FEELING THE LIGHT: TOM LLOYD'S ILLUMINATED SCULPTURES
- Leilani Lewis
- 3 days ago
- 4 min read
By Leilani Lewis
Walking into the new Tom Lloyd exhibition at the Frye is the technological equivalent of touching grass. The work is real. The lights trigger waves of nostalgia - street lamps, Christmas lights made of actual glass, the hum and pulse of tech you can hear and see and feel. In a world of screens and invisible systems with no knobs to turn or levers to switch, this show scratches the part of the brain that itches for analog technology. Lloyd built these sculptures sixty years ago and its work you can actually feel.
Moussakoo (c. 1968) Four aluminum hexagons built from rows of industrial bulbs, cycling through programmed color sequences that land somewhere between traffic signal and stained glass. The piece is modular so it seems that any arrangement works as long as one section touches another. Narokan (1965) is smaller, a wall-mounted grid of light bulbs and plastic lenses, with an analog control box clicking through its sequences at its own pace. Both pieces occupy physical space in ways screens simply cannot. They have weight and presence as they hold color and light.
Alongside an engineer at the Radio Corporation of America, Lloyd built his first light sculpture from sheet metal, a translucent plastic cover stripped from an automobile taillight, and Christmas tree bulbs, aiming to program sequences of flashing color.
In 1968, that work opened at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Someone in the audience tried to vandalize one of the sculptures that night. The complaint was that the work read as insufficiently Black. Lloyd answered at a Met symposium the following year, plainly: "We're Black. No matter what kind of work you do, you're influenced by all these things."
Lloyd was born in Detroit in 1929 and raised in Jamaica, Queens. His family came north with the Great Migration. He studied at Pratt Institute and the Brooklyn Museum Art School, and by the early 1960s, he was inside a New York art world under serious pressure and the civil rights movement at every door, Black artists and allies demanding visibility, while most institutions were largely unmoved. Most Black artists working in that moment leaned figurative, leaned narrative, with many images legible as resistance. But Lloyd chose light.
He was drawn to what was already alive on city streets - traffic signals cycling red to green, theater marquees blazing their sequences, the everyday programming of American public space. He saw something democratic in it. Technological and entirely of the present moment, he decided to build modular sculptures that produced rhythmic, shifting projections of abstract color and form. Refraction interested him, the way light bends when it meets a new medium, as technique and as idea.
The 1960s art world carried firm assumptions about what Black artists owed their audiences. Abstraction read, in many of those rooms, as retreat from the struggle. Lloyd's argument stood that a Black artist working in any idiom was making Black art, and that the full range of possibility belonged as much to Black artists as it did to anyone else.
His critical reception thinned and the field moved on.
L) Installation view of Tom Lloyd, Frye Art Museum, Seattle, May 16–September 20, 2026. Photo: Jueqian Fang. R) Tom Lloyd. Moussakoo, ca. 1968. Light bulbs, plastic lenses, aluminum, laminated plywood. Dimensions variable. Studio Museum in Harlem; gift of The Lloyd Family and Jamilah Wilson. Courtesy Studio Museum in Harlem. Photo: John Berens
Lloyd moved on as well towards a deeper, different kind of artistry. In 1971, he edited Black Art Notes, a volume written as a direct counter to the Whitney Museum's handling of Black artists in its Contemporary Black Artists in America Catalog. That same year, he founded the Store Front Museum and Paul Robeson Theatre in a former Goodyear dealership in Jamaica, Queens. It ran for sixteen years. Exhibitions, concerts, lectures, dance classes, karate, festivals. Queens' first art museum, built entirely for and by the community around it.
He was a founding member of the Art Workers' Coalition, the group that pressed MoMA and other major institutions to establish Black and Puerto Rican advisory boards and collect work by artists of color. He and Faith Ringgold co-led the Black coalition within the group, organizing together for visibility that the institutions were not offering on their own. He kept showing up for other artists while his own work moved away from the critical record.
The Frye exhibition holds all of it - the sculptures, the activism, the sixteen years of running a museum out of a dealership in Queens. Alongside the light works and early assemblages, the show includes photographs, documents, and materials from the Store Front years. Thelma Golden, director of the Studio Museum, has said the radical choice in making Lloyd the inaugural 1968 show was that he was an artist working in new technology at the precise moment when technology and the movement were pushing in the same direction. Lloyd understood this. He built accordingly - sculptures that refracted light, a museum in a former dealership, a coalition demanding access.
His work flashes and shifts. The color lands somewhere you did not expect. And it's still giving us something we can feel.
His exhibition opened at the Frye Art Museum on May 16 and runs through September 20, organized by the Studio Museum in Harlem, which anchored its own reopening - after seven years of renovation - with this retrospective. Seattle is the first city to receive the show after New York. The Frye presentation is organized by Tamar Benzikry, Director and Curator of Learning and Engagement. Admission is free.
Tom Lloyd runs May 16 through September 20 at the Frye Art Museum, 704 Terry Ave., Seattle. Admission is free.
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