February is African-American History Month: Art History and Prominent Black Artists
Typically, African American or Black History Month is about "regular" history and how Black Americans have experienced the US. I take it a little further in my piece on transportation history ("African American History Month and Transportation: February 4th | Transit Equity Day," 2025), and have written about creating "history trails" in systematic ways ("Four points about presentation of African American History in the context of Black History Month | reprint with an addition about the US Civil Rights Trail (versus the Dixieland Trail)," 2024).
I'm the last person to be able to write about art history generally, or in terms of African-Americans specifically, but that seems like a great topic area to celebrate during the month as well. I don't recall a lot of art presentation in the context of Black History Month.
Although yes, we see exhibitions all the time of Jacob Lawrence, Sam Gilliam, and contemporary artists Kehinde Wiley and Kara Walker.
For example, the Boston Globe has an article, "Art Review: Has John Wilson’s time arrived? He’s been here all along," on a retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts on the sculptor John Wilson. Who I hadn't heard of, but hell, I can pretty much only identify Rodin and Wiley as sculptors generally, given my lack of knowledge
“Father and Child Reading” by John Wilson. PHOTO: COURTESY OF ROXBURY COMMUNITY COLLEGE
Also see, "Sculpting a Legacy: The Art and Impact of John Wilson," Tufts Now.
Labels: African American/black politics, art history, critical race theory, cultural heritage/tourism, cultural planning, culture wars, historiography, public history, urban history
posted by Richard Layman @ 3:26 PM&Permanent Link
12 Comments:
Trump’s Orwellian Assault on Black History
https://prospect.org/politics/2025-04-15-trumps-orwellian-assault-on-black-history
Amid anti-DEI push, National Park Service rewrites history of Underground Railroad
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2025/04/06/national-park-service-underground-railroad-history-slavery/
Historians rip Trump attacks on the 'Black Smithsonian'
https://apnews.com/article/trump-black-history-smithsonian-dei-687fd306dc9c6d7611300d74fe49b8aa
Former NAACP President Ben Jealous, who now leads the Sierra Club, said museums that focus on specific minority or marginalized groups — enslaved persons and their descendants, women, Native Americans — are necessary because historical narratives from previous generations misrepresented those individuals or overlooked them altogether.
“Attempts to tell the general history of the country always omit too much ... and the place that we’ve come to by having these museums is so we can, in total, do a better job of telling the complete story of this country,” he said.
Head of African American Museum Departs as Trump Targets Smithsonian
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/arts/design/kevin-young-smithsonian-african-american-museum-departs.html
RESTORING TRUTH AND SANITY TO AMERICAN HISTORY
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/03/restoring-truth-and-sanity-to-american-history/
Trump Wants to Rewrite History at the Smithsonian. It’ll Be an Uphill Battle
https://www.vanityfair.com/style/story/true-colors-trump-wants-to-rewrite-history-at-the-smithsonian
Historians see Trump attacks on the ‘Black Smithsonian’ as an effort to sanitize racism
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/30/historians-see-trump-attacks-on-the-black-smithsonian-as-an-effort-to-sanitize-racism-00259310
Postelection surrealism and nostalgic racism in the hands of Donald Trump, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.14318/hau7.1.026
Trickle-down racism: Trump's effect on whites’ racist dehumanizing attitudes, Current Research in Ecological and Social Psychology
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666622723000710
Letter: Trump’s claim about the museum of African American history is a lie
https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/letters/2025/04/13/letter-trumps-claim-about-museum/
While on a recent vacation in Washington D.C., my partner and I went to what felt like a thousand museums. I would say my top two (not including the Gershwin exhibit in the Library of Congress) were the National Museum of Natural History and the National Museum of African American History and Culture. I came out of our trip with a renewed hope for our First Amendment rights and for our nation’s ability to overcome the toughest divisions over time.
Less than two weeks after we returned, POTUS signed an executive order targeting several of the Smithsonian museums we visited. The order specifically calls out the National Museum of African American History and Culture as one that promotes “improper ideology.” I am very distressed by this.
