Subheadline: Andrew Kreps Gallery brings together Kenneth Victor Young’s early “orb” paintings, revealing a distinctive synthesis of Color Field painting, jazz improvisation, scientific thinking, and Black artistic history.
In the history of American abstraction, some artists became movements. Others became footnotes.
Kenneth Victor Young occupies a more complicated position.
At Andrew Kreps Gallery in New York, Kenneth Victor Young: Works 1970–1972 brings together paintings from a crucial period in the Washington-based artist’s career, focusing on the atmospheric “orb” paintings that helped establish his distinctive visual language.
On view at 394 Broadway from September 18 through October 31, 2026, the exhibition is organized in collaboration with Edward Tyler Nahem Fine Art. It offers an opportunity to reconsider Young not simply as a participant in the Washington Color School, but as an artist who developed an individual vocabulary from abstraction, science, music, chance, and movement.
The paintings are deceptively simple.
Soft-edged forms appear to float across expanses of color. Some resemble cells seen under a microscope. Others suggest planets, atmospheric bodies, or fragments of an unknown celestial system.
Yet beneath their apparent simplicity is a remarkably complex history.
The “Orb” as a New Language
By the late 1960s, Young had begun developing the forms that would become central to his mature practice: rounded, organic shapes suspended within fields of color.
The orbs vary in opacity, scale, density, and position. Some seem almost weightless. Others appear to push against the surrounding color, creating a subtle sense of depth and motion.
Young’s technique was closely connected to the principles of stain painting associated with the Washington Color School. Working on unstretched, unprimed canvas, he allowed diluted acrylic pigment to soak directly into the fibers rather than sitting heavily on the surface.
But Young’s paintings move beyond the formal vocabulary of Color Field abstraction.
His shapes are neither purely geometric nor entirely organic. They seem to occupy an uncertain territory between matter and atmosphere.
That ambiguity is part of their power.
Science in the Studio
Young’s fascination with these forms was not accidental.
Before becoming a full-time artist, he studied physics and chemical engineering at the University of Louisville. His scientific background remained an important undercurrent in his painting, particularly in the molecular and celestial associations suggested by the orbs.
The paintings can therefore be viewed simultaneously at several scales.
A form might resemble a microscopic organism.
Then, moments later, it appears planetary.
The ambiguity prevents the viewer from settling on one interpretation.
Young was interested in a visual world where scientific observation and imaginative speculation could coexist.
That makes the paintings surprisingly contemporary.
At a moment when artists increasingly investigate artificial intelligence, biotechnology, astronomy, data, and invisible systems, Young’s paintings remind us that abstraction has long offered a way of imagining realities that cannot be directly seen.
Jazz as a Structural Influence
Another essential ingredient was music.
Jazz regularly filled Young’s studio, and its rhythms influenced the structure and movement of his paintings. Andrew Kreps describes the repetition and improvisational nature of his techniques as analogous to the construction of jazz solos.
The comparison helps explain why the paintings never feel mechanically repetitive.
Their forms recur, but they do not behave like identical units in a rigid pattern.
Each orb occupies its own position, density, and visual register.
There is rhythm without strict repetition.
There is structure without complete predictability.
There is improvisation within a controlled field.
In that sense, Young’s abstraction is less about eliminating representation than creating a visual equivalent for musical thought.
The canvas becomes a score.
The orbs become events.
Color becomes atmosphere.
Between Chance and Control
Young’s process also depended on balancing intention with unpredictability.
He experimented with sponges, spray bottles, airbrushes, traditional brushes, and other tools to produce halos, plumes, blended passages, and soft transitions.
Such techniques allowed pigment to behave in ways that were not entirely controllable.
The artist could establish conditions, but the material participated in the final result.
That relationship between chance and control is fundamental to the paintings.
The work does not look accidental.
But neither does it look completely predetermined.
Young’s method creates a tension between the artist’s decisions and the independent behavior of paint.
His stated ambition—to find “unity in this chaotic existence”—offers an especially revealing way of understanding the work.
