Black Artists Gain Respect of Museums
The painter Norman Lewis rarely complained about the singular struggles of being a black artist in America. But in 1979, dying of cancer, he made a prediction. “He said to us, ‘I think it’s going to take about 30 years, maybe 40, before people stop caring whether I’m black and just pay attention to the work,’ ” Lewis’s daughter, Tarin Fuller, recalled recently.
Lewis was just about right. In the last few years alone, his work has been acquired by the Nat ional Gallery of Art in Washington; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.
After decades of spotty acquisitions and token exhibitions, American museums are rewriting the history of 20th- century art to include black artists in a visible and meaningful way, and collectors are rushing to find the most significant works before they are out of reach.
“There was a joke for a long time that if you went into a museum, you’d think America had only two black artists — Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden — and even then, you wouldn’t see very much,” said Lowery Stokes Sims, the first African-American curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. “I think there is a sea change finally happening.”
The reasons go beyond the ebbing of overt racism. The shift is part of a broader revolution underway in museums and academia to move the canon past a narrow, Eurocentric, predominantly male version of Modernism, bringing in work from around the world and more work by women. But the change is also a result of sustained efforts over decades by black curators, artist- activists, colleges and collectors, who saw periods during the 1970s and the 1990s when heightened awareness of art by African-Americans failed to gain widespread traction.
In 2000, when Elliot Bostwick Davis arrived at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, as chairwoman of its Art of the Americas department, there were only three oil paintings by African-American artists in the wing, she said, and not many more paintings by African-Americans in the rest of the museum’s collection. “I had to deal with a lot of blank faces on the collections committee, because they just didn’t know these artists or this work,” Ms. Davis said.
The playing field is becoming much more even for young black artists, who are increasingly gaining museum presence and market clout. But artists who began working just a generation ago — and ones in a long line stretching back to the late 19th century — are only now receiving the kind of recognition many felt they deserved.
Like Norman Lewis, most of these artists now in permanent- collection galleries — including the painters Beauford Delaney and Alma Thomas — did not live to see the change.
But others, like the Los Angeles assemblage sculptor Betye Saar, 89, are witnessing it firsthand. The Chicago painter and printmaker Eldzier Cortor, who died at 99 on November 26, lived to see his work featured in the inaugural show of the new Whitney Museum in downtown New York. “It’s a little late now, I’d say,” he observed dryly a few weeks before his death. “But better than never.”
And while it was bad enough for male artists, black women faced even steeper obstacles. “We were invisible to museums and the gallery scene,” Ms. Saar said.
Through the rise of Modernist formalism and as abstraction took hold, black artists were at a disadvantage because their work was perceived by the white establishment as “lesser” — too often figurative and too narrowly expressive of the black experience.
But even abstract artists like Lewis were eclipsed — in part because when curators did seek out black artists’ work, figuration was the priority. “Up until about five years ago, when curators came to us, they were really only interested in narrative works that showed the black experience so they could demonstrate in no uncertain terms to their visitors that they were committed to representing black America,” said the New York dealer Michael Rosenfeld.
There is a growing realization by collectors that the absence of important works by black artists in their collections diminishes their own seriousness. John Axelrod, a Boston lawyer, said: “It was like a light went off, or more like a bomb: ‘How can I call myself a great collector of this period without some of these artists?’ ”
Now, there is a scramble to find the best works. “The prices are now well beyond what I could do without major financial sacrifices to buy just a single painting,” said the collector James Sellman.
Thelma Golden, the director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, said, “What we need to continue to understand is that the exhibition and collection of this work is not a special initiative, or a fad, but a fundamental part of museums’ missions.”