It is as though what is being said is that whatever black people do in the various areas labeled art is Art—hence Black Art. And various spokesmen make rules to govern this supposed new form of expression.

He’s problematizing the space of Black art. He was able to afford that to his peers. There was a need for that. At that time, art criticism was so highly regarded. There was emotive argument around what it meant to make painting that has been lost on us a bit. He was trying to do things that critics at the time couldn’t do, for this group of artists.

[How Frank Bowling’s abstractions made him one of today’s top British artists.]

It is clear that modernism came into being with the contribution provided by European artists’ discovery of and involvement with African works, and their development of an esthetic and a mythic subject from it. But the point I am trying to make concerns the total “inheritance” which constitutes the American experience and that aspect of it with which black people can now (perhaps they always have) fully identify, due to the politicization of blackness.

With the distance of reading this in 2021, you may not get the system of value at play and the ideological differences. You know, he’s talking about this European understanding versus an American one. Bringing out those differences to give these artists dimension [due]. It’s something that Bowling could do that would inform later critics and writers to look closer at the work of his peers.

William Williams’ work is like Frank Stella’s in not being about memory. It’s about discovery. There is almost no apparent residue, only amazed recognition as these bright abstractions register their charge to the eye and brain.

I like the generosity in observing a little closer—almost a critical look at the past, the biography, the previous exhibitions that informed it. What he’s doing is giving the work back to the artists, to politicize the labor of the time, as well as using the terms as they’re set formally. I think that’s important. It’s important to have a Black artist talking about other Black artists. It’s allowing them to possess themselves and hold their own space, especially in a space where people are devouring without taste.

We have not been able to detect in any kind of universal sense The Black Experience wedged-up in the flat bed between red and green: between say a red stripe and a green stripe.

It was clear he did a job, that this was a task that was important, to separate himself and the subjectivity of his studio. It gives a measure to his voice. He’s arguing for the importance of innovation—that people were trying to make a new kind of art.

The splendor of the great princely collections [forerunners of modern museums] was … inseparable from an element of snobbishness. Like everything connected with princes and millionaires, they were sometimes no more than a buttress to vanity, and so they became swollen and sycophantic.

He’s acknowledging these standards of tastes as being highly idiosyncratic and not necessarily based in scholarship. He’s questioning the form of expertise, and that’s something I think is incredibly contemporary, in the sense that we need to be questioning the neutrality of the museum, in part because societal conditions are creating the desire to change. [Certain politics] are embedded in the structure of the museum, and undoing them requires acknowledging that they exist there.

[Read Kenneth Clark’s 1954 essay “The Ideal Museum.”]

[Architect William] Lethaby’s famous statement that “a great building must not be one man thick, but many men thick,” applies to a great gallery.

The great director, or the great curator, is exalted, and though there are many people who do day-to-day stuff, the people who are running the vision and making big decisions [receive praise]. It’s the great individual mind—usually male, usually white, usually well-educated—enacting some great form of visionary act. The reality is: museums are profoundly collective enterprises. What if we really imagined them that way?

The fact is that works of art are like wealth; they move about from one part of the world to another, and at first it seems very shocking; but after they have been in possession of one place or person for long enough, the situation becomes respectable, and people are scandalized when they move again.

I am generally of the opinion that changing things is good because we need to be thinking in new ways all the time. While I have certain favorite things I love to visit [in museums] and will be heartbroken if I can’t visit those, ultimately I’ll find something else to enjoy. It’s something I respect about what the Museum of Modern Art is doing to reinstall its collection. It’s trying to reimagine what change is and what storytelling can do for artworks that were excluded. If there is a desire for greater participation from a larger swath of the public, we have to address inequities and biases.

A version of this article appears in the February/March issue of ARTnews, under the title “Of Princes and Millionaires.”

The public art gallery is a relatively recent creation—scarcely one of them is older than two lifetimes—and it has grown up through a series of accidents, without much clear thought of its purpose, or, rather, of its conflicting purposes. This does not discredit it, for many of the most valuable human creations. from the British Constitution to the Italian opera, have been accidental, illogical and full of contradictions. But it does suggest that the function of museums of art is bound up with the historical process by which they took their present form.

Under what circumstances were works of art first brought together for public enjoyment? The answer is that in the two complete, consistent epochs on which European civilization is based—those of fifth-century Greece and thirteenth-century France-works of art were first brought together as objects or accessories of worship. The first great displays of painting and sculpture in ancient Greece took place in temples, and were made in honor of the Gods. The first collections of works of art of all kinds—which we could call museums—were the treasuries of temples, such as that of the Oracle of Delphi. This is equally true of the Middle Ages. It was in the great cathedrals that men became conscious of the power of works of art to quicken their spirits, and give dignity and order to their lives. And it was in the treasuries of great churches, like the Abbey of St. Denis that works of the legendary past or of distant countries were collected as examples of fine craftsmanship and divine inspiration.

In both these examples, works of art were brought together as illustrations of a living faith. It was only when these epochs were drawing to a close, and losing their creative confidence that the collection of works of art became an end in itself, and passed from religious institutions to individual connoisseurs. Indeed it was the Romans, who could produce practically no art of.their own, who fir.st became collectors on a large scale. The Emperor Nero, type of the millionaire collector who believes himself to be an artist manqué developed, if he did not begin, the practice of taking works of art out of their settings in temples and putting them in a private gallery.

This sounds sacrilegious and probably was a bad idea; but time makes us accept anything. Four very important objects from Nero’s collection still exist—the bronze horses of St. Mark’s; and although their position, stuck up on the gallery of that strange holy junk shop, must be reckoned, by any standards, very peculiar, there would no doubt be the same cry of sacrilege if they were taken down today as there was when the Emperor Nero took them from a temple at Corinth. The fact is that works of art are like wealth; they move about from one part of the world to another, and at first it seems very shocking; but after they have been in possession of one place or person for long enough, the situation becomes respectable, and people are scandalized when they are moved again .. It was the sovereigns of small states of fifteenth-century Italy who, following the example of Roman Antiquity, created the first art galleries of the modern world. And here one must number the difference between those who wished to live surrounded by works of art and those who wished to have a gallery. The former chose almost entirely contemporary work, usually commissioned on purpose for the site. But from the first a gallery implied a collection of venerated works of the past, the word itself meaning that part of a house which one walks through, but does not live in. The objects it contains are on display and are chosen for their rarity or their arresting qualities. Such were the first great collections—the gallery of the Palace at Mantua, the gallery of the Dukes of Tuscany in Florence, known as the Uffizi. These were primarily collections of antiques, but already by the date of Castiglione’s Courtier, one or two painters had become so famous that they were considered on a level with the artists of antiquity; and so the works of Raphael, Michelangelo, Titian, Giorgione and a few others were transferred from their original places—the decoration of a living room or a church—and put into galleries. Thus at the beginning of their history galleries took on a character which they have retained until the present day. They were fundamentally artificial—pictures were not painted for them, but put in them when they had become sufficiently famous. This meant that they represented a standard of taste-a taste based on the assumption that almost everything done in Classical Antiquity was beautiful. It also meant that they involved a certain amount of snobbishness. From the first, powerful collectors began to look for rare treasures, and to buy names rather than works. Still we must admit that the great collections of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were the finest ever formed. Indeed the seventeenth century collections remained the basis of the galleries of Europe—galleries such as Dresden, Munich and Vienna—until 1946. If Charles I’s collection had not been broken up and sold by Oliver Cromwell, the English National Gallery would have been incomparably the finest in the world.

