Curator Tanya Pohrt understands not everyone knows artist Howard McCalebb’s work. That’s why The Golden Mean, a career-spanning Howard McCalebb show at the Lyman Allyn Art Museum, opens with a sequence that orients viewers to the sculptor’s process and aesthetic.

You first encounter a large sheet of paper bearing graphite lines – vertical, horizontal, diagonal drawn in relation to McCalebb’s guiding star: The Golden Ratio. 

Next come three sheets bearing clipped-corner shapes pulled from the matrix, each in a primary blue, red, or yellow. Finally: a single, 3D, almost diamond-shaped sculpture, wood and latex paint in that same kindergarten yellow, brush strokes visible. 

The matrix-born concept is now real. McCalebb’s vocabulary is set – it seems.

In all, 28 works fill the museum’s 744-square-foot Glassenberg Gallery. This is a tight footprint for five decades of work, yet the room never feels crowded. Each piece has enough air to stand on its own while they collectively provide a view of how Norwich-based McCalebb welds solid form with intangible symbolism.

For example, a pedestal holds two pieces, the yellow diamond connected to a squarer shape, also yellow, that is itself mirrored by a red sculpture beside it. Across the room those shapes are recast primary blue and reoriented: the same shapes presented differently, brushstrokes visible. They’re soft despite the hard geometry, a contradiction that gives the pieces a quiet sense of humor. A multitude of sentiments stems from a single matrix.

“There is no such thing as a single reality,” the artist writes in the show’s catalogue, viewable online. “Like many artists of the post-modern era, I have shifted away from mimesis and the goal of precisely representing reality. Instead, I focus on signification – the practice of selecting and presenting an image that prioritizes symbolic meaning.”

The symbolism is more evident in McCalebb’s multimedia pieces. The shapes there can stand in for social and emotional expectations, reflections of a world McCalebb sees with detachment, though not impersonally. As one of the few Black artists working in hard-edged geometric abstraction, McCalebb observes and has observed the world from the fringes. He’s never made this the subject of his work directly, but it’s there.

Howard McCalebb’s “Are You Shy?” (2014), serigraph and “Happy Germans” (2010), mixed media collage. Photo: Lyman Allyn Art Museum.

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Take the piece Are You Shy?: a red and yellow geometric panel with a found newspaper ad pasted dead center: a real 2014 call for a clinical drug trial for social phobia, complete with a checklist of symptoms and a phone number. It seems like a joke, but it’s not. It’s a clinical trial. You stop laughing. There is no single reality. 

McCalebb’s Marshall Plan series takes the artist’s view global.  

Named after the post-WWII initiative in which the United States financed the rebuilding, and social alignments, of western Europe, the series includes Happy Germans, which pairs a generic, mass-market idealized whiteness alongside generic, mass-produced mannequins wearing hijabs.

Who is real here and who is fake? Is one better? Is one worse? Are the subjects both distilled to their most basic shape? There is no single reality.

Again, the show is called The Golden Mean, a term that’s mathematical and philosophical, a duality McCalebb’s work captures. His golden mean is both the geometric golden ratio and Aristotle’s less tangible sense of the term: the balance between two extremes. 

McCalebb’s work – mathematic yet soulful, childish yet mature, industrial but with the artist’s touch – straddles that middle point and leaves the viewer seeing through the matrix. 

The Golden Mean: Howard McCalebb at Lyman Allyn, curated by Tanya Pohrt, on view until October 4, 2026. 

Born in Indianola, Mississippi, in 1947, McCalebb grew up in California before moving to New York City and settling in Tribeca, then a hotbed of artists lured by cheap, spacious work/live spaces. As gentrification caught up and Tribeca transitioned to a playground for the wealthy, McCalebb headed to Berlin’s vibrant and accessible art scene, where he opened DadaPost. He ran the gallery and residency there for over a decade before settling in Norwich, Connecticut, where he founded DadaPost USA.