The paintings do not deny chaos.
They organize it.
A Black Artist in the Washington Color School
Young’s place within the Washington Color School is also inseparable from the racial politics of American art history.
After moving to Washington, D.C., in 1964, he became acquainted with artists including Gene Davis, Morris Louis, and Kenneth Noland, who were exploring staining and poured-acrylic techniques. Young, alongside artists such as Sam Gilliam and Alma Thomas, participated in the city’s developing abstraction scene.
Yet early accounts of the Washington Color School often marginalized Black artists.
Andrew Kreps notes that Young and Gilliam, in particular, were overlooked in early histories of the movement in part because of the racial politics surrounding the Civil Rights era and their later arrival in Washington.
That omission has increasingly become part of the larger reassessment of postwar American abstraction.
The story is no longer simply about who developed a particular formal innovation.
It is also about who received institutional recognition for doing so.
Young’s paintings demonstrate that the history of Color Field painting was broader, more diverse, and more complicated than its most familiar narratives suggest.
From Louisville to Washington
Young’s path toward painting was itself unconventional.
While studying science in Louisville, he became friends with Sam Gilliam, Bob Thompson, and Robert Douglas. He later joined Gallery Enterprise, a collective created to provide exhibition opportunities and community for emerging Black artists.
Those relationships helped redirect his career.
Science did not disappear from his practice.
Instead, it became part of his visual imagination.
So did music.
So did the experience of building an artistic community.
By the time Young developed his mature orb paintings, these different influences had merged into something distinctly his own.
The Artist as Exhibition Designer
Young’s career also complicates the conventional image of the painter working exclusively in a studio.
For more than three decades, he worked as an exhibition designer at the Smithsonian Institution, and he also designed exhibitions internationally for the United States Information Agency. From 1973 to 1985, he taught art at the Corcoran School of Art and later taught exhibition design at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts.
That experience is significant.
Young understood not only how individual paintings occupy space, but how artworks construct relationships with viewers and environments.
His professional life therefore crossed the boundaries between painting, exhibition making, education, and cultural institution-building.
Recognition, Reassessment, and Legacy
Young received a solo exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in 1974, establishing his importance within the city’s art community. His work subsequently appeared in exhibitions including Contemporary Black American Artists at the Smithsonian Institution in 1969 and African American Art: Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights Era, and Beyond at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 2015.
His paintings are now held in major institutional collections, including the National Gallery of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Pérez Art Museum Miami, Delaware Art Museum, and Birmingham Museum of Art.
Yet the renewed attention to his work suggests that institutional presence and historical visibility are not always the same thing.
An artist can be collected by museums and still remain insufficiently known.
Andrew Kreps’s exhibition contributes to correcting that imbalance.
Why Young’s Paintings Feel Contemporary
There is something strikingly current about Young’s paintings from 1970–72.
Their forms seem to exist somewhere between biology and astronomy.
Their technique embraces controlled unpredictability.
Their structure resembles improvisational music.
Their visual language refuses to identify exactly what the viewer is seeing.
And their history raises questions about whose contributions become central to the story of American abstraction.
More than five decades after these works were made, the orbs remain open-ended.
They can be read as molecular, celestial, atmospheric, musical, psychological, or purely formal.
Perhaps they need to remain all of those things at once.
A Quiet Rewriting of Abstraction
Kenneth Victor Young: Works 1970–1972 is not a revisionist exhibition in the loudest sense.
It does something more valuable.
It asks viewers to look again.
To look at the paintings themselves rather than only the movement they have been assigned to.
To reconsider the Washington Color School through a broader history of Black abstraction.
To see science and jazz not as secondary references but as structural forces within Young’s practice.
And to recognize an artist whose search for order within chaos produced paintings that remain remarkably alive.
At Andrew Kreps Gallery, Kenneth Victor Young’s orbs no longer sit at the edge of the story.
They become the center of it.
Kenneth Victor Young: Works 1970–1972 is on view at Andrew Kreps Gallery, 394 Broadway, New York, through October 31, 2026.
