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A long-overdue assessment of James Brantley and his artistic contribution to American contemporary art
Force/Field: The Art of James Brantley, held at the Frances M. Maguire Art Museum at Saint Joseph’s University in early 2027, is the first major museum exhibition of the works of James Brantley (b. 1945). Renowned for his distinctive atmospheric landscapes and enigmatic urban views, Brantley has been a significant figure in American and Philadelphia contemporary art for more than fifty years. Trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) in the late 1960s and early 1970s, he studied with a cohort of influential Black artists, including Barkley L. Hendricks, Moe Brooker, Charles Searles, and Ellen Powell Tiberino. In the following decades, Brantley worked to break barriers and challenge inequity within the art world, especially through his participation in the Black artist collaborative Recherché. French for “rare” or “sought after,” Recherché organized in the late 1970s to provide members vital professional opportunities and exposure.
Brantley emerged at a pivotal moment in American art, when figuration challenged the prevailing emphasis on abstraction and conceptualism. The human figure as well as landscapes have remained central in his painting, and he has maintained an artistic individuality informed by lived experience and in dialogue with other artists’ work. His monumental vistas and figural pieces embody a complexity that resists precise identification and draws viewers in through their uncanny familiarity and dramatic contrasts of flat planes of color with atmospheric effects.
Force/Field is a long-overdue assessment of Brantley and his artistic contribution to American contemporary art. The catalog essays place the major themes explored by Brantley into context within the dynamic cultural landscape of Philadelphia in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Of particular focus are works produced in the twenty-first century—a period of profound creativity and the culmination of ideas developed over the course of five decades.
The catalog was supported through the generous contribution of the Philadelphia Fund Edna W. Andrade Grant.
Halima Taha is a distinguished art advisor, curator, author, cultural strategist, and appraiser specializing in African American art and culture. Best known for her pioneering work as the author of Collecting African American Art: Works on Paper and Canvas, she has spent over three decades providing expertise to museums, collectors, institutions, and artists nationwide. Taha’s leadership has advanced the visibility and scholarship of artists from the Harlem Renaissance to today’s cutting-edge innovators. With a passion for public education and cultural stewardship, she continues to serve as a trusted voice in the field, helping diverse audiences appreciate the richness, history, and impact of African Descendent art in America. www.tahathinks.art
Erin E. Downey, Ph.D., is an art historian and the Assistant Curator of the Frances M. Maguire Art Museum at Saint Joseph’s University. She is the editor and a contributing author of Margaret Gest: Painting at the Threshold in 20th-c. Philadelphia (2025). Downey received her Ph.D. from Temple University, where she specialized in artistic exchange and migration between the Netherlands and Italy during the early modern period. She has received numerous fellowships for her research, including the Samuel H. Kress Institutional Fellowship at Leiden University, a Getty Library Research grant, the Renaissance Society of America Newberry Library grant, and the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship at the Library Company of Philadelphia.
Emily Hage, Ph.D. is a professor of Art History at Saint Joseph’s University and the founding director of the Frances M. Maguire Art Museum. She teaches 20th - and 21st-century art and architecture, and has published extensively on art in magazines. Her first book, Dada Magazines: The Making of a Movement, came out in 2021, and she is in the final stages of her second book, on the art in Fortune magazine. Before coming to Saint Joseph’s, she worked at museums throughout the U.S., including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the National Portrait Gallery, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.