For the most part these princely collectors bought what they liked. They were not much disturbed by public opinion, and critics could be kept in order. When they wished for advice they consulted the most eminent artists available. The Dukes of Mantua took their advice from Mantegna; Charles I consulted Rubens and Van Dyck, Rubens also advised the King of Spain and Velasquez went to Italy to buy for Philip IV. The director of the greatest private collection of the late seventeenth century, that of the Archduke Leopold, which formed the basis of the Vienna Gallery, was the painter Teniers, who made sensitive miniature copies of every picture to serve as a catalogue. Nowadays it is often said that artists are uncertain guides in the purchase of old masters, and I am afraid that this has become true. The reason is that in the seventeenth century it was not thought necessary to be original. Contemporary art was founded directly on the art of the past. The artist had to do the same thing as his master, and, if possible, do it better. He therefore had to make a profound study of the painting which preceded him, its ideas, its pictorial science and its technique. And, since painting was supposed to be closely connected with literature, he had to be what is called a man of culture. All of which fitted him to advise on the formation of a great gallery; and does not apply to the majority of artists since about 1860.

The splendor of the great princely collections was, as I have said, inseparable from an element of snobbishness. Like everything connected with princes and millionaires, they were sometimes no more than a buttress to vanity, and so they became swollen and sycophantic. An agreeable illustration of this is Zoffany’s picture of the Tribuna in the Uffizi, the Grand Duke of Tuscany’s collection. Unlike the seventeenth-century Flemish paintings of gallery interiors, which are quasi-fantastic, this is a record of fact—except that some extra objects have been brought in from the other side of the room to complete the picture. We know from old photographs that up to about 1870 practically all galleries were as full as this—although not as full of good pictures. It was a sort of jungle of good taste in which only the fittest survived; and this crowd of objets d’art, jostling each other like eager courtiers, set a premium on a certain type of effectiveness. A picture needed great carrying power and finish to compete in such surroundings. A delicate or sensitive object would not show.

Snobbishness implies the acceptance of false values; and in post-Renaissance collecting these were provided by the fragments of antique sculpture which were discovered in ever increasing quantities during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The illusion that these were masterpieces of art lasted three hundred years and reached its climax in the late eighteenth century, just when the conception of the public art gallery was taking shape. At that date, excavation, restoration and fabrication of antiques for the English market was practically the only Italian industry to be run at a profit. The results could be seen in the galleries of many English country houses up to the last war, when they became the targets of billeted soldiery. When we consider that these antiques (if old at all) were poor journeymen’s copies in marble done at third hand from Greek bronzes, and subsequently rubbed down and restored, we may realize how heavily the precedent of the first Renaissance collectors continued to weigh on those of the eighteenth century. And we may reflect that collectors of old masters in the last fifty years surrounded themselves with objects quite as dubious, as thoroughly restored and as lacking in inspiration as the antique collectors of the eighteenth century.

It was at this date, too, that the removal of works of art from their proper contexts went to the most extreme lengths; and once more Zoffany provides an example in his picture of the famous Towneley collection of marbles. Charles Towneley was the typical man of taste of the eighteenth century, and this picture shows the extent to which taste is a word of changing color, for anything further from the modem concept of “good taste” than this jumble of fragments and cornices it would be hard to imagine. Even so, this type of dilettante collection had one advantage over the haphazard accumulations of modern galleries. It did reflect the consciousness of a complete ideal world, where every shape was the product of a single system of thought; and the haphazard presentation, indefensible as it is by logical and archaeological standards, has a feeling of personal affection which we may find more sympathetic than the antiquarianism and frigid good taste of the most up-to-date public galleries.

When, just over one hundred years ago, modern public galleries were established, they at first accepted the standards and imitated the form of the old princely collections. But as time went on they changed their character, and this change was by no means always an improvement. They began to lose that air of certainty and consistency which was such an enjoyable feature of collections like that of Dresden—and is still to be found in the Prado. It is sometimes said that this was due to the interference of Boards of Trustees, but on the whole the good gallery directors have had their Boards well in hand, and the reason for a change of character is rather more subtle. It arises, I think, from an unconscious uncertainty of aim, which was increased when scholars took the place of artists as gallery directors. The scholar was inevitably influenced by the encyclopaedic tendencies of the time. He did not always feel confident enough to buy a picture because it was beautiful, but he did feel confident (sometimes over-confident) about it as a historical document. If he could state categorically that it was the work of a rare artist not hitherto represented in the gallery he felt on solid ground. Considering what gallery directors have suffered from the press and from malicious amateurs, this defensive attitude was understandable enough. Moreover, we must remember the basic difficulty of reconciling the public purchase of works of art with the democratic system. Why should public money be spent on giving to a small minority of citizens a pleasure which is both momentary and inexplicable. The various answers have not been very convincing. In England there was an unformulated feeling that the contents of the Art Gallery were a form of material wealth. This is shown by the fact that up to the war the state was prepared to spend money on the purchase of pictures, but not on the promotion of music, which, after it had taken effect, left no material residuum. People who wrote letters to The Times about the Nation’s Treasures are usually thinking along those lines, and almost every week the director of the National Gallery is asked what the collection is worth. A more respectable form of justification, and one which seems to prevail in the United States, is connected with the word education. But the relationship of works of art with the concept of education remains vague. No doubt that in a large sense of the word the appreciation of art is educative. It gives us a fuller understanding of the human spirit; it greatly enlarges our capacity for life: and this, I suppose, is what education sets out to do. But these benefits are achieved by the enjoyment of the works of art themselves, not by information and classification. Often it has seemed as if the educative virtue of works of art consisted in knowing about them, not in experiencing them directly. This is surely an error, a sort of decadence in which the means has become the end, and, like the churches of a religion in which belief in God has died out and only the niceties of ritual remained, our art galleries might easily be swept away in a moment of spiritual revival.

There are, however, several reasons why the modern gallery cannot easily free itself from this pedagogical structure. For one thing, its aims have, in many recent examples, become confused with those of a museum. This was originally an almost antithetical concept. It was Aristotelian, whereas the gallery was Platonic. It dealt with facts, whereas the gallery dealt with essences and ideas. The early museums, based on their collections of natural history, botany and geology, contained human artifacts only if they gave information about remote and peculiar ways of life. Whereas galleries were confined to the concentric world of Classical culture, the first “museums,” like those of Tradescant and Hans Sloane, were eccentric, and chiefly concerned with what we today would call ethnology. When such collections became fused with art galleries it was inevitable that some of their encyclopaedic, documentary character spread, and works of art began to be treated like mineralogical specimens.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, a third ingredient was added to the museum-art gallery: the exhibition of applied art. It had become apparent that traditional craftsmanship was dying out, and collections were formed to show the types of skill with which various materials had been treated in the past. One of the greatest museums in the world, the Victoria and Albert, came into existence in this way, and until the war the exhibits were arranged under the materials in which they were executed. Here, once more, we recognize how insecure is the position of the democratic-materialist state which sets out to patronize art, for the Victoria and Albert Museum was supported on the theory that it would raise the standard of industrial art, and thus increase exports, a theory which could scarcely convince the most optimistic, but which was considered a more effective way of asking Parliament for money than to say that the objects were collected because they were beautiful. But whatever its ostensible intention, the result was that works of art were displayed to give information rather than to produce a state of mind.

