James Andrew McCray was born in 1912 in Niles, California. He studied art at the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1934 and a master’s in 1935. In 1937, he received a two-year scholarship from the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania. There, he saw the geometric abstraction of Dutch artist Piet Mondrian, a style he adopted for several years. By the 1950s, he had turned away from Geometric Abstraction and instead modified his style to color field minimalist abstraction. His later works, starting in the 1970s, often included black lines denoting specific visual features superimposed on brilliant patches of color.

McCray had a long teaching career, including intervals at UC Berkeley from 1935 to 1980. He also taught at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco from 1940 to 1946, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art from 1941 to 1943, and at Santa Barbara College in 1951. McCray died in 1993 in Walnut Creek, California.

-Jean Stern