“Modernism belonged to me also.” So resolved British Guiana–born artist Frank Bowling in 1966, when he moved from London to New York City, impelled by ambition to make his mark on modern painting. “Frank Bowling’s Americas” is the first exhibition dedicated to the transformative years the artist spent in the US, and the first major survey of his work by an American institution in more than four decades.

The exhibition brings together a range of Bowling’s powerful works in the country of their making—Pop-inflected paintings from the early 1960s; monumental, color-soaked canvases that evoke oceanic expanses; and little-seen examples of the artist’s technically pioneering paintings rooted in abstraction. Providing for the first time a nuanced encounter with this pivotal chapter of Bowling’s career, “Frank Bowling’s Americas” offers an essential contribution to a more cross-cultural and global understanding of modern art.