According to the National Core Art Standards, one of the enduring understandings that art educators should pass along to their students is that “objects, artifacts, and artworks collected, preserved, or presented either by artists, museums, or other venues communicate meaning and a record of social, cultural, and political experiences resulting in the cultivating of appreciation and understanding.” Indeed, it is understood that art museums are a repository of values, instructing communities on what society deems admirable and worthy of study. What then does it mean when we discover that 85.4% of the ‘objects, artifacts and artworks’ collected and presented by museums come from white artists? What ‘appreciation and understanding’ are galleries fostering when African American artists make up only 1.2% of the total artists displayed? A 2019 study found that out of the 18 museums surveyed the ethnicity of the artists displayed broke down as follows: “85.4% white, 9.0% Asian, 2.8% Hispanic/Latinx, 1.2% Black/African American, and 1.5% other ethnicities” ¹. Curators, historically white and male, have controlled what is seen as the accepted aesthetic and therefore have enabled museums to reinforce social biases and stereotypes. As Kevin Coffee explains,
Cultural anthropologists and action sociologists generally agree that the manipulation of ideology, such as through style and iconography, is essential to defining, reproducing and contesting rank and power relationships in complex societies (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992; Geertz 1973; Hegmon 1992; Weiner 1980). In contemporary complex societies, museums may be used as instruments in that manipulation. 2
By only valuing certain artworks, art galleries act as agents of enculturation by “reinforcing gender, class, ethnic and other socio-economic distinctions prevalent in the larger society” 3. As the Black Lives Matter movement continues to encourage critical conversations about the history and legacy of racism in our society, galleries are grappling with the knowledge that “there remain problematic power dynamics that maintain white supremacy” in our museums.4 It is now up to museum educators and curators “to interrogate the ways in which racism (often unintentionally) manifests in our interactions with exhibitions, audiences, and colleagues if we wish to create inclusive spaces where multiple identities are valued equitably”5. Art curators must face the fact that they are either continuing to uphold systems of white supremacy or they must actively seek to be anti-oppressive.
African American Representation in the Art World
For African Americans, confronting racism and pushing for inclusion in the artworld is nothing new. Centered within a white European canon, museums have historically valued art objects from Europeans on the basis of their artistic merit while objects from other cultures are studied as anthropological artifacts outside of the existing canon. As Coffee explains, “nineteenth century French paintings show up in ‘art’ museums and nineteenth century Mangbetu sculptures are more often encountered in ‘ethnographic’ museums” 6. As such, African American, Native American and Chicano/a artists, to name a few, have historically been segmented out as cultural studies and excluded from contemporary art criticism. As the Civil Rights movement unfolded in the 1960’s, however, these groups began “demanding historical recognition and visibility in the mainstream art world” 7.
One exhibition proved to be a tipping point in this battle. In 1969, The Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibited a show entitled Harlem on My Mind, Cultural Capital of Black America,1900-1968. The exhibit consisted of large photo murals that had the effect of treating Harlem as an anthropological case study. The fact that the Met sought no input from any members of the Harlem art community set off a huge backlash against the show and the treatment of Black artists in general. Protests led to not only the call for established museums to hire more Black museum professionals and incorporate more Black artists but also “artists and curators responded to the Metropolitan's disregard for Black artists by increasing their efforts to curate their own exhibitions”8. Thus, began two concurrent tracks that have progressed through the art world ever since.
The backlash to Harlem on my Mind pointed out the tension and complexity of creating inclusion in museum spaces. While some activists were calling for artists to create their own spaces for exhibition, others like the Art Workers Coalition (AWC) and the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC) were fighting to create change within established spaces like New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney and the Met. The BECC created a list of demands for the Whitney that included not only purchasing and displaying works by black artists, but also hiring black curatorial staff 9. As Benny Andrews, member of the BECC states, “with the great number of black art exhibitions taking place across the country, it is no longer necessary for the BECC to demand that black art work be shown or for black art exhibitions to take place; instead we have moved into the area of the employment of black expertise.”10 Andrews and others realized that true change and inclusion would only occur when there was black representation at all levels of the museum world, from curators to critics to board members to artists. Although the Whitney pushed back on this demand in particular, the Metropolitan Museum did indeed bring on Dr. Lowery Stokes Sims to lead community programs in an effort to start incorporating black expertise. But change was slow and not all agreed with Andrews' claim that there was no longer a need for black art exhibitions. The two tracks of pushing for identity-based exhibitions alongside the hiring of black expertise in established museums would run concurrently to the present day.
