Excerpt

"But the patronage of Black art by a white millionaire is complicated, then as now. The acquisition of cultural artifacts from a society that is subjugated or impoverished raises ethical questions. And once African sculpture is taken out of the context in which it functioned, what role does it play? And whose interests does it serve?"

Click on the image on the right for an overview of artists and their work throughout different times. Be sure to go to the 'Civil Rights and Urban America' section and see work by Norman Lewis ('Evening Rendevous', 1962), Jacob Lawrence ('Bar and Grill', 1941) and Alan Rohan Crite ('School's Out', 1936).

An excerpt from  'Civil Rights and Urban America' :

“Now is the time to lift our nation from the quick sands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children.”  –Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., 1963

Excerpt:

"The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke is a 2018 biography of Alain LeRoy Locke written by historian Jeffrey C. Stewart.[1][2] The biography examines the life of Locke, an African-American activist and scholar who mentored many African-American intellectuals and writers[3] and whom many see as the "father" of the Harlem Renaissance.[4][5] Published by Oxford University Press, The New Negro won the 2018 National Book Award for Nonfiction and the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Biography.[6]

Excerpt

"In the wake of George Floyd’s murder and the subsequent protests, museums across the country began making pledges to initiate change within their walls. In emails and social media posts, institutions impugned racism and acknowledged their own complacency in systems that perpetuate it. They preached solidarity and inclusivity. They vowed to take a good hard look in the mirror, to reject silence, and to listen and learn.

Important though those statements were, many wanted even more to see action. Some institutions offered concrete plans, including, for example, staff trainings, inclusivity committees, and more diverse programming goals. But many also appeared content to rely on platitudes, or only delivered tangible plans after being called out for their passivity." 

An excerpt

• ...THEN, IN THE 1970S, Hammons moved to New York and became a major reason a young single mother named Linda Goode Bryant opened her own gallery, Just Above Midtown (known as JAM): In 1973, Bryant was working as the director of education at the Studio Museum in Harlem,  another important touchstone for black artists of the era. She was familiar with Hammons’s work and asked if he’d ever show in a New York gallery. He told Bryant, “I don’t show in white galleries.” Her response: “Well, I guess have to start a gallery.” She was the only black gallery owner in a building on 57th Street full of exhibition spaces.(Bryan recalls that whenever  she ran into Allan Frumkin, a dealer of mostly realist paintings, he’d tell her, “You don’t belong here.”)

Excerpt

"I love this photograph by Billy (Fundi) Abernathy. It shows three boys looking out a window, their faces and hands pressed against a fly screen. The tattered screen has holes in it. The frames of the window are similarly beaten up."

Click on the image on the right to learn about Elizabeth Catlett.

A beginning excerpt:

 In the mid-1940s, as Jackson Pollock flung paint onto a canvas, Elizabeth Catlett set out to create a series of prints, “The Negro Woman,” later renamed “The Black Woman.”

Like many Black artists when abstraction was the coin of the realm, Catlett, who died in 2012 at 96, was a realist who portrayed the untold stories of Black Americans.

An excerpt:

'In a new HBO documentary, the titan of 20th-century photography is celebrated by the many artists he inspired ' 

 An excerpt;

“She’s a 21st-century oracle,” said Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, an associate professor of the history of art and architecture and African and African American studies at Harvard University. “Carrie has been at the forefront of addressing issues to do with, not just our humanity, but the racial dimensions of it. You want to probe the history of injustice and redemption? You must understand the work of Carrie Mae Weems.”

An excerpt:

"Incorporating work from throughout the artist’s four-decade-long career, “The Shape of Things” has a strong retrospective quality — confronting the past in order to understand the present — without being a retrospective exhibition. The artist traces our current national predicament, with ever-present anti-Blackness and eroding democracy foremost among many woes, while reminding us that what we’re seeing in our political landscape is nothing new. In fact, she’s been telling us about it for decades. What is less present, sometimes frustratingly so, are ways to imagine a different future."

Click on the right to learn more about this artist.

An excerpt:

"For Gibbs, 33, who only started painting six years ago and received his MFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art last year, the commission has “changed the way that I look at what I’m doing,” he said. “It gave me courage that people want to support what I bring to the table and believe that I have value.”

