On the occasion of the exhibition Pattern Recognition at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA) in Brooklyn, Benjamin Sutton posts a slideshow and an interview with exhibition curator Dexter Wimberly. The show features works by Rushern Baker IV, Kimberly Becoat, Hugo McCloud, Duhirwe Rushemeza, and Sam Vernon.

Wimberly comments: "There are absolutely clear nods to Pollock, there are clear nods to Rauschenberg, de Kooning. There are some allusions to other artists who aren’t necessarily considered abstract artists. There are nods to Kara Walker, to Richter. I think it’s one of those things where you can’t really do an exhibition of abstract painting or mixed media without people seeing the influences of art historical figures. And that happens because our eyes and our brain kind of conspire to draw connections between what we’re looking at and what we’ve already seen. I also think that one of the things that may go unnoticed is that there’s also a tremendous history of abstract art-making, particularly within the African and African American art-making tradition and history. And there are black artists that, in their own right, have become very, very famous internationally as abstract artists, people like Frank Bowling or Frank Wimberly (no relation). So what I also wanted to do was to show that the influences come a lot of different places. Definitely from the Rauschenbergs, from the de Koonings, from the Pollocks, but also from people that folks haven’t really heard of in the mainstream."