In the groundbreaking 1976 exhibition Two Centuries of Black American Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, guest curator David C. Driskell endeavored to prove “that blacks had been stable participants in American visual culture for more than 200 years” 11. Building upon "The Negro in American Art," (UCLA,1966), "Ten Afro-American Artists of the Nineteenth Century," (Howard University, 1967) and "The Evolution of Afro-American Artists: 1800-1950" (City College, 1967), Two Centuries of Black American Art established a historical record of high-quality work of black artists that had been previously omitted from scholarly discourse and recognition. With the goal always of art being “a visual dialogue about man's cultural history that can be read and understood without regard to the color of the artist” 12, Driskell acknowledged that these single race exhibitions were needed to highlight the systematic exclusion of artists of color. When asked by a critic why all Black shows were necessary in 1977, Driskell answered, “Because you have propagated the notion that blacks are not a part of this system. So, until such time as you free your thinking enough to see that they've always been a part of it, and should rightly be included in the history books and what have you, we'll have to keep having black shows."13 For David Driskell, single race shows were a necessary counter to the omission of African American artists from mainstream museums.
While Driskell had a partner in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, many other artists found they would have to create their own venues if they wanted to be seen. A great example of this is the Southside Community Art Center in Chicago. As writer, curator and arts educator Keith Morrison explained, “until the Chicago Freedom Movement of 1965–67 raised the idea of ‘open occupancy,’ whereby anyone could live where they wanted, Chicago was legally and strictly segregated, a condition that still largely persists to this day.”14 While Black artists wanted to exhibit in the established galleries on the North Side or in the Hyde Park Art Center near the University of Chicago, they were restricted by a racial and geographical divide. The Southside Community Art Center was established in 1940 under Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration in the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago which at the time was the thriving hub of Chicago’s African American Community. The Art Center’s mission “was to educate young African American artists and to provide a venue for them to exhibit in the absence of such opportunities in the rest of Chicago” 15. SCACC became an important gathering place for young and established artists including Charles White, Archibald Motley, Ralph Arnold and a host of Black photographers including Gordon Parks. Through this community center, artists created their own niche for community and self-expression that was otherwise denied in segregated Chicago.
AfriCOBRA (Coalition of Bad Relevant Artists) was another community alliance of Black artists working to fight for space in the artworld. However, rather than seeking a bridge for recognition within the established art scene, AfriCOBRA more closely aligned with the philosophy of the Black Power movement and sought to create a Black visual aesthetic “without concern for the opinions of white institutions and white critics” 16. AfriCOBRA grew out of OBAC (Organization of Black American Culture) a group of artists, writers and poets formed amidst the burgeoning civil rights scene in Chicago who sought to empower their community through shared activism and racial pride. OBAC’s visual arts branch, under the leadership of Jeff Donaldson, created The Wall of Respect in 1967, the first public mural project of the movement. With larger than life likenesses of such prominent African Americans as Harriet Tubman, Malcolm X, W.E.B. DuBois and Aretha Franklin prominently displayed in the Bronzeville neighborhood, the mural reminded residents of the Southside that they come from a rich tradition of accomplished creators and intellectuals. The mural represented one of the founding tenets of the Black Arts Movement: art created by the Black community for the Black community is valuable independent of white society.
Jeff Donaldson branched off from OBAC to found AfriCOBRA along with Jae and Wadsworth Jarrell, Barbara Jones-Hogu, and Gerald Williams in 1968. This collective took that idea of art by and for the Black community and ran with it developing 13 shared principles that all of the artists incorporated in their works in search of a Black aesthetic. In their Manifesto, Jeff Donaldson declares, “our guidelines are our people- the whole family of African People, the African family tree” and goes on to say, “our People are our standard for excellence.” 17 Embracing the tenets of the Black Power Movement, AfriCOBRA reminds the community that they stem from a rich history and that they need to connect with that history in the present in order to project them into the future. As Donaldson stated, “it is our hope that intelligent definition of the past, and perceptive identification in the present will project nationfull direction in the future -- look for us there, because that’s where we’re at” 18. By rejecting the art establishment and defining their own ideals, AfriCOBRA helped forge a new path for visibility for African American artists.
Similarly, The Studio Museum in Harlem blossomed out of the civil rights movement to establish a space for African American voices. Established in 1968, The Studio Museum in Harlem quickly became a hub for African American artists in New York to claim space and gain visibility. Throughout the years, the Studio Museum has held this place and continued to support artists particularly through their Artist in Residence program whose alumni include David Hammons, Kerry James Marshall and Kehinde Wiley, to name a few. Visionary curators such as their current Director and Chief Curator, Thelma Golden, have continuously created exhibitions that promote diversity and inclusion for marginalized communities in the arts.