In all these ways the first reason which led men to collect works of art was overlayed and confused; and yet a great museum-gallery, like the Metropolitan, cannot escape from its complex heredity any more than can a human being or a nation. The sanctity of the old temple treasury, the classical values of the Renaissance, the snobbery, the pedantry, the ethnological curiosity-we may discover them all, and we may ask how it is possible to unite so many conflicting claims in the same institution. The answer is that this artificial creation must be treated as a work of art and should command the same faculties which are involved in the writing of an opera or the building of a cathedral. The first of these may be called creative confidence. The basis of any gallery, as of any work of art, is selection, and the selection which forms a fresh unity cannot be achieved by science or by rule. The gallery director who attempts to be scientific is under the same kind of misconception as the historian who believes himself to be impartial. Like it or not, he must select, and unless he selects in accordance with some conviction the result will be mere chaos. As a matter of fact, learning, like everything else, is subject to the Zeitgeist, and those who believe themselves to be pure scholars flutter in the winds of fashion far more helplessly than the artist or the poet. The difficulty for the modern museum director is that his creative confidence must extend over such a wide field. In the days when he was confined to Classical culture and its derivatives he had, so to say, a book of the rules to which he could turn when in doubt; but since we have decided that many of the heathen idols and curios of the museum must now be transferred to the art gallery the old laws no longer hold good. What can take their place? Simply the capacity to recognize which works of the human hand have been made with love, have achieved an independent unity and are the reflection of an idea. This capacity is given in some small degree to almost everyone-that is why we have public galleries-but in the high degree necessary for creation it is as unusual as any other creative faculty. Almost everyone can beat time, but good conductors are so rare that the half dozen in existence spend their lives in airplanes. And this analogy with the conductor reminds us that the gallery director must not only select, but must unite and co-ordinate. He must not only know what the works of art are saying to him, but what they are saying to one another. Famous works of art do not always get on well together any more than famous people do: the exhibition of masterpieces of the Metropolitan, which preceded its glorious re-opening, produced one of the finest swearing matches I have witnessed. On the other hand, someone with a delicate ear who can catch almost inaudible whispers of affection or assent, can produce fresh associations which have the quality of works of art. If Paul Klee had been allowed to take what he liked from any museum in Germany and arrange it according to his fancy, the result would have been one of the most beautiful museums in the world. But it would perhaps have been too idiosyncratic for permanence. Lethaby’s famous statement that “a great building must not be one man thick, but many men thick,” applies to a great gallery. Like a language, a political constitution or a Gothic cathedral, it is enriched by fortunate accidents. And it may be that my conception of the museum as a work of art is possible only when a collection is small. Just as a small community can be held together by personal relationships and a few traditions whereas a large one requires an ever increasing burden of elaborate laws, so the large gallery requires a more rigid and definable framework to support it. Almost inevitably this framework becomes historical, for no other classification is as easy to operate and to explain. Works of art are, indeed, the most fascinating of historical documents, but they are also misleading, because, as Blake said, “Genius is always above the age.” If we were honestly to collect works of art as historical documents we should have to confine ourselves to the second-rate. Marxist art-historians support their conclusions by the work of journeyman painters like Pacino da Bonaguida and find Giotto or Masaccio merely inconvenient. But in fact the only reason for bringing together works of art in a public place is that for which they were brought together first, that they produce in us a kind of exalted happiness. For a moment there is a clearing in the jungle; we pass on refreshed, with our capacity for life increased and with some memory of the sky.

Artist Howardena Pindell, a former associate curator at the Museum of Modern Art, compiled a seven-year statistical report on museum exhibitions and current gallery representation of the 11,000 black, Asian, Hispanic, and Native American painters, sculptors, craftspeople, photographers, graphic designers, and architects who live and work in New York State…. Only the artists in ten galleries out of a total 64 surveyed throughout the state were less than 90 percent white.

There’s more exposure today, but that’s mainly African-Americans. I don’t think there’s more exposure for Latino and Asian artists. I’m concerned for everyone. But for Black artists, it’s better. Some of my favorites are Kerry James Marshall, Lorna Simpson, Whitfield Lovell, Julie Mehretu, and Carrie Mae Weems. They’re people who have been out there a long time doing what they’re doing.

[Read “Black Artists Today: A Case of Exclusion.”]

According to the artist Al Loving, these institutional patterns persist because “many people in positions of power do not believe that an American black can have an original thought.”

I have this wild pedigree of being an artist, curator, and teacher. Working in a museum, you see the underbelly of the art world. I was on the New York State funding committee for institutions, and some of them had guaranteed money. Nonwhite ones had all these hoops to jump through to get less money.

Due in part to the efforts of such dealers and curators as Kellie Jones, a number of black artists, among them Lorna Simpson, Alison Saar, Joe Lewis, and Lisa Jones, are now joining their established peers in shaping the pluralistic contours of American contemporary art.

Things have changed since the article. The biggest change is at the Museum of Modern Art, where [curator] Ann Temkin has integrated the collection. Viewers will see Mel Edwards in the same space as Jackie Winsor, for example. We also now have more African-American curators. Ashley James is at the Guggenheim, which used to be impenetrable—when I was doing my statistics, they would never answer the phone. I remember going to receptions at the Guggenheim, and people would ask why I was there. Also, Valerie Cassel Oliver [at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts] and Naomi Beckwith [at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago]. There has been change, even if it’s just a few people.

Addressing a 1985 symposium, black artist Beverly Buchanan, a Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships winner, recalled an encounter with a New York gallery in the early ’70s. “I walked into one gallery in SoHo and asked, ‘Are you looking at work?’ They said, ‘Yes, but we don’t show black art.’ I said, ‘Oh, good. Let me show you my slides.’”

Today that same gallery might have turned the artist away more diplomatically or backhandedly, perhaps by rejecting her work for esthetic reasons, but the exchange points up a stubborn myopia that still encumbers much of the U.S. art establishment. Sustained in part by stereotypical assumptions about the accomplishments of American black artists, this narrowness of vision continues to limit opportunities for experiencing and evaluating their work. An ARTnews survey of 38 artists, dealers, collectors, art historians, and museum curators reveals unanimity on one point: the art world is not widely informed about the scope and quality of visual art now being produced by black Americans.

The answer to why this is so is necessarily complex and controversial, since it cannot be isolated from the wide backdrop of social interactions between minority cultures and the country’s white majority. Furthermore, diversity of opinion within each group inevitably produces objections to collective conclusions. Nevertheless, it seems possible to identify certain issues that often help to clarify the positioning of these artists within the art establishment, among them outmoded definitions of’ “black art” and racial exclusionism disguised as artistic judgment.

Lowery Sims, associate curator of 20th-century art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and perhaps the most prominently positioned black curator of contemporary art in the United States, discussed the problems in an article that appeared last year in Atlanta’s Art Papers. Sims points out in the piece that for curators the word “discrimination” can have a double edge. She goes on to explain that curatorial decision-making “is the act of discrimination, making choices that are the expression of our eye, our taste, our sense and standard of quality.” But she notes that discrimination also means to exclude, and both meanings, “exclusionary and choosy, have determined how non-white artists have fared in the art world.”

In today’s mainstream contemporary-art institutions, Sims argues, the two meanings of “discrimination” can be conflated to mask racial exclusion under ostensible judgments about esthetic quality. If many black artists now go to the same schools as white artists, “learn from the same teachers, shop in the same art stores for the same materials, make the same slides and transparencies, frequent the same bars, why are they still on the periphery of the art world?” To discover the answer, she says, one can begin with economics. “The art establishment, as with the American economy as a whole, still seems hesitant or unwilling to admit minority artists into full economic participation in the art world. Even where goodwill exists, there is a distinct difference between the way these artists are promoted vis a vis their white counterparts. An unconscious but definite feeling seems to exist that their work does not merit comparable financial returns as their gallery mates. Economic issues, therefore, are couched in diversionary issues like ‘quality’ or ‘taste’ or ‘talent,’ hence the insidiousness of the situation.”

Although Sims would not elaborate on the economic restraints, she did point out in a recent interview that “people are still calling me when they want a list of black artists. This certainly tells you something is wrong with the kind of information people are getting. … Whether we like to admit it or not, there’s no question that minority artists are being held back by their race….” Double-edged economic and institutional discrimination is likely to persist, in her estimation, as long as “people still believe or act as if the values of Eurocentric culture are universal. This is a very complex kind of prejudice, and it’s not always easy to see how it works.”

This opinion was shared by many of the participants in an unprecedented conference of anthropologists, cultural historians, and art professionals held at the Smithsonian Institution last September. Titled “The Poetics and Politics of Representation,” the conference examined how art and artifacts of various cultures—including American minority cultures—are represented in museums. Among the participants were art historians Michael Baxandall and Svetlana Alpers; literary critic Stephen Greenblatt; curators Jane Livingston and John Beardsley of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; Susan Vogel, director of New York’s Center for African Art; and museum directors Peter Marzio of the Houston Museum of Fine Arts and Patrick Houlihan from the Millicent Rogers Museum in Taos.

