Johnson Lowe is proud to present Sleeping Giants, the second exhibition in its inaugural year. Sleeping Giants apposes the work of three artists — Herbert Creecy, Thornton Dial, and Sam Glankoff — whose unique contributions to the canon of art history were largely overlooked for the majority of their careers. Despite their undeniable talent and significant innovations, their work was largely relegated to the periphery of modern and contemporary art. 

Sleeping Giants showcases paintings and assemblages, along with selections of works on paper as guideposts for their artistic outputs. The exhibition is accompanied by Sleeping Giants: Rediscovering and Reclaiming the History of Overlooked Modern Masters, an essay by award-winning journalist, art critic, and curator, Edward Gomez.

“Thanks to new ways of thinking about art history, especially due to the influence of postmodernist critical ideas, the overlooked or little-known legacies of some of modern art’s most remarkable sleeping giants have been rediscovered in recent decades being appreciated anew. Now honored — and aroused — these artists’ creative spirits and the ideas that inspired them gave rise to distinctive bodies of work for which a new generation of art historians, curators, critics, and collectors have been making room in modern art’s familiar canon and in the broader story of its long, multifaceted evolution.

With Sleeping Giants, Johnson Lowe Gallery pays homage to the inventiveness and originality of three artists who, to varying degrees, found themselves working on the margins of modern art’s mainstream currents, even as, in their own ways, they may now be seen — and acknowledged — for having contributed substantively to the language and expressive power of the art of their time.

Creecy, Dial, and Glankoff produced large, diverse bodies of work whose many innovations and hallmarks are still coming to light. Now, as Sleeping Giants richly demonstrates, as the achievements of such artists are being rediscovered and examined, the retelling — and reimagining — of modern art’s story of creative rebellion and invention are becoming all the more compelling thanks to the resonance of their enduring legacies.” – Edward Gomez