HUMANSCAPES (1960s)

These early black-and-white works mark the moment Mel Casas began formulating what would become the Humanscape series — one of the most ambitious sequential projects in American art. Completed in the 1960s, before Casas adopted the large-scale 72-by-96-inch acrylic format that would define the series, these paintings are experimental in both medium and intent. They capture a painter working through a new visual idea: the cinematic screen as a lens through which American culture reveals itself. In 1965, Casas was struck by the image of a drive-in movie screen rising above a Texas landscape, the woman projected on it appearing to dwarf and consume the natural world around her. That collision — between the manufactured image and the physical environment, between spectacle and reality — became the founding premise of the Humanscape project. These early works are studies in that premise: spare, probing, and formally stripped down. They document the birth of a sustained artistic inquiry that would occupy Casas for the next twenty-four years and produce 153 finished paintings.