteenth century European prints, and modern and contemporary art.

Preston’s work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions at David Zwirner Gallery, London (2023); Pinacoteca de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil (2022); Nina Johnson Gallery, FL (2022); Karl and Helen Burger Gallery at Kean University, NJ (2019); Grey Art Museum at New York University, NY (2017); Wilmer Jennings Gallery at Kenkeleba House, NY (2016); Merton D. Simpson Gallery, NY (2015); LeRoy Neiman Gallery, NY (2012); and gallery onetwentyeight, NY (2002), among others.

His work is held in museum collections including Museu Afro Brasil, São Paulo, Brazil; Musée Khelcom, Saly, Senegal; and Nigerian National Museum, Lagos, Nigeria, among others.