Several discussions raised the issue of an unmediated encounter with a cultural object: do such visual experiences actually occur, or do esthetic predispositions inevitably alter the perceptual act, for example of a white, middle-class art professional with traditional Western art-historical training? Are such “discriminating viewers” deceiving themselves if they believe that they can truly empathize with the artistic intentions of other cultures or of American minority artists? To what degree and on what formal or conceptual terms does such empathy occur?

The calling of the conference was itself an acknowledgment of a growing professional self-consciousness about culturally induced perceptual predispositions, an issue raised with increasing frequency in debates evaluating art of other cultures and about the current status of black artists within the art establishment. To Kellie Jones, a black curator at the Jamaica Arts Center in Queens, for instance, the contemporary-art world has a different configuration than it does for some of her colleagues at larger New York institutions. “Black artists can’t escape the mainstream because they are surrounded by it, but mainstream institutions can choose to look or not to look at minority expression,” she points out. “From my personal experience, I can say that the big museums here don’t do a lot of reaching out, which is why I often see things they don’t. You can find terrific work by black artists at places such as the Longwood Art Center in the Bronx, in SoHo at the Exit Art gallery, and in the East Village at Kenkeleba House. Big museums have their own cliques and networks,” she observes, “and they don’t see these places as fitting in.”

According to artist Al Loving, these institutional patterns persist because “many people in positions of power in the art world do not believe that an American black can have an original thought. This means they have no real need to know your point of view, and so there’s no real reason to make an effort.” Painter and collagist Benny Andrews, who is the former head of the National Endowment for the Arts’ Visual Arts Program, puts the problem of preconceptions about black artists in even stronger terms. “It’s not like this in other parts of the country,” Andrews remarks, “but before there will be any real changes for black artists in New York, some of the older people who run the art world will have to die off.”

Other kinds of assumptions about the work of these artists are held by black viewers, many of whom consider black art to be a distinct category of artmaking. Although far more prevalent in other parts of the country than within the New York art establishment, this viewpoint has a clear art-historical foundation and reflects strong beliefs about the moral and social obligations of black artists to their communities. Lizzetta LeFalleCollins, visual arts coordinator of the California Afro-American Museum in Los Angeles, explains: “From the time of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s until the late ’60s and early ’70s, the figure was a mainstay for Afro-Americans, many of whom concentrated on literal depictions of Afro-Americans in their environments. The influence of Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden was very strong, and artists wanted very direct routes to the Afro-American experience. This kind of work, which is still being produced and which people still love and cherish, formed the basis of what many people, both black and white, think ‘black art’ is and should be today.”

During the ’60s, when the Civil Rights movement and a new emphasis on black pride often made headlines, “the figure,” LeFalle-Collins continues, “was still a mainstay, but often it was twisted or contorted or abstracted to express negativity and anger about exclusion. More artists also began working with collage, assemblage, and found objects, sometimes picking up on African folk traditions.”

In the ’60s many museums responded to Civil Rights activism by temporarily increasing their collection and exhibition of work by black artists. According to LeFalle-Collins, this response was a mixed blessing that sometimes gave the viewer a false idea of what was typical in black art. “Much of the artwork that found its way into many of these exhibitions were obvious representations of black figurative work,” she explains. “Some were awkward representations at best.” Meanwhile, many artists who had been working with expressive Social Realist figuration in the early and mid-’60s—artists such as Leslie Price, David Hammons, and John Outerbridge—were moving away from these figurative modes.

While a number of museums and galleries in the ’60s and early ’70s were, in effect, setting the tone for what was to be called black art, many artists were rapidly developing bodies of work that contradicted that tone. Many viewers did not connect this new work with recognized examples of black art, and institutional support was initially rather limited and tentative.

The futility of generalizing about black art becomes obvious, however, if one considers the range of styles and mediums associated with some of today’s leading American black artists, among them sculptors Martin Puryear, Richard Hunt, and Melvin Edwards; painters Robert Colescott, Benny Andrews, Raymond Saunders, James Little, Ed Clark, Oliver Jackson, Al Loving, Sam Gilliam, Hughie Lee-Smith, Frederick Brown, and Jacob Lawrence; printmaker/sculptor Elizabeth Catlett: and multimedia artists David Hammons, Betye Saar. Howardena Pindell, and Faith Ringgold. Their work ranges from direct links with the Harlem Renaissance in the case of Lawrence and with the Magic Realism of the ’40s in the evocative images of Lee-Smith, to the expressionistic abstractions of Saunders and Clark, the chromatic explorations of Loving and Little, the eloquent formalism of Puryear, Edwards’ muscular sculptural forms, the irreverent social commentary of Colescott, Ringgold’s multimedia fabric compositions, and the assemblages of Saar.

Less well-known, especially among black audiences, are black artists who have been active in the fields of video, performance, and environmental installation. “Art as a Verb,” an exhibition co-curated by Sims and Leslie King-Hammond, dean of graduate studies at the Maryland Institute College of Art, was conceived to help rectify this art-historical gap. First mounted at the Maryland Institute, the exhibition can now be seen in New York, as a two-part installation—at the Metropolitan Life Gallery through April 16 and at the Studio Museum in Harlem through June 12. This unprecedented show features the work of 13 “first generation” Afro-American artists who have explored video, performance, and installation in their work for the last ten to 20 years. These artists include Ringgold, Hammons, Pindell, Saar, the late Charles Abramson, Maren Hassinger, Candace Hill, Martha Jackson-Jarvas, Senga Nengudi, Lorraine O’Grady, Adrian Piper, Joyce Scott, and Kaylynn Sullivan.

For “Art as a Verb,” Hammons created a six-foot-high portrait of Jesse Jackson with blond hair, blue eyes, and pink skin, drawn directly on the gallery wall. On Jackson’s pale blue suit, stenciled letters read, “How do you like me now?” Saar’s Mojotech is a 24-foot-long environmental assemblage employing electronic junk to express the “usefulness and fragility of both technology and magic and how, in some cases, they are synonymous.” Other contributions range from Hassinger’s expressionistic grouping of tree branches, Piper’s charcoal and crayon drawings on New York Times pages, and Pindell’s video drawings and videotape, Free, White and Twenty One, which reviews harrowing reactions to skin color. The performance program includes O’Grady’s Nefertiti/Devonia Evangelene, which presents striking physical, familial, and psychological parallels between Queen Nefertiti, her daughter and sister, and O’Grady’s sister and her daughters.

“It is probably because full acceptance within the visual arts community is still eluding them that black artists have turned to performance and video in particular,” Sims observes in discussing the show. “Performance and video are so well suited to black expression in the arts that they seem almost stereotypical. All black Americans have to ‘perform’ in some way or another in this society on a daily basis in order to survive.” Sims adds that “too often the black community has been accused of being ‘retardataire,’ ‘timid,’ incapable of contributing anything substantial or ‘new’ to the art dialogue, bogged down as it was in its struggle to gain acceptance by the establishment. l think these individuals demonstrate for both the black and the white community that there are powerful voices out there who will be heard.”

Why haven’t these voices been more widely heard, along with those of other adventurous black artists? ls it primarily because their work is not stereotypically “black”? Obviously more is involved than a shifting of art-historical definitions, as Benny Andrews indicates in his observations about representations of black artists that appear in major newspapers and art publications.

