Artist, activist, and community organizer Tom Lloyd (1929–1996) was an early pioneer of using electric light as an artistic medium. Collaborating with an engineer at the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), Lloyd developed a highly experimental and technologically advanced art practice in the 1960s that challenged popular understandings of what role the work of Black artists should play. Employing a purposely limited vocabulary of colors, forms, and shapes, Lloyd advocated for a relationship between abstraction and blackness that was greatly debated at the time, and one that continues to animate conversations around artistic practices.

Born in Detroit, Lloyd relocated to New York City as an infant with his family. He entered the New York art world in the 1960s at the start of a radical shift in the status quo that saw Black artists organizing and demanding visibility and representation for artists of color. Although his work was collected and included in numerous exhibitions, by the end of the decade, Lloyd had already moved away from full-time artmaking to dedicate himself to activism and community leadership. He was a founding member of the Art Workers’ Coalition, which formed in 1969 to advocate for artists’ rights, and founded and led the Store Front Museum/Paul Robeson Theatre (1971–1986) in Queens.

Lloyd’s decision to set aside his artistic practice in favor of supporting those of other artists ofAfrican descent may have contributed to his long-standing absence from scholarship related to these decades of artistic production in the United States. Based on extensive new research and intensive conservation work, Tom Lloyd explores twenty years of the artist’s career and shows, for the first time ever, his assemblages, electronically programmed light sculptures, and works on paper together and alongside materials that illuminate his efforts to transform the New York art world.

Tom Lloyd is organized by Connie H. Choi, Curator. Exhibition support and organization of Store Front Museum materials provided by Habiba Hopson, former Senior Curatorial Assistant. Special thanks to Charmaine Branch, Sasha Cordingley, Amber Edmond, Abigail Gordon, Jordan Jones, Zuna Maza, and Meg Whiteford.