The Role of the Curator
In her book Curatorial Activism: Towards and Ethics of Curating, author and curator Maura Reilly identifies the persistence of skewed representation in galleries and highlights the work of many curators who are working to make a change. Reilly, the founding curator of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, uses her expertise in feminist and queer theory to draw connections between all underrepresented communities within the artworld and defines three “strategies of resistance” that ethical curators can employ to address these inequalities. The first strategy, revisionism, seeks to sort through the existing canon and seek out artists who were excluded. An example of this would be Energy/ Experimentation: Black Artists and Abstraction 1964-1980 curated by Kellie Jones. While Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko dominated the narrative about Abstract Expressionism, African American artists such as Norman Lewis, and Alma Thomas were contemporaneously creating works that were largely ignored. Energy/ Experimentation revised the narrative to re-insert these artists into the existing canon. The second strategy, area studies, spotlights work based on a “racial, geographical, gendered or sexual orientation”19. Examples of this strategy include David Driskell’s 1976 exhibition Two Centuries of Black American Art or Okwui Enwezor’s 1996 exhibition In/Sight: African Photographers 1940-present. Area Studies function as “curatorial correctives” that highlight marginalized communities who were excluded from mainstream collections. The final strategy, relational studies, seeks to abolish historic canons and reframe the dialogue amongst and between works of art based solely on the curators’ vision. This approach “is interested not in a monologue of sameness, but in a multitude or cacophony of voices speaking simultaneously”20. Thelma Golden’s Black Male exhibition demonstrates this strategy as she brought together a diverse array of artists with the specific intention to create a space for “complicated dialogue” about the intersection of gender and race in American society.21 Through this unit, I will invite students to consider these strategies as they begin to curate their own exhibits. We will study the following curators in an effort to see how these strategies have been employed to build inclusivity in the art world.
Dr. Lowery Stokes Sims entered the field of art professionally as a direct response to the community protest over the Harlem on my Mind exhibition of 1969/70. Hired by the Metropolitan Museum in 1972 Stokes says she was part of the “first wave of a diversification and outreach in museums” as the artworld was beginning to grapple with the increased calls for representation by Black, Latino, and Native artists 22. Starting in ‘community programs’ her role was to lead exhibitions and workshops in the education department until working her way up to become the Met’s first African American curator in 1975. In her 27 years at the Met, Sims curated over 40 exhibitions increasing equity with her expertise in African, Latino, Native and Asian contemporary art. In 2000, Dr. Sims left the Met to become the Director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, a place whose history she admired and whose legacy she would uphold. Always with an eye on the community, Sims worked closely with Deputy Director for Exhibitions and Programs Thelma Golden to launch the Expanding the Walls program which engages local teens in the study of James VanDerZee’s photography. Throughout her career Dr. Sims has had to wrestle with the notions of ‘area studies’ and ‘revisionism’ as she tries to create space for underrepresented cultures in her museums. When asked if there was still a need for the Studio Museum in the 2000s she replied with a hearty ‘Yes!’ and went on to explain “we needed an institution that was looking after our community twenty-four-seven, instead of just in February when you have Black History Month”23. Although museums have made progress towards the diversity goals set out in the 1970’s Dr. Sims and her successor, Thelma Golden, continue to fight against the tokenism that continues to take place.
Thelma Golden has used her voice to build a new vocabulary for art exhibitions throughout her tenure as an art curator. Currently employed as the Director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, Golden began her career as a curator at the Studio Museum before working from 1988-1998 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her groundbreaking exhibition, Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary Art (1994-95) showcased her desire to use the gallery as a catalyst for change. “My overall project is about art—specifically, about black artists,” she explains, “very generally about the way in which art can change the way we think about culture and ourselves.”24 Defining curatorial work as “intellectual work, weaponized,” Golden sees her role as inventing a new vocabulary outside of the traditional art history canon in which art and the artists engage with the public in real time and with real context.25 In Black Male, Golden sought to open a conversation about the intersection of race and gender in contemporary American culture. By exhibiting a broad array of artists that touched on themes of Community and Leadership, Civil Rights, Business and Employment, Television and the Media, and Gender and Sexuality, Golden opened a dialogue that challenged the existing narrative. “It sought to express the ways in which art could provide a space for dialogue,” she explains, “complicated dialogue, dialogue with many, many points of entry – and how the museum could be the space for this contest of ideas”26. This idea of art as a catalyst for change has always been at the heart of Golden who sees her work as a balance between artist, institution and audience. In her view, curators “have the opportunity to meet audiences where they are, to create space that makes it possible for art to be the agent of engagement”27. Creating space for community to encounter and reflect on the work of black artists remains at the center of Golden’s work.
