In early March of 2024, I met my best friend from high school, Ruth, and her husband, at the Jeffrey Deitch gallery in SoHo to see the Frank Stella exhibit, two months before his death. His final works were the result of 3-D printing, metal, and automotive paint. I remember thinking that the colors and quality of the paint reminded me of powder coated bicycles and cars. I used to help my dad out on car lots, in the final era of his self-employed career that moved from carpentry to window washing to painting cars. The sculptures on wheels gave the impression of machines with a functional purpose. After taking in Stella’s work, the three of us walked over to Toad Hall for a drink. I had a whiskey soda, I think. Does it mean something? What does it mean? When Ruth took her coat off, I saw she was wearing my grandmother’s flannel shirt—and it always comforts me to see her wearing it. “I don’t make Conceptual Art. I need the physical thing to work against,” Stella has said. He became instantly successful at the age of twenty-one when his pinstripe “black paintings” were shown in MoMA’s Sixteen Americans exhibit in 1959, for which he used a house painter's brush. Frank Stella’s father was a first generation Italian-American who painted houses to pay his way through medical school. He brought Frank along to jobs to help him scrape and sand. Journeying from minimalism to maximalism, from pure black to vibrant color, Frank Stella’s ability to change his vision throughout his career is astounding. What means something, to me, is the way there’s always an element of working-class life in his work: a house painter’s brush, commercial house paint, car paint.
-Morgan English