An excerpt:

The first and most urgent task is to preserve and scan the negatives before they deteriorate irreversibly, said Jeff L. Rosenheim, curator in charge of the photography department at the Met. Diacetate film from the early 20th century is unstable, and with age, the plastic base under the emulsion becomes brittle and detaches from the image-bearing layer. The Met’s conservation department encountered this problem previously with the first photographic archive it acquired, of Walker Evans, in 1994. In 2008, the museum also took possession of the archive of Diane Arbus. The Van Der Zee archive is its third archive.

An excerpt:

"In this particular case, King’s arrest was captured by the photojournalist Charles Moore, an admirer who would go on to become an influential chronicler of the civil-rights movement. Years later, Moore said, “I did not know at the time that my pictures might make a difference, but I knew this man would make a difference.” His photos from that day, which ran in Life magazine and in newspapers around the world, provided the inspiration for Ronald Wimberly’s cover for the January 17, 2022, issue of the magazine. We recently talked to the artist about artistic collaboration and how he translates the tools he uses in cartooning to other fields."

An excerpt:

"Hear these men speak about their decades-long bond and their individual artistic practices, however, and certain rigorous and revelatory connections to jazz are bound to emerge: tradition as a foundation for innovation, improvisation within material and chosen constraints, competition in the context of collaboration, private labor that enables public virtuosity."

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Click on the right to learn more about this "period room".

An excerpt;

This project has roots in the homes of Seneca Village, of which only a fragmented history remains. Like other period rooms throughout the Museum, this installation is a fabrication of a domestic space that assembles furnishings to create an illusion of authenticity. Unlike these other spaces, this room rejects the notion of one historical period and embraces the African and African diasporic belief that the past, present, and future are interconnected and that informed speculation may uncover many possibilities. Powered by Afrofuturism—a transdisciplinary creative mode that centers Black imagination, excellence, and self-determination—this construction is only one proposition for what might have been, had Seneca Village been allowed to thrive into the present and beyond.

Click on the right to read more about this "period""" room.

An excerpt:

"Titled Before Yesterday We Could Fly, the new addition to the American Wing is a reimagining of a home in Seneca Village, the largely Black community on Manhattan's Upper West Side that thrived in the mid 19th-century before being seized by eminent domain in 1857 and razed to make way for what is now Central Park (part of a pattern of land seizure in Black and poor neighborhoods across the country). Although several items in the room stem from the findings of a 2011 excavation of the site, the room, unlike traditional period rooms, doesn't speak to one specific era. Rather, it builds upon the history of Seneca Village to tell a broader story of Black culture through the lens of Afrofuturism, the philosophy that explores alternative retellings and imaginings of the African diaspora."

Click on the right to learn more about this "period room".

An excerpt:

As much as this exhibition looks backward, the room is also steeped in the present. The Met, breaking with its own tradition of the immersive “period room” shaped by a particular period of time or genre of decorative arts, has envisioned a counterfactual fable: The room here belongs to a Seneca Village resident, a Black woman and her family, left undisturbed, and able to maintain the dignity, safety and suffrage that were the results of their landowning. Most strikingly, the room’s ornateness underscores the toll of the city’s loss, and the consequences of denying Black people the ability to pass on their wealth across generations.

An Excerpt:

'While there was some stagnation in the previous period when it comes to exhibitions, the next year promises to make it up, with rich programming already announced by the leading institutions. The upcoming exhibitions in 2022 will feature established names, Philip Guston , Henri Matisse, Faith Ringgold, Georgia O'Keeffe, and many more, and will offer a new take on some of the dominant art theories and discourses.

Surrealism will have two shows, at Tate Modern and the Belvedere, with refreshing explorations of links between psychoanalysis and the movement and its worldwide iterations. Francis Bacon remains a constant fascination, and a new exhibition will look at his animal-human depictions.

Gordon Parks, Diane Arbus, and Jamel Shabazz will have shows looking at their photographic practice, while women artists will be gathered together for a show dedicated to the image of a woman.

An Excerpt:

“As Black people we’re fighting for change, and as a Black artist, we’re always trying to move forward — it always feels like we’re fighting for change and sometimes literally for change,” said Mr. Robinson, 42, who was born and raised in Harlem.

He is the teaching artist-in-residence at the museum in conjunction with the “African American Art in the 20th Century” exhibition, which includes 43 works by some of the country’s most famous Black artists. Mr. Robinson’s first museum show and the 20th Century exhibition will run concurrently from Oct. 15 through Jan. 16.