“Most of the time media people have no need to write about black artists because, for one thing, they’re not big potential moneymakers,” he says. “An exception is when there are riots in the streets or something like the Tawana Brawley case. Then media people look around for some happy black folks, maybe a happy black artist to show that everything’s really okay. The other time they’ll look for you is in February, Black History Month. Then it’s like Christmas Eve shopping—a big last-minute rush and then it’s all over. Otherwise, black artists become good copy only if they can be portrayed as militants or exotic creatures, like poor Jean Michel Basquiat. Even the Village Voice, which has a certain reputation for writing about minorities, would never write about an ordinary, non-esoteric, mid-career black artist just because he makes good contemporary art.”

The relative invisibility of black artists in New York art publications, for example, is a reflection of their low profile in major New York galleries and museums. Many artists agree with Sims that today exclusion of minority artists from these institutions tends to be accomplished indirectly, through judgments about artistic competence and quality. Since the negative experience of one artist, however, can always be viewed as an exceptional case or the regrettable consequence of less-than-first-rate talent, attempts to document double-edged discrimination often flounder over the problem of convincing evidence.

Acknowledging this difficulty, artist Howardena Pindell, a former curator at the Museum of Modern Art, compiled a seven-year statistical report on museum exhibitions and current New York gallery representation of the 11,000 black, Asian, Hispanic, and Native American painters, sculptors, craftspeople, photographers, graphic designers, and architects who live and work in New York State. As of mid-1988, according to data cited in the report, 39 galleries in New York City, including nearly all of the most prestigious spaces, represented only white artists. Only the artists in ten galleries out of a total of 64 surveyed throughout the state were less than 90 percent white, and one of those ten was in the process of closing.

[Read Howardena Pindell’s response to “Black Artists Today: A Case of Exclusion.”]

Queried about representation of minority artists, New York gallery officials often provide two kinds of responses. One is exemplified by Pierre Levai, director of the Marlborough Gallery, which represents Frederick Brown and several well-known Latin American and Spanish artists, such as Rufino Tamayo, Fernando Botero, and Antonio Lopez-García. To inquire about the racial identity of his gallery artists, says Levai, is to ask “a racist question. We don’t have any kind of moralistic policy. The quality of the work is what concerns us.”

Ronald Feldman, whose gallery, according to Pindell’s report, is 94 percent white, offers a more tenuous point of view. “What something like this report tells you is that there is a serious problem, one I’ve been trying to wrestle with myself. The fact I’ve come to face is that as a white American male, my background hasn’t given me the tools to penetrate certain artistic worlds. I’d like to have those tools, but I’m not certain how to get them. … A lot of us, without thinking about it, expect artists who are not white males to know, adopt, and then come back to us with something that relates to our historical framework, when they may be coming from another place entirely.

“The most obvious next step for me is to do a lot more looking, and harder looking, at work by non-white artists,” Feldman continues. “Yet in practical terms, this is very difficult to do with a gallery such as mine that is inundated with art.” He goes on to suggest that it “would help a lot to have more up-to-the-minute research and places for exhibitions that put the work in context as opposed to single-artist shows.”

But, as Kellie Jones points out, opportunities to see a wide range of current work by minority artists are not in fact lacking in New York City. In the view of Mary Schmidt Campbell, who was director of the Studio Museum in Harlem for ten years and is now New York City’s cultural affairs commissioner, “the problem is not a lack of exhibition spaces but a lack of intellectual will. We don’t need more appendages to the structure we already have, where there are very well-known institutions that have distinguished themselves for their quality, like the Studio Museum and El Museo del Barrio. I can’t tell you how infuriating it is to have these places, in effect, ignored or dismissed when people complain about not being able to see enough work.”

While artists express respect for the professionalism of institutions like the Studio Museum, not all agree with Schmidt Campbell about the sufficiency of existing structures. Painter James Little, for instance, argues that “the idea that there is such a thing as ‘black art’ hasn’t entirely disappeared in New York City, and that’s partly due to the exhibition program at the Studio Museum, which is generally pretty conservative. They want to appease the black community as much as they want to show contemporary art. If they were really focused on art, they would bring shows by artists like Jennifer Bartlett or David Salle out to the people in that neighborhood. Artists that the Whitney shows should be shown in Harlem, and people shouldn’t have to go all the way to Harlem to see a painting by James Little.”

Artists like Little are not well represented by other major New York museums either, as Pindell’s report indicates. Based on exhibition lists provided by the institutions themselves, the study concludes that from 1980 to 1987, 97.11 percent of the exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art were devoted to artists from Europe or of European descent. At the Whitney Museum of American Art, the comparable statistic was 92.95 percent; of the total number of artists shown at Whitney Biennials from 1973 to 1987, 4.4 percent were artists of color. From 1981 to 1987 there were no one-person shows of black, Hispanic, or Native American painters or sculptors at the Whitney. Lists provided by the Guggenheim Museum indicated that the exhibition program from 1980 to 1985 was devoted entirely to artists from Europe or of European descent.

Confronted with such statistics, major museum curators are almost unanimous in denying that their collection and exhibition decision-making is negatively affected by the race of the artist.  Patterson Sims, former curator of permanent collections at the Whitney Museum of American Art and now chief curator at the Seattle Art Museum, for instance, stresses that “in my experience at the Whitney, the choices of artists to be exhibited were based on esthetic issues, and questions of race, religion, and sex were subordinated to that end.” Sims also points out, however, that “the curatorial staff was entirely white when I worked there. From the vantage point of New York City, art museums appeared to be among the most all-white environments left in America in the aftermath of the Civil Rights movement.”

“The statistics are a little misleading in our case,” says Museum of Modern Art director Richard Oldenburg. “Our exhibition program covers the whole history of modern art. … But I don’t question the bottom line conclusions of the report. Issues of minority representation have lain somewhat dormant in the Reagan era, and there’s no question that we need more effort. But in my experience, if the race of the artist is even mentioned here at all, as it occasionally is in acquisition meetings, for example, it’s in a positive and constructive sense. … I do think one of the biggest problems these artists face is the opportunity for curators to see exhibitions of their work,” he adds. “Among other things, we do rely on a gallery network where minority artists are not well represented.”

What about artists of color who have not been excluded from the mainstream art world? Does their success deflate Pindell’s data by demonstrating that major institutions do in fact make judgments based solely on artistic quality?

A case in point might be Martin Puryear, a highly respected artist who has shown at nearly all of the country’s most prestigious contemporary-art museums. The 47-year-old sculptor is represented by major galleries in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, and his shows generally receive substantial and glowing reviews. This year he will represent the United States at the São Paulo Biennale. His rapidly ascending career is apparently unaffected, it would seem, by the fact that he happens to be black.

Puryear himself views his São Paulo selection with a certain equivocation. “Black artists have been making art throughout this country’s history,” he points out, “but it’s been very difficult for us to achieve visibility, not to mention recognition in the society as a whole. So the fact that I’m the first Afro-American artist to represent the United States at the São Paulo Biennale can be seen as a triumph, especially when it is considered against a long history of exclusion and denial. Speaking as an artist, though, it would be sad if the most exciting thing about my inclusion were the color of my skin and not the work I do. I think there’s something to be angry about as well as pleased,” he says.

To help counteract the low visibility of American blacks in the visual arts, several black art dealers in major U.S. cities have opened galleries in recent years to promote and showcase some of the most adventurous, sophisticated, and solidly accomplished artists. One of these dealers is June Kelly, who operates a two-year-old multi-ethnic gallery in New York’s SoHo district. “When I first opened,” Kelly remembers, “people kept asking me who June Kelly was. It just didn’t occur to them that the black woman behind the desk might be the owner of the gallery.” Kelly represents, among other artists, Loving, Lee-Smith, and Little, and is philosophically opposed to the concept of “black art.” “There is no such thing. My gallery is about art, not about color, and most artists want it that way.”

