Robert Pruitt

Robert Pruitt (b. 1975) is Houston-based artist well known for drawings, videos and installations dedicated to examination of the historical and contemporary experiences of African Americans. Robert Pruitt: Women includes nearly twenty large-scale conté drawings of Black women. Combining elements of science fiction, hip-hop culture and comic-book graphics, each figure is at once politically charged, physically grounded and fantastic—a blend of willful self-determination and culturally conditioned myth.

Robert Pruitt received his BFA from Texas Southern University and MFA from the University of Texas at Austin. In addition to his solo work, Pruitt is a founding member of the artist collective Otabenga Jones & Associates. He has exhibited his work at venues including the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Dallas Museum of Art and The Studio Museum in Harlem, and he was a participating artist in the 2006 Whitney Biennial and SITE Santa Fe 2010. Pruitt received the Artadia Artist Award in 2004 and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation award in 2008.

Robert Pruitt: Women is organized by Naima J. Keith, Assistant Curator.