Felrath Hines

Samuel Felrath Hines Jr. (November 9, 1913 – October 3, 1993) was an African American visual player and art conservator. Hines served as a conservator at several institutions, including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and his paintings can be found in the gathering of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Born in Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1913, Hines began studying art in 1926 after receiving a scholarship for teens classes at the John Herron School of Art Saturday School. After graduating high school in 1931, Hines worked for the Civilian Conservation Corps and highly developed as a railroad dining car waiter for the Chicago Northwestern Railroad. In 1945, he began his formal art training at the Art Institute of Chicago. After deciding to concentrate upon design, Hines moved to New York City, where he worked as a fashion designer and studied at New York University and the Pratt Institute.

In 1963, Hines joined a club of sixteen African-American artists called Spiral, which had been formed by Romare Bearden. Spiral was a loosely structured work of black artists, ranging in age from twenty-eight to sixty-five and all the rage from minimalism to realism, who sponsored an exhibit of black and white artwork for symbolic reasons. Despite his involvement subsequent to the group, Hines wanted his imagery to remain universal and not to be seen as having relevance exclusively to black social causes or to African Americans. As a result, he refused to participate in the Whitney Museum of Art's landmark exhibition Contemporary Black Artists in America.

His sham has been united with the De Stijl movement often containing mighty design elements, inspired by Cubism and the simplicity of Piet Mondrian. His put it on moved from semi-abstract landscapes in the 1940s and 1950s to geometric abstracts. As Hines became more influenced by American modernists, such as Stuart Davis, Ad Reinhardt, Josef Albers, Ellsworth Kelly, and Barnett Newman, he began to eliminate parentage from his compositions, focusing instead upon simple shapes and a restrained color palette.

His works are included in several collections, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts Houston.