McArthur Binion

McArthur Binion was born in 1946 in Macon, Mississippi, and was raised largely in Detroit. He has said he spent a year at Morgan State University, a historically Black college, studying business administration, before enrolling at Wayne State University in Detroit, where he began as a creative writing major and shifted into drawing and printmaking, earning his BFA in 1971. He went on to Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, earning an MFA in painting in 1973 and becoming, by his own account and the school's, the first African American to complete an MFA in painting there.

Binion developed his mature working method over subsequent decades: a dense grid of oil stick, ink, and graphite laid over an underlayer of Xeroxed personal documents, including copies of his birth certificate and pages from an old address book, work he has grouped under titles such as the DNA series. He received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1976 and a New York C.E.T.A. Artist Project Grant in 1978, and built a long, steady exhibition history through the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, including solo shows at institutions such as the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston in 2012, before his profile expanded sharply after his inclusion in Viva Arte Viva, the main exhibition of the 57th Venice Biennale, in 2017. That year, the American Academy of Arts and Letters gave him a Purchase Prize. He founded the Modern Ancient Brown Foundation to support young visual artists and writers of color. He lives and works in Chicago.

Binion's reception has tracked a steady late-career rise from a respected studio painter to an artist treated as central to recent histories of Black abstraction. Institutions including the Studio Museum in Harlem, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art hold his work, and his 2017 Venice Biennale inclusion is widely cited as the turning point that brought him to broader international attention. Writers have connected his grid structures to Minimalism while stressing that, for Binion, the underlayer of personal and family documents keeps the work rooted in lived, specific history rather than pure formalism. Gallery and museum texts consistently frame his practice as a decades-long negotiation between abstraction and autobiography.

Binion's best documented auction result is Route One: Box Two: I, which sold for USD 302,400 at Christie's; the exact sale date and location are not published in the sources available for this profile, so it is treated here as his highest confirmed public sale rather than a fully dated auction record. Other publicly reported results, including several at Phillips, range from roughly USD 84,000 to about USD 201,600, indicating his public auction history remains comparatively thin. He is represented by three galleries, Xavier Hufkens in Brussels, Lehmann Maupin in New York and Seoul, and Richard Gray Gallery in Chicago, a footprint that reflects institutional and market interest that has grown faster than his secondary market history.

There is no published catalogue raisonne for Binion, so provenance and gallery verification carry extra weight; buyers should confirm works through one of his three representing galleries. His auction history is thin relative to his institutional standing, with a best documented high of about USD 302,400 and no verified higher result identified, so individual sale results should be read with the small size of his public auction record in mind rather than as evidence of a smooth trend line. His strong and expanding museum collection base is the more durable signal of his standing.