Still, a growing proportion of Kelly’s clientele consists of young black professionals like Dennis Franklin, who is an investment banker at Goldman, Sachs & Company. “It was Romare Bearden’s 1980 traveling retrospective that hooked me on art,” Franklin says. “I was in the Navy then, and I fell in love with the work and wanted to know more about it. That led me to June Kelly, who represented Bearden, and she introduced me to a whole world I didn’t know anything about. I bought one of Bearden’s collages on time and kept on reading and going to shows and talking to people until I developed an eye for what I liked. I’m an infant collector, and most of what I buy is in the $2,000 to $3,000 range. My most expensive buy was a still life by [the 19th-century American artist] Charles Ethan Porter.”

George N’Namdi in Detroit, whose gallery includes Pindell, Loving, Hunt, and Edwards, defines part of his mission as campaigning for a commitment to art on the part of black professionals. “We have an affluent population here that didn’t necessarily grow up with art, and they need a lot of encouragement. My clientele is predominantly black, but mixed—about 60 percent to 40 percent. Many of the black collectors started out primarily with the idea of supporting black artists, but as they gain more experience they think more in terms of just collecting art. l try to bring a certain style of art into the gallery that people will associate with me. I look for a very energetic style, very colorful, mostly abstract work with an emphasis on collage and multimedia painting—partly because I want to break down the automatic association people have between ‘black art’ and a certain kind of figurative work.”

The Malcolm Brown Gallery is also located in an affluent suburb, Shaker Heights, Ohio. Brown is one of three black members of the American Watercolor Society, and the gallery holds regular exhibitions of Society work in addition to shows by established painters such as Lee-Smith. Ernestine Brown, who runs the gallery, recalls that their first collectors were almost exclusively white, “but there’s been a definite growth in the number of black collectors. The key is education, exposure, and, above all, perseverance. To be convincing in this position, you have to have staying power, and you can’t get that without a real commitment and quality work.”

Chicago’s Isobel Neal Gallery, which has been in business for the past two years, shows only black artists, many of whom, such as Calvin Jones, Geraldine McCullough, Robert Dilworth, and Willie L. Carter, are from Chicago. “Until other galleries start picking up some of these people, I think I have to keep it exclusive,” Neal says. A major marketing obstacle, she stresses, is the low level of response to well-trained black artists by local and national museums. “Everyone in the business knows that for many collectors, museum exposure is necessary to establish credibility. What doesn’t seem creditable is that we have what is supposed to be a major museum of American art in this city [the Terra Museum] that has only a single work by a black artist.”

In Boston the Liz Harris Gallery shows African art and work by over 20 contemporary black artists, including Loving, Little, and Oliver Jackson. “Something we had to overcome,” says Harris, “was the term ‘black art,’ which so many people associate with representational images of urban bliss or misery or political protest work of the 1960s. One of the goals of the gallery is to broaden the term ‘black art’ until it becomes meaningless.” Like Neal, Harris is frustrated by the slow pace of recognition many black artists encounter from the museum establishment. “It seems to me that the museum system resists dealing with black artists at least in part because their existence threatens curator expertise,” she says. “To confront these artists is to confront their ignorance of something they should know about. l suspect there just hasn’t been a lot of looking.”

Due in part to the efforts of such dealers and curators as Kellie Jones, a number of younger black artists, among them Lorna Simpson, Alison Saar, Joe Lewis, and Lisa Jones, are now joining their more established peers in shaping the pluralistic contours of American contemporary art. Their forward momentum is one element in a disparate but multilevel system of change: a monolithic conception of black art is slowly fading in the country’s major cities, thanks in part to the education and exhibition programs such as the California Afro-American Museum’s. Dealers like N’Namdi report steady progress in the campaign to initiate a commitment to art on the part of affluent black professionals. Postmodernist critical theory has encouraged productive reexaminations of majority-minority relationships, which may help broaden the critical climate for “alternative” forms of expression. In all these undertakings, however, the idealism that inspired optimistic assessments about social change in the art world in the ’70s seems conspicuously absent. “What we insist on is to be looked at levelly without condescension,” says artist O’Grady. “But this demand comes up against white culture at its most dug-in.”

Jeanne Siegel, back then: When I asked each of the 13 men and one woman who make up the present membership of the Spiral group what Spiral stands for, I got 14 conflicting answers. One of the reasons for the disparity is that unlike most artists’ circles, its raison-d’être was not primarily an esthetic one, nor was it formed for the traditional purpose of exhibiting together and making public statements.

Lauren Haynes, now: I don’t think they agreed [on many issues]. That’s the beauty of the collective coming to bear as we’re looking back on this and thinking about how we talk about Black abstract artists.

[Read Jeanne Siegel’s 1966 profile of Spiral in full.]

Norman Lewis, then: “I am not interested in an illustrative statement that merely mirrors some of the social conditions, but in my work I am for something of deeper artistic and philosophic content.”

Hale Woodruff, then: “I agree with Norman Lewis. I am not interested in some ‘gimmick’ that will pander to an interest in things Negroid.”

Haynes, now: So many artists were answering questions so many of them got at the moment: What does it mean for you, a Black artist, to make art in this political moment? Are you supposed to talk about only works that uplift the Black experience? Are you supposed to make works only about this current moment, or can you make abstract work that’s not necessarily tied to it? That’s why someone like Hale Woodruff might feel as if this could be a gimmick.

Emma Amos, then: “We never let white folks in. I don’t believe there is such a thing as a Negro artist. Why don’t we let white folks in?”

Haynes, now: I was lucky, years ago, to do a studio visit with Emma Amos around the time of the Studio Museum show. We got to talking about Spiral and her experience. She talked about how she felt like she was let in—there were other Black female artists who could’ve been a part of Spiral. Because she was younger, there was an expectation that she would take notes and get coffee, not be an active participant.

Alvin Hollingsworth, then: “We blackballed all the Colored folks too.”

Romare Bearden, then: “The Negro artist is unknown to America.”

Haynes, now: People who are interested in art tend to turn to artists to solve problems that aren’t theirs to solve. This is an example of artists coming together to try to do that. [Spiral’s artists] didn’t come away with answers—they didn’t say, “This is the six-step plan we need, this is what we need to do.” But the fascination [with Spiral today] comes from the fact that they were trying to do something, that they wanted to figure this out.

Irving Sandler on Joan Mitchell: She finds particularly distasteful moral insinuations concerning “good” versus “bad” criteria, and insists that “there is no one way to paint; there is no single answer.” Miss Mitchell is reticent to talk about painting, so in order to approach the underlying processes in her work, the Socratic method was needed, rejecting some classifications, modifying or keeping others.

Mary Weatherford on Irving Sandler: He basically tells us at the very beginning that for this article he just ekes things out of her by asking lots of questions. I like that…. Sometimes, writing about art gets swayed toward the artists, but really, it’s always two artists—a collaboration, in a way. I can tell how hard Irving Sandler worked to try to get it right, to try to get down in the English language what Mitchell thought about her own work.

[Read Sandler’s “Mitchell Paints a Picture” in full.]

Unlike some of the younger artists who have reacted away from the elders of Abstract-Expressionism, she sees herself as a “conservative,” although her pictures can hardly be described as hidebound. She not only appreciates the early struggles of the older painters, whose efforts expedited acceptance for those following them, but finds a number of qualities in their work that have a profound meaning for her.

Here’s the great thing about Sandler’s writing: I don’t notice much. A sentence goes down easy. His writing doesn’t have any barbs on it. He’s such a beautiful writer.

In the case of Bridge, she hesitated and decided to save this canvas for future study. The picture was rejected because the feeling was not specific enough, and because the painting was not “accurate.” To her, accuracy involves a clear image produced in the translation of the substance of nature into the nature of memory.

She starts a picture called Bridge for the article and then abandons it. Then she starts this other painting about her standard poodle [George Swimming at Barnes Hole]. I have a friend who, when he was a graduate student, interviewed Mitchell over a long period of time and asked her about that painting. He asked her if it got too cold for the dog to swim, and she said to him, “No, Paul, the painting got cold.” That’s almost what Sandler is describing—that kind of process where she starts out with a good memory on a sunny day, and then the painting gets cold.

