An
active proponent of civil rights, Felrath Hines participated in Martin Luther
King’s march on Washington in 1963. That same year, along with Romare Bearden,
Hale Woodruff, and Norman Lewis, he was one of the founding members of the
Spiral Group of artists dedicated to social change. In 1966 he was also among
the first artists to be featured at the newly founded Studio Museum of Harlem.

Across
a career that spanned more than four decades, Hines sought the absolute freedom
and universality offered by abstraction. Like Ellsworth Kelly, he often took
inspiration from the surrounding landscape, and then pared down his
compositions to the kind of simple geometries seen in Temple. Hines commented, “An artist’s work is to rearrange everyday
phenomena so as to enlarge our perception of who we are and what goes on about
us.”