The Electric Sculptures of Black Artist Tom Lloyd Illuminate the Frye

Walking into Tom Lloyd's new exhibition at the Frye Art Museum feels akin to walking onto a transcendent yet serene dance floor. 

The late New York artist's large-scale geometric sculptures made of Buick taillight lenses and Christmas light bulbs flash colors — green, yellow, red, blue, orange — in a pattern-like procession. With some of them, you can even hear the relay boxes click the lights on and off, maintaining their own techno-like rhythm. It all meshes together into a celebration of light and color, cohering into a spectacle greater than the sum of its parts.

Lloyd was one of the few Black artists working in light art in the 1960s, and his pieces are genuinely stunning to behold. This exhibition, simply called "Tom Lloyd," is a fascinating exploration into the career of Lloyd, an early pioneer of light art who has remained obscured from broader art history. Developed by the Studio Museum in Harlem for that museum's 2025 reopening — and up at the Frye until Sept. 20 — the show culls together works from across Lloyd's oeuvre, from early mechanical sculptures to his light works to later vibrant collages, and includes behind-the-scenes materials detailing his parts of his artistic process. 

When you first enter the main gallery, you're greeted by his 1968 sculpture "Veleuro," a radial work that flickers impressively with color and light. Composed of nearly 800 Christmas light bulbs, standing in front of it is like putting your face right next to a marquee: Its textures and colors seem familiar, but its flashing seems like it's communicating something from another planet.

Toward the back of the gallery is "Moussakoo" (1968), one of the last-known light works Lloyd ever made. Named after a racehorse, the piece is composed of four connected hexagonal components that can be interchanged into different formations. When the sculpture came into the Studio Museum's collection, most of its original motors were lost and, thus, what we see at the Frye is only an interpretation of its original pattern. Regardless, it's similarly entrancing to take in, like a portal to another universe.

At the time Lloyd made these sculptures, it was unheard of for a Black artist to produce work that wasn't immediately reflective of their identity. Lloyd's friends, like Romare Bearden, Faith Ringgold, and Jacob Lawrence all made work that explicitly elucidated the Black experience through figurative painting and collage. Supposedly on opening night at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1968, a visitor defaced one of Lloyd's works, deeming it not Black enough for the museum focused on Black art. Though Lloyd was always insistent about his work being categorized as Black art, he instead took an experiential route to that representation, immediately reflecting his Black life nestled deep in the urbanity of the cityscape. 

"Light is part of our everyday lives. We communicate by light," Lloyd said. "We can't help but notice TV, lighting in general—Broadway, traffic lights, car headlights." 

In this way, Lloyd stands shoulder to shoulder with celebrated artists like Dan Flavin and Nam June Paik, who similarly utilized mass-produced objects, like fluorescent lighting tubes or televisions, to craft their own inquisitions into light, abstraction, and culture. But unlike his contemporaries, Lloyd was insistent that his work be seen specifically as Black art and not be subsumed by white institutions in the ways his Black colleagues' works were. Thus, much of his work wasn't preserved and got left behind.

Born in 1929, Lloyd spent the entirety of his life in New York City and studied at both the Pratt Institute of Fine Art and the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Around 1965, Lloyd entered a collaborative partnership across stratified racial lines with Radio Corporation of America (RCA) engineer Alan Sussman. The two met serendipitously at Washington Square Park, where Lloyd was showing off some of his mechanical assemblage works (which are also on view at the Frye) made up of discarded industrial parts, like springs and gears. Sussman himself made similar assemblages, and the two bonded on their love of machinery. Over the next several years, the two worked on what would become Lloyd's light sculptures. 

While Lloyd didn't leave behind much documentation about his process, Studio Museum curators and conservators managed to infer and deduce parts of his process by looking at records and conducting interviews with Sussman (who, unfortunately, passed away in 2023). Lloyd designed the shapes and drew out the forms, and Sussman then went to his RCA job to fabricate the wood and metal needed to create the shell of the sculpture. 

Sussman would bring that shell back to Lloyd's workshop, where Lloyd would work on wiring the lights, using configurations of Christmas light bulbs underneath Buick taillights. The lights would be powered by a control box with a motor-driven cylinder, where Lloyd used different-sized electrical tape to program the lights to go off at different times, experimenting with wattage and velocity (only two of his works in the show retain this original control box, as the others have been conserved and converted to digital).

After a furtive period of creation in the late 1960s, Lloyd largely turned his attention to activism and community organizing around Black art. He joined the Art Workers' Coalition and, in 1971, he founded the Store Front Museum in Jamaica, Queens. It became a crucial gathering space in the borough for nearly 20 years, serving as a cultural center and exhibition hall before it closed in 1988. At the Frye, visitors can look through various material relating to his organizing.

In some ways, Lloyd's passion for community organizing mirrors his artistic pursuits. Ever curious about mechanical systems and how they interact and depend on one another, in his artwork, Lloyd took apart everyday mechanical systems, rewired them, and created his own vision of what they could be. Similarly, his political activism took the parallel interest in institutional spaces that were denied to him and his community, creating his own version that sustained a generation of Black artists and organizers in Queens.

Despite his shift to focus on organizing, Lloyd continued to paint and collage on a much smaller scale, still obsessed with color, shape, and abstraction. His untitled painted works on view at the Frye are murky and blue-hued, but still feel as if they are peering into another universe. Perhaps Lloyd saw something there than none of us could — and we're all better for it. 

"Tom Lloyd" is up at the Frye Art Museum through Sept. 20. Admission is free. Visit the Frye's website for more information.