Dick Jemison (1942 – 2024) was an American painter and sculptor whose Abstract Expressionist canvases and totemic wooden sculptures, charged with the visual language of Indigenous cultures and the earth tones of the American Southwest, earned him a distinguished place in significant public and corporate collections across the United States.Dick Jemison came of age as an artist during the period when the Abstract Expressionist aesthetic was being defined by the major painters of the New York School — Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, and Jackson Pollock. He absorbed their understanding of the canvas as an arena, a field of action where the intuitive gesture of the paint-loaded brush interacted with all other surface marks, and made it the foundation of a practice that was entirely his own. Jemison's Art StyleJemison's canvases focus on working the surface. Micaceous clay used in Pueblo pottery combines with textiles reminiscent of Great Plains culture, and the marks that result are a kind of graphic script, like a rudimentary and fragmented voice seeking to be understood. In his celebrated Dreamworks series, these graphic elements, more articulate and resolved, appear and disappear across compositions formatted like rising walls, blocks of flat painting experienced against the expanse of the canvas. The unifying force of his paintings is color, specifically the dominance of a rich earth-orange tone that warms and makes luminous the shapes within the structure, localizing the work in the ochre hills and adobe architecture of the Southwest while simultaneously reaching toward something universal. His sculptures extend this vision into three dimensions: vertical totems carved from standing tree trunks and hand-smoothed into freely invented ancestor forms, their outer surfaces polychromed with patterned divisions of primary and complementary hues, thick with constellation-like dots and cross-hatchings that pay homage to the indigenous cultures he knew intimately from a lifetime of world travel.The Legacy of Dick JemisonJemison's work is held in a substantial range of public and corporate collections, including the Birmingham Museum of Art, the Montgomery Museum of Art, Goldman Sachs, IBM, AT&T, and E.F. Hutton, among many others. His career represents one of the most sustained and distinctive engagements with the visual heritage of the American Southwest by a non-Native artist working in the Abstract Expressionist tradition. Selected Public and Corporate CollectionsAmerican Television Communications, Denver, Colorado Anderson Industries, Inc., Rockford, Illinois AT&T, Denver, Colorado Baptist Hospital Conference Center, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, Alabama The Charter, Beaver Creek, Vail, Colorado Consolidated Capital Companies, San Francisco, California Denver National Bank, Denver, Colorado E.F. Hutton, New York, New York Goldman, Sachs, New York, New York Head Corporation, Baltimore, Maryland IBM, Birmingham, Alabama Jemison Investment Company, Birmingham, Alabama Montgomery Museum of Art, Montgomery, Alabama Prudential-Bache, New York, New York