James Little

For nearly fifty years, James Little has built one of American abstraction's most exacting and quietly defiant bodies of work, hand-grinding his own pigments and fusing oil with beeswax into paintings of taut geometry, saturated color, and hard-won rhythm. Illustrated with works spanning 1975 to 2024, the book traces the full arc of Little's evolution as a painter.

Little's paintings are supported by texts from Valerie Cassel Oliver, Aruna D'Souza, and Gavin Delahunty, which situate his work within the history of postwar American abstraction. An oral history by Carrie Cooperider, drawn from extensive conversations in Little's Brooklyn studio, traces his path from segregated Memphis to a career defined, in his own words, by self-determination and "making his own way."