Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African American Art

Bringing focus to African-American art and its essential place in the history of American art.

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Sam Middleton

1927-2015

Works in the Collection

PFF137-Sam Middleton, Love Day, Mixed Media, 1963. Abstract composition with collage elements including a Pall-Mall cigarette pack, Asian newspaper print, and sheet music.
Love Day
1963

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Biography

Sam Middleton was born in 1927 in New York City and grew up in Harlem at the height of the Harlem Renaissance. He enlisted in the Merchant Marines at age 17 and returned to New York in the 1950s. There he befriended other New York School artists such as Franz Kline, Jackson Pollack, and Robert Motherwell. Middleton later moved to Mexico where he studied at the Instituto Allende. It was there that his painting style shifted from social realism to abstract expressionism. He then spent time traveling to Spain and Sweden and eventually settled in the Netherlands in the 1960s. He formed many close friendships during his time in Europe, spending time with artists and intellectuals such as Herbert Gentry and James Baldwin.  His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and can be found in the collections of the Whitney Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts, Fisk University Galleries, the Hampton University Museum, and the Howard University Museum, as well as in private collections all around the world.

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