James Little: Homage El Shabazz

Petzel is pleased to present Homage El Shabazz, James Little’s third exhibition with the gallery, which brings together a rarely seen body of work from a pivotal moment in Little’s practice. The exhibition comprises six intimately scaled paintings from Little’s Homage El Shabazz series made between 1985 and 1989. This show marks the largest presentation of the series since 1992, when six of these works were included in the Walker Art Center’s Malcom X: Man, Ideal, Icon exhibition curated by Dr. Kellie Jones. Coinciding with Homage El Shabazz, the first extensive monograph on Little’s five-decade career will be published this fall, featuring essays by Valerie Cassel Oliver, Aruna D’Souza, Gavin Delahunty, and Carrie Cooperider. Petzel will host a public launch and signing for the book at their 25th Street location on November 14, with Little in conversation with Aruna D’Souza.

In his Homage El Shabazz paintings, Little applies hand-mixed oil and wax to canvas, producing subtly shifting fields of color that lend a human touch to the structured, hard-edge compositions. In each work, four triangular panels converge at the center to form an “X” — a tribute to political activist Malcolm X, who used the name El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz following his pilgrimage to Mecca. Little has described these works as containing a “revolutionary spirit” without dictating a specific narrative or social effect on the viewer, posing a conscious examination of how political and personal references can coexist with the autonomy of abstraction.

Little’s work is deeply informed by Black histories and experiences, but he approaches abstraction as a language that extends beyond any single category or identity. His Homage El Shabazz paintings bring questions of racial activism and representation into dialogue with his sustained investigation of color, geometry, and materiality. For Little, abstraction possesses its own “non-narrative” syntax, capable of communicating multiple meanings and interpretations through time.

Homage El Shabazz will run concurrently with several significant institutional exhibitions featuring Little’s work, including Geometries at the Studio Museum in Harlem; Hard Art at MoMA PS1, both in New York; and Rhapsodies in Black—part of the inaugural program that will open at the new Memphis Art Museum this December.