Joe Minter’s (b.1943, Birmingham, AL) first solo exhibition on the West Coast is currently showing at Parker Gallery. The exhibition at Parker Gallery will feature a selection of large-scale sculptures from 1989 to 2018, together with recent paintings made between 2022–2024. 

The artist’s retirement from steel and construction work in 1989 coincided with the announcement of a civil rights museum to be established in his hometown of Birmingham. Anxious that the “foot soldiers” of the civil rights movement would be omitted from the official narrative, Minter began making sculptures in earnest, tributes to historically under acknowledged peoples and events, particularly those of his African ancestors. The sculptures—welded-steel and mixed media works using castaway objects— speak directly to the history of enslavement and oppression in the United States. In 2021, the artist began making paintings that address contemporary and historical American society, while transmitting genuine hope for its future. 

Recent group exhibitions include Shifting Landscapes, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2024); Souls Grown Deep like the Riv-ers: Black Artists from the American South, Royal Academy of Art, London, England (2023); and Called to Create: Black Artists of the American South, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC (2022). His work is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., the Ackland Art Museum at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, CA, the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA, the New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA, the Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL, and the Minneapolis Museum of Art, Minneapolis, MN, among others.