George Nelson Preston: painting, as in gospel
July 15th - August 15th, 2025To resist the urge to mythologize George Nelson Preston would be like trying to swim through a rip current toward the plain fact of shore. That is to say it’s futile. One must be swept into the immensity of his history and influence, hurtled across continents and generations until settling finally into a state of sober awe. But the history and lore should not obfuscate the impact of the work itself. Preston’s significance as a figure is undisputed, but the significance of the works, particularly as a seminal member of the second-generation New York School painters also bears careful consideration.
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George Nelson Preston painting in his studio. Photography by Frank Stewart.
Preston’s artistic life had an auspicious start. Born in New York to parents who nurtured his creative proclivities, Preston studied art and literature throughout his formative years. In the late 1950s, as Preston’s painting practice became more focused, he founded the Artist’s Studio at 48 East 3rd Street, which acted as a hub for avant-garde artists and Beat poets like Allen Ginsburg and Jack Kerouac. In 1960, he traveled to Cuba where he met and interviewed figures like Pablo Neruda and Celia Cruz, which began a lifelong engagement with the Afro-Atlantic world that would eventually take him throughout the Caribbean, South America, Africa, and Europe.
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Dr. George Nelson Preston (right) during his Beat years at a poetry reading, October 25, 1959. Photograph from Fred W. McDarrah.
Preston played a vital role in expanding the expressive range of the second generation of the New York School. His contribution is distinctive and multifaceted, shaped by his roles as a painter, poet, intellectual, and later, a pioneering African art historian. Though not as commercially celebrated as some of his peers, Preston was deeply embedded in the cultural and aesthetic ferment of 1960s and 70s New York, and his impact lies in how he bridged abstract painting, African diasporic consciousness, and intellectual activism.
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Studio portrait of George Nelson Preston. Photography by Greg Carideo.
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A glimpse into George’s world—bookshelves lined with his personal collection of books and objects. Photography by Jake Holler.
His paintings embraced gestural abstraction, symbolic form, and saturated color, using the visual language of modernism to explore spiritual meaning and ancestral connection. Departing from the purely formalist concerns of the first-generation Abstract Expressionists, Preston inflected his work with historical and cultural resonances, drawing especially from African cosmologies and diasporic iconographies. Preston’s abstraction articulated a distinct cultural specificity, placing him in meaningful dialogue with contemporaries like Jack Whitten, Romare Bearden, and Faith Ringgold. He helped broaden the definition of abstraction in American painting at the time, demonstrating that it could convey not only existential depth but also ancestral memory and political presence.
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George Nelson Preston, Historic Sea Lanes Of The Slave Trade: Somewhere Between Kisama and Quissamà/ Algures Entre Kisama e Quissamà, IX/2017, Oil on canvas, 48 x 60 in.
The visual language of his works has persisted throughout a career spanning more than half a century. In his 2025 exhibition with Nina Johnson gallery, The Four Moments of the Sun, his free gestural approach creates untethered depths. Stretches of color against blank space produce compositions that are imbued with both a spiritual energy and profound serenity. This spiritual undertone presides over the true heart of Preston’s practice, which is community. Over the course of his career community has operated in two overlapping modes. In the local sense: by creating a physical space in New York for artists, writers, and activists to gather; in his various teaching positions and innumerable less formal mentorship roles; through the Museum of Art and Origins, which exhibits a panoply of Classical African art, Modern and Contemporary art, as well as photography and personal ephemera. In the broader sense, though, community extends beyond Preston’s physical vicinity and into the global diasporic communities of the Afro-Atlantic world, and ostensibly, beyond that world too—into the cosmos themselves.
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A look into George's studio. Photography by Jake Holler.
Preston has said of his practice: “For me the work of art is never an end in itself. Art is The Way, The Path, The Light…” For him, art is not an object, but a medium–a way to further understanding and connection. And by this measure, Preston has been extraordinarily successful. Cassi Namoda recounts her exchanges with her longtime mentor: “there was never a need for mundane conversations. The air between us always allowed the gestures and syntaxes […] to […] enter the realm of the Kalungas–the world of the ancestors–where epiphanies lay waiting in sacred conversations: no talking (only seeing, listening), and the spirituality we profess in painting as in gospel.” George Nelson Preston’s draw is planetary; his impact, however, is beyond this world.
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George Nelson Preston, Red Kalunga Viewed From Fort Anomabo , 2023, Oil on canvas, 30 x 40.25 in.
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George's desk. Photography by Jake Holler.
George Nelson Preston is an artist, acclaimed professor, prolific author, critic, and an honoured Akan chief in Ghana. Born in New York City in 1938, he grew up surrounded by art and music and in 1959 founded the Artist’s Studio at 48E 3rd Street, which became the center of Beat poetry. Shortly after, in 1960, he visited Cuba on assignment for Swank Magazine, and was introduced to Celia Cruz, Benny Moret, and interviewed Pablo Neruda. This would be the first of his many journeys across the Americas, Africa, and Europe. Later, George Nelson Preston entered the Primitive and Pre-Columbian Art Program in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University, where he earned his Masters degree in 1968 and his PhD in 1973. During this period he curated, designed, and installed the African Hall at the Brooklyn Museum, which would remain on view through 1978. George Preston is the recipient of The Art of Alumni of CCNY 2014 Career Achievement Award, and a Former Foreign Area Fellowship recipient. In 2016, he was elected to the Pierre Verger chair of the Academia Brasileira de Belas Artes, Rio de Janeiro. He is also the founder of the Museum of Art & Origins, located on 162nd Street in New York City, which exhibits hundreds of African artworks, Preston’s own artworks, antique family photographs, and works by other contemporary artists. He lives and works in New York City.