Tom Lloyd

Artist, activist, and community organizer Tom Lloyd (1929–1996) was an early pioneer of using electric light as an artistic medium. Working in collaboration with an engineer at the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), Lloyd developed a radically experimental practice in the 1960s that fused art and technology to dazzling effect. His electronically programmed sculptures—featuring rhythmic sequences of color and abstract forms—challenged popular understandings about what role the work of Black artists should play. This landmark exhibition is based on extensive new research and intensive conservation work undertaken by The Studio Museum in Harlem.

Born in Detroit and raised in New York City, Lloyd worked during a moment of profound transformation in the art world, as Black artists organized for visibility and representation. While his work was exhibited and collected during the 1960s, Lloyd soon redirected his focus toward activism and community leadership, becoming a founding member of the Art Workers’ Coalition and later the Store Front Museum/Paul Robeson Theatre in Queens.

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