She liked George, but felt that it still lacked a certain structure and an “accuracy in intensity.” When asked about her personal meanings in this work and their communication, she answered: “If a painting comes from them, then they don’t matter. Other people don’t have to see what I do in my work.”

He’s describing someone like a tennis player. You have to know what you’re doing while you’re making decisions. Your body has to be so trained that you can command it to make whatever decision your mind is thinking.

“Shaping the Story of Black Art”
By Pamela Newkirk
May 2000

The son of Georgia sharecroppers, artist David Driskell has become the world’s leading curator, collector, and scholar of works by African Americans

In 1952 David Driskell was a sophomore at Howard University, studying painting and history, when one of his teachers, James A. Porter, encouraged him to switch his focus to art history. “He said, ‘You can’t afford to just be an artist,’” Driskell recalls. Porter, a scholar of African American art explained, “You have to show people what we’ve contributed.”

Driskell continued to paint, making images drawn from nature and African American life. But he heeded Porter’s advice—a decision that would shape his career as a scholar, curator, teacher, and collector of African American art. Porter introduced him to the rich legacy of black American artists, including the work of Aaron Douglas, Henry Ossawa Tanner, and William H. Johnson, whose reputations had not yet been firmly established. Meanwhile, in his spare time, Driskell apprenticed at the Howard University Gallery of Art, which had been founded by another of his professors, James V. Herring. Herring instilled in him a passion for collecting, cataloguing, and curating art.

Today, the 69-year-old Driskell is widely regarded as the world’s foremost authority on black art in America. “He has probably had more to do with the seriousness of the way African American art is treated than has any other single person,” says Harry C. Parker, director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Joseph Jacobs, curator of American art at New Jersey’s Newark Museum, agrees that Driskell is “an absolutely seminal figure” for black art in the United States. “I’d be hard-pressed to come up with someone as distinguished as David from the art world,” he says.

Over the years, Driskell has received nine honorary degrees and curated more than 35 exhibitions of works by black masters, including Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, and Elizabeth Catlett. In 1972 he organized a substantial Johnson retrospective for the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C. “Two Centuries of Black American Art,” a traveling exhibition that Driskell put together for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1976, was the highest-profile show of its kind at a major museum in the United States. In 1996 Driskell advised the White House on its first purchase of a work by a black artist, Sand Dunes at Sunset: Atlantic City (1885) by Tanner. Driskell has also advised Oprah Winfrey and is currently the curator for Bill Cosby’s collection.

Since 1998, highlights from Driskell’s own holdings have been traveling to museums nationwide and will be on view at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta from June 22 through September 10. Titled “Narratives of African American Art and Identity: The David C. Driskell Collection,” the show includes some 100 works by artists such as Johnson, Bearden, Robert Colescott, and Augusta Savage, many of whom Driskell knew as a teacher, student, curator, or friend. An exhibition of Driskell’s own paintings, “Echoes: The Art of David C. Driskell, 1955–1997,” has been touring the country since 1998 and is at Spelman College Museum of Fine Art in Atlanta through the 22nd of this month.

Driskell’s collection fills his home in Hyattsville, Maryland, a 112-year-old Victorian house he shares with his wife of 48 years, Thelma G. DeLoatch. Ranging from African tribal objects to protest art from the 1960s to contemporary works, the pieces reflect Driskell’s interest in the themes of nature, Christianity, and African art, as well as in abstract and political art. Outside his house, beyond the teeming vegetable and herb garden, is a wood-frame studio, filled with his own vivid collage and gouache paintings—works-in-progress. “This is my hangout,” says the slight, lively Driskell of the rustic, one-room structure, bathed in sunlight. He points to a suitcase that he will use for a sculpture. “I don’t throw anything out.” As with his collection, Driskell’s own works reveal his interest in collage, religious images, nature, and African crafts.

Many of the pieces in Driskell’s collection reflect the history of the black American experience. “The shared struggle to break free of the confines of race in America, while embracing a common cultural heritage,” Driskell explains, is part of the identity of the artists whose work he owns. “They had the same training as mainstream artists. But as good as they are, they are still viewed as black artists.” In the traveling show, Johnson’s undated watercolor I Baptize Thee depicts the outdoor baptism of an African American boy, while Lawrence’s General Toussaint, a 1986 silkscreen image taken from the artist’s 41-panel series, completed in 1938, commemorates Toussaint L’Ouverture’s battle to emancipate Haiti. The Last Bar-B-Que, a 1989 lithograph by Margo Humphrey, portrays a black Christ and his disciples at a table covered with African kente cloth and laden with chicken and watermelon. Traditional 19th-century landscapes by Hale A. Woodruff and Edward Mitchell Bannister are also here, along with formal, early 20th-century studio portraits by the Harlem photographer James Van Der Zee.

“The artists I have known were in search of their place in American society. Loïs Mailou Jones, as good as she was, was still an African American artist,” Driskell says of his former teacher, whose paintings Ethiopian Boy (1948) and Notre-Dame de Paris (1936) are in his collection. “Her question was, ‘Will I ever live to be just an artist?’”

During the Harlem Renaissance, in the 1920s and ’30s, Driskell says, black talents like Aaron Douglas and Langston Hughes were eager for mainstream recognition. In their work, they strove to portray blacks “in a more human way” than the caricatured renderings of African Americans they saw in mass media. They often referred to Africa in order to emphasize African Americans’ long tradition of art and culture. Beginning in the 1950s, Driskell and his fellow artists, including Bearden and Colescott, were less concerned with society’s approval than with infusing their work with social commentary. In 1955, for example, Driskell was outraged by the Mississippi lynching of Emmett Till, a black boy accused of whistling at a white woman. The next year he painted Behold Thy Son, in which Till’s portrayal recalls the crucifixion. “In the 1950s and ’60s, I don’t think artists cared about social acceptance anymore,” says Driskell. “We were impatient—disillusioned with integration. We wanted to be left alone. Some of us severed relations with majority culture.” But as a curator and collector, Driskell emphasizes, he has always esteemed the quality of an artwork above any overtly black symbolism. “Just because it has a fist doesn’t make it art,” he explains, referring to the popular icon of black power during the 1960s and ’70s.

Driskell was born in Eatonton, Georgia, into a family of sharecroppers. When he was five, the family moved to the Appalachian mountains in North Carolina, where he lived until leaving for Howard in 1951. Making art has been a family tradition. Driskell’s grandfather was a sculptor in the African style, fashioning ornaments from bark, and his father, a Baptist minister, made drawings and paintings of religious themes. His mother created woven baskets and quilts.

In college Driskell met Mary Beattie Brady, an arts patron who went on to work with him throughout his career promoting black artists. Brady ran the Harmon Foundation, an organization that collected and preserved more than 4,000 works by African Americans. She was especially keen to advance Johnson’s art. When Driskell took a teaching job at Alabama’s Talladega College after graduating from Howard, Brady sent Talladega’s Goodnow Art Gallery several Johnson pieces as a long-term loan. In 1962, when Driskell returned to Howard to teach, that university became the beneficiary of Brady’s philanthropy. She would subsequently loan works to Fisk University in Nashville, where Driskell was chair of the art department and director of the art gallery from 1966 to 1977. She also recommended Driskell to curate the Johnson show at the National Museum of American Art in 1972. Brady had retired by the time Driskell began teaching at the University of Maryland, where he ran the art department from the time he left Fisk until 1998.

It was at Fisk that Driskell first made his mark as a serious scholar. During his tenure there, he curated several shows spotlighting black artists, including Douglas, William T. Williams, and Ellis Wilson. “Fisk was the only place doing this work,” he says of the college’s efforts to exhibit and document African American art. He oversaw the college’s Alfred Stieglitz Collection, which includes pieces by Paul Cézanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Georgie O’Keeffe, and Stieglitz. O’Keeffe had given the collection to the college in Stieglitz’s memory, and Driskell, who was in charge of maintaining it, got to know her well. “I said to her that it was wonderful that she had given 101 works to Fisk, a black institution. But I was very concerned that she did not endow the collection,” he recalls. “She hesitated, looked at me, and said, ‘You know, you’ve got guts. I like you.’ She donated $50,000 after that.”