One of my favorite things about the museum was the piece of it that walks you through an honest history of some of the darkest parts of our nation’s history — the slave trade, the Civil War, segregation, etc. — and still manages to leave you feeling hopeful about America. It shows you exactly how the Founding Fathers failed to live up to their own principles, but how, after years of struggle and bloodshed, we have grown closer and closer to living up to the ideal.
This administration claims in the order that, “The National Museum of African American History and Culture has proclaimed that ‘hard work,’ ‘individualism,’ and ‘the nuclear family’ are aspects of ‘White culture.’”
From my experience there last month, I can only conclude this claim is a lie. And to me, it seems like a pretty pernicious one.
Ian McDougal, Tooele
https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2025/08/after-a-torrent-of-graffiti-and-a-provocative-sign-what-remains-of-this-ne-portland-mural.html
After a torrent of graffiti and a provocative sign, what remains of this NE Portland mural?
How the Getty is preserving L.A.’s Black heritage amid Trump’s DEI rollbacks
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2025-09-25/getty-la-black-culture-heritage
The Getty has ramped up initiatives aimed at preserving Black arts and cultural heritage in Los Angeles through landmark designations, grants, acquisitions, archives and scholarship.
Key acquisitions include 4.5 million images from Johnson Publishing Co.’s archives and architectural plans from pioneering late Black architect Paul R. Williams.
Despite the Trump administration‘s pressure on arts institutions, the privately funded Getty continues expanding its collection and staging major exhibitions of Black artists.
“It’s an iterative process,” says Rita Cofield, an associate project specialist at the Getty Conservation Institute who leads the African American Historic Places project, which has been identifying local sites of cultural importance to the Black community and working to register them as historic landmarks. “The more you learn, the more there is. The more history you know, the more history that’s revealed and the more the community comes to you.”
The project is currently in the process of selecting its second round of Black heritage sites and hopes to get them designated as landmarks in the next year or so. Its first round included Tom and Ethel Bradley’s Leimert Park residence, as well as Stylesville Barbershop & Beauty Salon in Pacoima; St. Elmo Village and Jewel’s Catch One in Mid-City; the California Eagle newspaper in South L.A.; and New Bethel Baptist Church in Venice.
Another key program is the Getty’s African American Art History Initiative, which was launched in 2018 through the Getty Research Institute. It serves as a major West Coast center of scholarship through preservation and documentation of artist archives, original research and the creation of oral histories. Among its proudest acquisitions are the archives of the Johnson Publishing Co., founded in 1942 by African American businessman John H. Johnson and known for Ebony and Jet magazines. Acquired jointly with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, the archive consists of more than 4.5 million images primarily from Black photographers, including Ebony’s Moneta Sleet Jr., who won a Pulitzer Prize for feature photography for an image he captured of Coretta Scott King at husband Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral.
Another key program is the Getty’s African American Art History Initiative, which was launched in 2018 through the Getty Research Institute. It serves as a major West Coast center of scholarship through preservation and documentation of artist archives, original research and the creation of oral histories.
Among its proudest acquisitions are the archives of the Johnson Publishing Co., founded in 1942 by African American businessman John H. Johnson and known for Ebony and Jet magazines. Acquired jointly with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, the archive consists of more than 4.5 million images primarily from Black photographers, including Ebony’s Moneta Sleet Jr., who won a Pulitzer Prize for feature photography for an image he captured of Coretta Scott King at husband Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral.
Another key program is the Getty’s African American Art History Initiative, which was launched in 2018 through the Getty Research Institute. It serves as a major West Coast center of scholarship through preservation and documentation of artist archives, original research and the creation of oral histories. Among its proudest acquisitions are the archives of the Johnson Publishing Co., founded in 1942 by African American businessman John H. Johnson and known for Ebony and Jet magazines. Acquired jointly with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, the archive consists of more than 4.5 million images primarily from Black photographers, including Ebony’s Moneta Sleet Jr., who won a Pulitzer Prize for feature photography for an image he captured of Coretta Scott King at husband Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral.
