Tuxedo Junction

Description

Stella loved live jazz music. The title of this painting refers to the standard Tuxedo Junction of which Stella particularly remembered a live performance by Duke Ellington. This piece is about a jazz café on the crossroads of Tuxedo Junction in Birmingham, Alabama, which was popular with Afro-American steel and railway workers. Stella’s Tuxedo Junction is part of 24 paintings called the Black Paintings. Some titles of the paintings in this series refer to black jazz clubs in the Chitlin’ Circuit, the name of a club circuit that was safe for Afro-Americans in parts of the east and south of the US during the period of racial segregation.

The titles are without reverence to Stella’s formal painterly intentions. His art practice addresses the act of painting, the painting materials and flatness of the canvas as surface. For this painting he used black commercial enamel paint and a flat decorator’s paintbrush. The unprepared canvas is visible in the lines that have been left unpainted. Stella said: ‘What you see is what you see.'

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