In January, in one of his final undertakings, the Abstract Expressionist artist Frank Wimberley assembled a collage at his home in Corona, Queens, which went on view soon after at his Manhattan gallery, Berry Campbell, in a retrospective of his paintings and sculptures spanning 1982 to 2025. Mr. Wimberley, a key figure in African-American art, was 98 at the time, and his wife, Juanita, observed later that the work, "Untitled," was the first one sold at the exhibition.
Mr. Wimberley's early attraction to art and music was no accident. He grew up in Pleasantville, N.J., with a mother who was a ceramicist and a pianist, and a father who bought him a trumpet to play in a band. Both parents encouraged his interest in the creative arts.
Born on Aug. 31, 1926, he came of age just in time to serve in the Army during World War II. Afterward, he enrolled at Howard University under the G.I. Bill, where he studied painting under several influential midcentury Black artists and developed friendships with some legendary jazz musicians, among them Miles Davis and Wayne Shorter. Jazz became a central motif in his art, and an enduring passion throughout his life as well; he could often be seen attending jazz concerts at the Parrish Art Museum.
"The spontaneity of his process was akin to jazz," his gallery wrote, "but his method was unfailingly deliberate."
The Wimberleys met at Howard, where both were taking a class in ceramics. Mrs. Wimberley, a year older than her husband, observed her 100th birthday in May. The couple had been married for 80 years when he died, on Oct. 9 at the age of 99.
In 1969, at a time when few Black artists were invited to exhibit their work, Mr. Wimberley was included in a group show at C.W. Post College in Brookville. His reputation grew quickly, and in the '70s he showed at numerous prestigious museums, among them the Hudson River Museum and the Museum of Modern Art. Solo exhibitions of his collages, paintings, and drawings followed.
The Wimberleys had bought land in Sag Harbor Hills back in 1964, where they designed and built a skylit Japanese-style house in the Modernist style. East End galleries embraced his work over the years, starting with a Guild Hall show in 1979 called "Eastville Artists," works by a group of North and South Fork painters and sculptors devoted to promoting the arts. In 1998, he received a Pollock-Krasner Fellowship, in 2010 he took first place in Guild Hall's artist-members show, in 2021 he had a solo show at Duck Creek in Springs, and in 1922, at the age of 96, he was inducted into Guild Hall's Academy of the Arts.
Texture played an important role in his work, according to the Berry Campbell Gallery, "beginning with assemblages of paper and found objects and continuing in collages from scrap cardboard, paper, cloth, and metal." His later work commanded an army of tools, among them steel-wire brushes, spatulas, and pumice.
In a tribute, the Parrish Art Museum wrote that Mr. Wimberley's output embodies "a lifelong pursuit of experimentation, rhythm, and expressive freedom." The Parrish, which has featured him in numerous shows over the years, holds four of his works in its permanent collection; he is also in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and many more. At present, his work can be seen in a group exhibition titled "With Passion and Purpose" at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
A memorial service for Mr. Wimberley will be held at the Berry Campbell Gallery, at 524 West 26th Street, at 1 p.m. on Dec. 13.
