Louisville's Black Avant-Garde: Gloucester Caliman (G.C.) Coxe

JUNE 7 – SEPTEMBER 7, 2025

The third in the Louisville’s Black Avant-Garde series, this exhibition will focus on G.C. Coxe, “the Dean of African American artists in Louisville.” In 1955, at age forty-eight, Coxe became one of the first Black artists to graduate with a degree in Fine Arts from the University of Louisville. He became a co-founder and integral member of the Louisville Art Workshop (1966 – 1978) and mentored younger artists like Ed Hamilton and William Duffy.

Coxe was an abstract painter who experimented with form, while often using unconventional materials. Perhaps due to his time as a display artist for the Lyric and Grand (Colored) Theaters, or his twenty years of experience as an illustrator at the Fort Knox Training Aid Center, Coxe always stretched his own canvases, mixed his own colors, and made his own frames. Through loans of important works in both private and public collections, the Speed will present a retrospective exhibition of this important and prolific artist.

Louisville’s Black Avant-Garde is curated by fari nzinga, curator of African and Native American collections, with support from Sarah Battle, research curator at the Speed, formerly of the National Gallery of Art, whose oral history research project, Painting a Legacy: the Black Artistic Community in Louisville, 1950s-1970s, provided a scholarly foundation for the exhibition.

Learn about G.C. Coxe from his friends, family, and colleagues. Click here to dive deeper into life and his works here, GC Coxe Collective

Press Release

Exhibition Sponsors

Additional Support by:

Alyce Weixler

Exhibition Season Sponsors

Cary Brown and Steven E. Epstein
Debra and Ronald Murphy
Sociable Weaver Foundation

Exhibition Programming

Speed Reading Book Club
June 21, 10:30 am – 12:00 pm
Book: Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South by the late Winfred Rembert as told to Erin I. Kelly. Join us for Speed Reading Book Club, a book discussion inspired by both special exhibitions and artworks in the Speed’s permanent collection! Learn more

Artists with Ties to Louisville’s Black Avant-Garde
August 3, 2–3:30 pm
Join us for an afternoon celebrating the legacies of Old Walnut Street, and the long-lasting impact of Louisville’s Black artistic community in the twentieth century. Bringing together artists and historians involved in this important moment in the city’s cultural history, the program creates space to memorialize the individuals and collectives.

Louisville’s Black Avant-Garde: G.C. Coxe in the Press

Uncovering a Quiet Giant: G.C. Coxe Exhibition at the Speed, Audience Magazine, 6.9.25