Dr. Kellie Jones is an art historian, curator and professor whose career has spanned over 30 years. As the daughter of poet Hettie Jones, and Black Arts Movement member Amiri Baraka, Jones’s career in the arts might seem preordained. In an interview with the art blog Hyperallergic, Dr. Jones explains that her passion to become involved in art curation stems back to high school. During art history class she noticed that all the artists of color shown were ‘ancient’. “They’re Egyptians, they’re Aztecs,” she explains, “but after that you don’t see people, and I thought this was wrong”28. She has since made it her life’s work to increase representation among artists of color throughout her career. Her exhibitions include
- New York: Brooklyn Museum, 2005
- Energy / Experimentation: Black Artists and Abstraction, 1964-1980. New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 2006.
- Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960–1980.Los Angeles: Hammer Museum, October 2, 2011 – January 8, 2012; MOMA PS1 in Long Island City, New York, from October 21, 2012 – March 11, 2013; and at the Williams College Museum of Art in Williamstown, MA, from July 20-December 1, 2013.
- Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties.New York: Brooklyn Museum, March 7–July 13, 2014. Co-curated by Teresa A. Carbone and Kellie Jones.
Through all of her exhibitions, Jones “refuses to treat the work of black artists as an isolated phenomenon, instead drawing on a keen attention to cross-cultural aesthetics and a highly developed sensitivity to the formal properties of art objects to integrate their work into the broader artistic production of the United States in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries”29. In Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960–1980, Jones examined the transformation of African American identity within American culture as the result of the Black Arts and Civil Rights movements. But true to character, Jones maintains an eye on not segregating black artists from contemporaneous art movements saying, “with Now Dig This, people think it’s a ‘black art show.’ But in fact, there is a range of voices that are in dialogue about American and African American art-making in that period”30. Through her art analysis and curation, Jones has been a powerful voice for bringing a new understanding of the role of black artists throughout history.
Credited by the New York Times as the “Curator who Remapped Art World” Okwui Enwezor used his platform to shatter boundaries established by the white European canon. Born in 1963 in Nigeria and being displaced several times during the Biafran War, Enwezor “learned what it means to be the Other” and used this world view in his visionary exhibitions. In/Sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the Present “was one of the first museum exhibitions to present imagery from African by Africans themselves, beyond the stereotypes of Western ethnography”31. Following the relational studies strategy of art curation Enwezor sought to
“construct a new and inclusive discourse for art in an age of globalization, one that could confront the ‘ethics and limits of occidental power,’ demand a radical overhaul of contemporary structures of power and privilege, and thereby depart from hegemonic, Euro-US cultural perspectives and their exhibition projects, criticizing the latter’s tokenist inclusion of ‘non-Western’ peoples” 32.
Enwezor was the first non-European to be tapped as the artistic director of Documenta (11th edition, 2002) which he restructured with a global focus creating 5 platforms in Vienna, Berlin, New Delhi, St. Lucia, and Lagos. More than half of the artists he selected to exhibit were from the developing world connected through the theme of globalism in a “historically engaged view of the whole, roiling planet, where artists and images were in constant motion”33. Enwezor established himself as a thought leader in the world of art history and curation and expanded the understanding of African Art around the world.
Mari-Carmen Ramirez, curator of Latin American Art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, draws on her bicultural background to introduce Americans to unknown LatinX artists. Her 2004 exhibition, Inverted Utopias, is credited with shifting the perception of Latin American art in the United States by sidestepping the heavy hitters like Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo and instead shining a light on less well-known avant-garde South American artists. Born in Puerto Rico, Ramirez began her curatorial career as the assistant director of the Ponce Museum of Art before earning her PhD and being appointed as the first curator of Latin American art in the United States at the art museum of the University of Texas at Austin34. When accepting the position at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Ramirez made it conditional upon creating a research center there to study and promote Latin American artists. “I have been operating from the margins, whether in Puerto Rico or in Texas,” Ramirez states, “And I also have been representing or standing for artists who have been marginal until very recently”35. Ramirez makes it her mission to ensure that the entire complexity of Latin American art is understood and appreciated by the American audience.