As many of the artists who defined the movement pass away, San Diego Museum of Art (SDMA) inside Balboa Park is hosting landmark exhibit “american minimal” through June 1 which revisits and broadens the definition of minimalism while still honoring its core canon.

The anchor piece and inspiration of the exhibit is late artist Frank Stella’s “Flin Flon VIII” (1970), a huge, colorful geometric painting. Stella kicked off the minimalism movement in 1959 with “Black Paintings” exhibited at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Artists who became involved moved away from having a specific subject matter portrayed in a new way like in abstract expressionism to instead not represent any part of reality.

The focus is on the art piece with the viewer interpreting what it means rather than subjective personal expression from an artist. Even visible brush strokes are avoided to take the artist out of the piece as much as possible. With minimalism’s emphasis on perception, the onus is on the viewer to pay attention and complete the works before them. Time walking through the exhibit feels reflective, nearly meditative, while looking at these soothing works.

Stella coined the movement’s unofficial motto when he quipped, “What you see is what you see.” When Stella died in 2024, SDMA wanted to bring “Flin Flon VIII” out of the vault. With a few months break in several downstairs rooms this spring, curators built the survey of American minimalism around his piece.

“As a museum, we’re not generally known for our modern and contemporary collection, but about 95% of the show’s from [our] collection,” said deputy director of curatorial affairs Anita Feldman. “This show’s making an effort to get these things out and give them a context.”

Stella is not the only minimalist pioneer to have recently deceased. Los Angeles-based visual artist Joe Goode died a few days after the exhibit opened in March. Plastics inventor and sculptor DeWain Valentine’s widow Kiana Sasaki was in attendance at a tour of the exhibit, her first public appearances since his death in 2022.

As legends in the movement pass away, it has also been a time to reassess what minimalism meant and means. Guest co-curator Jennifer Findley of JFiN Collective included many women who had been overlooked or pushed out of the movement in the 1960s.

“One of those focuses we wanted to have in the show was a specific, particular refocus on women’s role in minimalism,” taking back minimalism from what has in some ways been a masculine hegemony, Findley said.

Some were excluded for including organic forms or not following rigid rules around hard lines in paintings. Helen Lundeberg is only now getting her due after being considered a joke for her paintings of space and planets in a movement where nonrepresentation was revered. “american minimal” includes other women like Florence Arnold, Helen Pashgian, Mary Corse, and Gisela Colón as well as a photo by Arnold Newman of minimalist dance innovator Martha Graham.

“Now many, many decades later, it’s okay to talk about content and organicism and life itself. So maybe that’s what I love about art, that you can reinterpret an object centuries, decades later, and give it a new feeling, a new meaning, a new thing that maybe back then wasn’t allowed to talk about, like they wouldn’t want to talk about organicism,” Colón said in a room of the museum displaying one of her monliths. The swirling, glittery, purple sculpture is a surprisingly phallic centerpiece from the female artist in a room with circles and spheres, a feminine form. It is one of the final rooms of the exhibit, followed only by a giant resin sculpture from her late best friend Valentine.

On the opposite end of the exhibit, the show begins with monochromatic paintings juxtaposing the East and West Coast strains of minimalism. The next room includes the Stella painting with sculptures and paintings that play with forms, shapes and colors. It moves into an area more associated with Southern California’s Light and Space movement, with many neon and moving lights as well as a sound sculpture from Harry Bertoia, another Southern California-based designer.

One of the most stunning pieces in the entire exhibit is a triangle of beveled glass infused with Inconel and silicone monoxide created by Larry Bell in 1980.

Situated flat in a corner with a white light beamed from above, “Untitled (Corner Lamp)” was the most difficult piece to install with the light and angle needing to be just right to form a sharp-edged diamond with precise colored shapes reflected from the simple plate of glass. The ethereal resulting light-bending display is a distillation of minimalism’s ability to translate complex thought into simple expression. A sheet of glass it may be, but it took Bell’s sustained effort, expertise, vision and skill to create something so seemingly simplistic yet breathtakingly gorgeous.

“american minimal” will be on view at SDMA until June 1.

For museum hours and entry costs, visit sdmart.org.

Top photo caption: The exhibit opens on monochromatic paintings from various artists, providing a peaceful, meditative introduction to minimalism. (Photo by Drew Sitton)