Preserving architecture
One of those buildings overlaps with another Getty initiative called Conserving Black Modernism, a $4.65-million grant partnership between the Getty Foundation and the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund that works to identify, preserve and strengthen modern architecture by Black architects and designers. The program launched in 2022 and currently includes 21 buildings across the country, including Williams’ Founder’s Church of Religious Science, which was built in 1960, and Watts Happening Cultural Center — designed by architects Robert Kennard and Arthur Silvers.
Giving grants for research and community-building
HBCU libraries, as well as other research centers, universities and museums are benefiting from grants given by the Getty Foundation as part of its ongoing Black Visual Arts Archives program. In August, it awarded $1.5 million to seven institutions, including the Amistad Research Center in New Orleans, Cal State Los Angeles and Visual AIDS in New York.
The goal is to enable groups to organize, preserve and digitize vast archives that have thus far remained largely uncatalogued and unavailable to scholars — and to build community between archive stewards, says Getty Foundation senior program officer Miguel de Baca, who has been meeting with potential grantees and logging hundreds of hours of travel in what he calls a “bespoke” process of identification.
Collecting and displaying indelible images
It’s not all about archives, of course, says Jim Ganz, the Getty’s senior curator of photographs. The Getty‘s collection is largely white by virtue of its focus on pre-20th-century European art. The photography department is an outlier in that its collection begins with the earliest images and continues to modern day — this allows the department to be especially representative. One of the best ways to accomplish parity is through acquisitions, Ganz says, and his team of seven curators regularly acquires work by Black photographers.
Dawoud Bey wants to deterritorialize art: ‘When I’m in these spaces, it opens up space for the Black community’
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2023-05-16/dawoud-bey-sean-kelly-gallery-getty
========
https://savingplaces.org/stories/black-modernism-reinventing-space-rewriting-history
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/05/us/joseph-mcneil-dead.html
Joseph McNeil, Young Spark in a Civil Rights Battle, Dies at 83
He and his classmates from a historically Black college in Greensboro, N.C., desegregated a Woolworth’s lunch counter in 1960, inspiring similar protests across the nation.
Planting a Flag, and a Flagship, for Black Art
The reopening of the Studio Museum in Harlem, after seven years of construction, comes with dazzling alumni and collection shows.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/06/arts/design/studio-museum-art-review.html
Some museums, just by existing, plant a bright radical flag in history. Fifty-seven years ago, when it opened in a drafty rented loft space over a liquor store on upper Fifth Avenue, the Studio Museum in Harlem did that.
At the time, 1968, racist Jim Crow laws had ended only a few years earlier with the passing of civil rights legislation. African American history was a story still waiting to be fully told. Black art and culture had almost no institutional visibility anywhere.
Now that bright banner is unfurling as in a fresh wind, with the opening next week of the museum’s fine new purpose-built home on West 125th Street. And the arrival comes at yet another pressure-point political moment around issues of diversity and equity.
Both the Ligon and Hammons pieces are from the museum’s permanent collection, holdings so aesthetically rich and historically consequential as to make it hard to believe that when the museum opened in 1968 it was with the stated intention of not collecting anything at all. It had very limited financial resources then, and the focus was to be strictly on creating a supportive work environment for practicing artists and avoiding the burden of material accumulation, with its preservationist demands.
Within a few years this focus changed. People, some of them artists, gave the museum work whether it wanted the work or not. And, of course, it did want it. Who wouldn’t? Especially since some truly awesome things were coming its way, and by the mid-1970s, the desire to acquire became official.
The result, a half-century later, are holdings that number in the thousands. They’re primarily African American and Afro Latino in origin but also span continents. Some 200 items — including very early contributions — are on view for the opening in a selection called “From Now: A Collection in Context” concentrated on two floors but installed throughout the museum, and with more to come during the year as works are rotated to ensure that return visitors will be rewarded with surprises.
Under its director, Thelma Golden, it has produced some of the most influential New York shows of the 21st century, including the 2001 new-talent roundup called “Freestyle” that introduced an entire generation of Black artists to the mainstream, effectively breaking the art market “color barrier” as no other show had.
The market has since absorbed those artists, and it continues to poach from the annual A.I.R. shows. But we live now in a newly precarious and silencing time for culture, and particularly for art and for museums with truth-telling missions.
