McArthur Binion is an African-American artist known for his mixed-media abstract paintings. Probing both Minimalism and personal identity, Binion employs grids, hand-drawn lines, and photocopied versions of his birth certificate to create his works. “The part I took from Minimalism is that you want to do your own stuff in your own image,” he has said. Born in 1946 in Macon, MS, he and his family movedto Detroit in 1951. Binion received his BFA from Wayne State University and his MFA from the Cranbook Academy of Art in 1973, before moving to New York. Influenced by Piet Mondrian as well as his contemporaries Brice Marden and Sol Lewitt, Binion became an integral part of the downtown scene before he moved to Chicago in 1991. Though his work slipped from the narrative of the art world for a number of decades, in 2017 he was included to represent the United States at the 57th Venice Biennale. The artist’s works are included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., and the Detroit Institute of Arts, among others. Binion continues to live and work in Chicago, IL.