He consulted closely with O’Keeffe about the collection. “I had the chance to really sit and confer with her about art matters,” he says. O’Keeffe had carefully pruned the works to include only high-quality pieces, which were then meticulously documented. Driskell would be just as rigorous when cataloguing African American works, creating a scholarly context for black art in America.

Driskell’s greatest strength may be his “encyclopedic knowledge about a large range of works, even when they’re not catalogued,” says Mary Schmidt Campbell, dean of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and former director of the Studio Museum in Harlem. “He has relationships with an enormous number of artists and their patrons. If you have a conversation, he provides you with a context to help you understand your subjects. He is an incredible mentor.” Campbell calls Driskell’s 1976 show “Two Centuries of Black American Art” a turning point for black art. “Almost everybody uses the catalogue for that show as a reference,” she says.

The catalogue caught the attention of Bill Cosby, who telephoned Driskell in the fall of 1977. “He called and said, ‘This is Bill Cosby,’” Driskell recalls with a chuckle. “My brother-in-law, Scott, is always teasing. I said, ‘Scott, what do you want?’” Unfazed, Cosby responded by explaining that he and his wife, Camille, would like to begin collecting and wanted Driskell to be their adviser. By the end of the conversation, Driskell realized that it really was Cosby on the phone. Soon after that, he started working with the Cosbys and has been their personal curator ever since. Driskell has also selected artworks that have appeared on The Cosby Show and is writing a book about the couple’s collection, The Other Side of Color: The African American Collection of Camille O. and William H. Cosby, Jr., scheduled to be published by Pomegranate Publications next spring. While buying work for the Cosbys at Sotheby’s in 1981, Driskell placed the $250,000 winning bid for Tanner’s painting Thankful Poor, which, with the buyer’s commission, was at that time the largest sum ever paid for the work of a black artist. Camille Cosby gave the work to her husband for Christmas. “I had no limit,” Driskell beams, still basking in the memory of the bidding war.

Driskell’s own collection, he is quick to point out, was built on more modest means. “I collected what I could get my hands on,” he says. “The saving grace for me is that I had a trained eye.” As Parker of San Francisco’s Fine Arts Museums observes, “To see what he bought, who he knew, and what artists he selected is a very interesting aspect of the collection. You feel like you’re in touch with living history.”

These days, when he isn’t lecturing around the country or advising collectors, Driskell busies himself at home in Maryland, tending his garden, painting, occasionally quilting, and attending his local church, whose stained-glass panels are decorated with black biblical figures that he designed. During the summers, he settles in for a few months of painting at his second home in Falmouth, Maine, which he purchased in 1961 by selling a Kandinsky print from his collection. This month, he will receive his tenth honorary degree, from Colby College in Waterville, Maine.

“If I had to do it over again, I would,” he says. “Art is a priestly calling. It’s the kind of visual mobility that shows us life can be so beautiful. I’ve been blessed to have that happen to me.”

Yayoi Kusama is an original painter. The five white, very large paintings in this show [at Brata gallery] are strong, advanced in concept and realized. The space is shallow, close to the surface and achieved by innumerable small arcs superimposed on a black ground overlain with a wash of white. The effect is both complex and simple.

The Kusama [review] is classic Judd. It’s him recognizing and arguing for something he feels is new. He has this understated exultation for her. He writes, “The strokes are applied with a great assurance and strength which even a small area conveys.” You know that’s a big compliment.

In large oils of Arizona landscapes and smaller watercolors, [Richard] Artschwager uses a quick spiked stroke, elongated and communicative of abbreviation, a clipped dissolution. There is a sensitivity immanent in the stroke, especially when the technique is used in the sparse context of two effective watercolors of dunes. The more abstract watercolors are less telling, too casual and airy.

You can learn a lot about him from reading his reviews. You get this great template for criticism—for ideas about short reviews, tone, and pace, and for looking and writing about looking. In the beginning, he had this formula—describe and judge, describe and judge. If you’re interested in criticism, it’s such a great place to see it in its most essential qualities—that is, making a case for an opinion.

[Harold Altman’s] technique of creating planes with fine parallel strokes is derived from the Cubist etchings of Villon. Altman uses the method with exceeding finesse and much about the configurations the planes assume is personal.

ARTnews at the time was a bastion of Abstract Expressionism. From ’58 on, he’s very uncomfortable with what’s happening, in terms of what he saw as the dilution of this style by a younger generation, who he thinks are following it too devotedly and in a way that starts echoing Cubism. Judd said he was always left alone [at Arts magazine, where he began writing for its editor, critic Hilton Kramer, after he stopped contributing to ARTnews], and ARTnews likely had more editing, which he probably wasn’t crazy about.

Joseph Stella retained a lifelong interest in portraiture fundamentally at odds with the methods of his well-known bridge and city paintings. … A profile Self-Portrait characteristically combines such elements as the sophisticated line and flattened, gradated, shading of Stella’s coal mine drawings with the naïve anatomy renderings of a primitive, and a conspicuously textured wash in the background. Stella accepted too simply the idea that the span of expression is that of a technique, yet, at the time, even the attempt to unify such a range was a contribution.

He’s so confident that his negative opinions, at least in these reviews, are never really mean. Sometimes, he’s sarcastic in an opening line. But he really gives people their due, particularly in the Joseph Stella one, where he’s offering different opinions about different kinds of work in the show. … Judd worked in a much different time, when art’s linear progress had a credibility that it doesn’t today. This moment calls for a different kind of criticism.

A version of this article appeared in the Spring 2020 issue of ARTnews, under the title “Describe and Judge.”

Below are King-Hammond’s thoughts on Louchheim’s profile of Lawrence.

The paradox that the most effective propaganda for understanding the Negro problem should be visual truth is the essence of Jacob Lawrence’s work. For this young Negro has, in his own words, “tried to paint things as I see them.”

I don’t think he was doing propaganda! I think he was just responding to a very personal, very real experience in his time, using references from direct subject matter. He created imagery out of themes that were, by the standards of the time and of what other modernists were focusing on, so astute. He took the ordinary, the mundane, the commonplace—he took all these elements of humanity that most people did not want to pay attention to, in certain circles, and he elevated them in a way that was shocking. [Louchheim] kind of got woke—she said, “Look at these images, these stories, these people! Oh, my God!”

The way Lawrence sees is in terms of pattern in bright primary color, unmodulated (so that no black and white reproduction can do him justice), and in simplification of form. Form is simplified in order to articulate the essentials.

At the time, there was a big question in the artistic mind of many African-American artists: whether to go “modern.” Somehow, I don’t think that was a conversation that created a climate for Jacob Lawrence, but he decided to tell stories without personalizing his style, meaning that he did not get into figurative details and portraiture as we came to know it at that point in history.

The sixty panels [in “The Migration Series,” a 1940–41 group of paintings about the Great Migration] tell a story strangely contemporary to World War II . . . The simple dignity of the running prose captions have as unadorned an impact in their quiet truth as the paintings. “My wife helped with those,” he explains.

We cannot discount the impact of his wife, Gwendolyn Knight, who was also a painter and very much in support of his work. . . . [Knight was] not just a housewife. She wasn’t just sitting there, cooking and making sandwiches. She was an artist, and she was helping him create all the narrative panels of this work.

In October, 1943, Lawrence enlisted in the Coast Guard, where he has found, in spite of racial rank, the greatest democracy he has known to date.

After the Coast Guard, he went to a sanitarium because he was having some emotional issues, like all people. Jacob took some time out, to seek therapy, but what did he do? He painted! He didn’t stop recording those experiences. Everything was a muse to him.