Arts, Culture and Museums
For a Distinctive Black Culture, a Rerouted Parade Feels Like Erasure
The annual Penn Center Heritage Day Parade in South Carolina draws hundreds to celebrate the Gullah Geechee people. But a new route has Black residents feeling as if their legacy is vanishing.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/08/us/penn-center-parade-south-carolina-gullah-geechee.html
As Trump Recasts History, a Civil Rights Museum Sticks to a Messy Past
The National Center for Civil and Human Rights is expanding its exploration of the country’s racial dynamics despite a surge of government resistance.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/08/arts/design/trump-national-center-civil-human-rights.html
Workers at the newly reimagined National Center for Civil and Human Rights were busy on a recent afternoon assembling an exhibit that begins with a rush of progress: The Civil War has ended and slavery is abolished. Black candidates are elected to public office. Institutions of higher learning, like Morehouse College and Atlanta University, are established to serve Black students. The Greenwood District of Tulsa, Okla., emerges as a hub of prosperity known as Black Wall Street.
Then, the exhibit abruptly shifts.
Greenwood is shown ravaged by fire and bloodshed in an outbreak of racial violence. Across the South, white leaders orchestrate a web of laws that enforce segregation, block access to the polls and keep would-be Black politicians out of positions of power for generations.
“It’s the story of Black progress and white backlash,” said Kama Pierce, the chief program officer and curator of the exhibit at the center in Atlanta, which is reopening on Saturday after a $58 million overhaul and expansion. “We feel like we’re still in this cycle in this country.”
The museum’s curators said their intention was to neither sensationalize nor sanitize history, but to still have it resonate in a visceral way. To achieve that, they have relied heavily on documentary evidence including photographs and video, statements from participants in important events, and contemporaneous accounts from journalists.
Among the changes is an update to one of the museum’s most popular, and most emotionally taxing, exhibits: a simulation of a sit-in protest at a diner. Visitors perch themselves on stools, put on headphones and place their hands on the counter while listening to taunting and threatening voices.
Now visitors are introduced to the intensive training that demonstrators went through, instilling the need to stick together and remain unflappable. Built-in tissue dispensers were also added, in recognition of how many people walk away shaken and tearful — often before the one-minute, 25-second recording ends.
The museum also created a larger space dedicated to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whose papers the museum has exclusive rights to display. King’s daughter Bernice curated the first of the rotating exhibits. It includes some handwritten correspondence and is focused on lessons on civil disobedience and her father’s broader activism on improving economic opportunity and working conditions and challenging the Vietnam War.
Museum leaders said they refrained from too much interpretation in the exhibits to encourage visitors to draw their own conclusions.
The center was also designed to join a cluster of offerings that have made Atlanta a destination for soaking up civil rights history, including the national park encompassing King’s birthplace and the old sanctuary of Ebenezer Baptist Church, where he was pastor.
Curators have also dedicated more space to Black empowerment. A modern take on a jukebox was installed to play songs reflecting that collective pride, like James Brown’s “Say It Loud — I’m Black and I’m Proud.”
An elaborate interactive section is being added for children, who had been unserved by past iterations. A secret passage behind a bookcase leads them to a lair for “change agents,” where they learn about the influence of young people in activist movements.
Much of the history the museum covers is despairing, but its leaders want it to be threaded with hope. After all, unsteady progress is still progress. One display has small cards highlighting ways for visitors to become more civically involved, like
https://chicago.suntimes.com/art/2025/09/24/depaul-art-museum-young-lords-exhibit-chicago-tengo-lincoln-park-en-mi-corazon
From street gang to civil rights group, the Young Lords' impact is on display in a new DePaul art exhibition
The exhibition arrives at a tense political moment when President Donald Trump has taken aim at museums nationwide. In a social media post last month, Trump wrote, “The Museums throughout Washington, but all over the Country are, essentially, the last remaining segment of ‘WOKE.’ ”
At the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Riches of African-American Art
The museum, which has long collected works by black artists, rehangs some of its galleries to offer a fascinating journey through a wondrous, complex tradition.
https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/fine-art/at-the-detroit-institute-of-arts-the-riches-of-african-american-art-339c65c2
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