Force/Field: The Art of James Brantley

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.