Artist and print maker, Nelson Stevens, will have his first solo exhibition in NYC in decades at Kravets Wehby Gallery featuring works dating from the 60s to the present.

As a toddler in Bed-Stuy Brooklyn, his parents would cover the house with butcher paper to keep him from drawing on the furniture and walls. Nelson Stevens’ socially conscious artworks are both energetic and intense, consistently asserting equality throughout his lifelong career.

Nelson Stevens joined AfriCOBRA in 1969 and has celebrated and helped define the Black Arts Movement over the last fifty years. AfriCOBRA is recognized as the country’s longest active artist collective. At a 1970 exhibit at The Studio Museum in Harlem, Stevens handed out ballots to decide which painting in the show would be turned into prints that were later sold for $10 each. Stevens recalls FESTAC’77 in Lagos, Nigeria and being summoned to Fela’s compound because one of Fela’s “lieutenants” had seen his work and demanded an audience. It was an image of Malcolm X saying, “From one artist to another.”

Stevens’ artwork is currently on view in “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power 1963-1983”, closing at The Broad September 1, 2019 and opening at The de Young Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco November 9, 2019.  “Soul of a Nation” was seen at Tate Modern, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and the Brooklyn Museum. His work is also included at a major exhibition titled “AfriCOBRA Now: Nation Time” at the 2019 Venice Biennale.