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"Equis Dream"

Artist/Creator: Alvin C. Hollingsworth
Holding Institution: Hudson River Museum, Yonkers

Alvin C. Hollingsworth (1928-2000) was a prolific African American artist who was born in Harlem, NY, lived and worked in New York City, and later moved to Hastings-on-Hudson, NY. He was a member of Spiral, a New York–based collective of Black artists, organized in the 1960s and focused on the civil rights movement and its relationship to the shifting landscape of American art, culture, and politics. Other notable members of the Spiral group include Romare Bearden, Richard Mayhew, Norman Lewis, and Emma Amos.

Hollingsworth was a feminist ally and had a progressive outlook on the role of women in society. He dedicated an entire series of artworks in the 1970s-1980s to the empowerment of women, with particular emphasis on elevating Black women. Hollingsworth commented in his 1978 “Women” exhibition brochure: “This series on Women was inspired because I identify with their struggle. In 1971 I conducted a series of interviews with 14 women artists with an eye toward having them published….I was so inspired by what I had heard during these interviews that I decided that a series entitled “The Women” was long overdue. I hope these paintings and poems will represent to all women my songs of freedom and equality.”

Hollingsworth was a lifelong art educator and taught a variety of classes at the Hudson River Museum in the 1960s and 1970s

Works on Paper