Arthur Monroe

Arthur Monroe (b. 1935 – d. 2019) was an African American Abstract Expressionist who lived and worked in the Bay Area. Born in Brooklyn, NY, Monroe was educated at The Boy's School in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn and the Brooklyn Museum School Art School. Monroe trained further in painting at the Art Students League and under the tutelage of Hans Hoffman. Monroe spent his formative years in East Village with painters including Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning, as well as Jazz musicians Charlie Parker and Nina Simone. Discerning the eurocentric aesthetic of the mainstream art world of New York, Monroe left New York for Mexico to examine non-European sources of visual art, especially those of the Mayans, Zapotecans, Michteans, and Olmecans. When he returned to America, he relocated first to Big Sur and then to San Francisco during the legendary Beat Era of North Beach in the late 1950s. Throughout his painting career, Monroe stayed committed to his Abstract Expressionist roots, creating rhythmic and striking, often large-scale works. In Oakland, California, where he spent more than 40 years of his life, Monroe converted the Oakland Cannery Warehouse into the first legal live-work space for artists in the city and advocated for the rights of artists to live and work as he did. He also cared for the historic collection at the Oakland Museum of California as their chief registrar and taught African American studies at the University of Berkeley, and San Jose State College.

During his lifetime, Monroe exhibited at prestigious institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY); the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco, CA); the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, MN); the Oakland Museum (Oakland, CA); the Museum of the African Diaspora (San Francisco, CA,) to name a few. His artwork resides in the permanent collections of the National Museum of African American History and Culture (Washington, DC); Crocker Art Museum (Sacramento, CA); Kristiania University College (Oslo, Norway); the University of Agder (Grimstad, Norway); and the de Saisset Museum (Santa Clara, CA). His collected papers from 1950 - 2019 were acquired by the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art in 2019, and he was the subject of a solo museum exhibition in 2024 at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art.