The Black Arts Council (BAC) was an organization founded in 1968 to advocate for African-American artists and support their community. [1] Founded by Cecil Fergerson and Claude Booker (black art preparators who worked at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, or LACMA), the organization comprised African-American artists, staff members, and other city residents who aimed to promote African-American art in Los Angeles. When the Black Arts Council was founded in 1968, every LACMA board member was white. [2]
The organization grew to over 1,000 members in two years. [3] It not only pressured LACMA to organize exhibitions for African-American artists, but also did extensive work supporting artists outside the museum. [4] The BAC organized student field trips to art exhibits, gave lectures at schools, and curated art exhibitions at various community locations and events. [4]
The BAC's advocacy produced results in the form of two LACMA exhibitions: Three Graphic Artists: Charles White, David Hammons, and Timothy Washington in 1971, [1] and Panorama in 1972, featuring Noah Purifoy, John Outterbridge, and Betye Saar. [5] These exhibits paved the path for LACMA's 1976 exhibition Two Centuries of Black American Art , which traveled to the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, and the Brooklyn Museum. [5]
The BAC ceased activities in 1974 following Booker's death. [4]
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is an art museum located on Wilshire Boulevard in the Miracle Mile vicinity of Los Angeles. LACMA is on Museum Row, adjacent to the La Brea Tar Pits.
Betye Irene Saar is an American artist known for her work in the medium of assemblage. Saar is a visual storyteller and an accomplished printmaker. Saar was a part of the Black Arts Movement in the 1970s, which engaged myths and stereotypes about race and femininity. Her work is considered highly political, as she challenged negative ideas about African Americans throughout her career; Saar is best known for her artwork that critiques anti-Black racism in the United States.
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“Art is not a luxury as many people think – it is a necessity. It documents history – it helps educate people and stores knowledge for generations to come.” – Dr. Samella Lewis
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Kerry James Marshall is an American artist and professor, known for his paintings of Black figures. He previously taught painting at the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In 2017, Marshall was included on the annual Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world. He was born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, and moved in childhood to South Central Los Angeles. He has spent much of his career in Chicago, Illinois.
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"Where We At" Black Women Artists, Inc. (WWA) was a collective of Black women artists affiliated with the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. It included artists such as Dindga McCannon, Kay Brown, Faith Ringgold, Carol Blank, Jerri Crooks, Charlotte Kâ (Richardson), and Gylbert Coker. Where We At was formed in the spring of 1971, in the wake of an exhibition of the same name organized by 14 Black women artists at the Acts of Art Gallery in Greenwich Village. Themes such as the unity of the Black family, Black female independence and embodiment, Black male-female relationships, contemporary social conditions, and African traditions were central to the work of the WWA artists. The group was intended to serve as a source of empowerment for African-American women, providing a means for them to control their self-representation and to explore issues of Black women's sensibility and aesthetics. Like AfriCobra, a Chicago-based Black Arts group, the WWA was active in fostering art within the African-American community and used it as a tool of awareness and liberation. The group organized workshops in schools, jails and prisons, hospitals, and cultural centers, as well as art classes for youth in their communities.
Alice Taylor Gafford was an American nurse, teacher, and artist, based in Los Angeles.
Ruth G. Waddy was an American artist, printmaker, activist, and editor, based in Los Angeles.
Two Centuries of Black American Art was a 1976 traveling exhibition of African-American art organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). It "received greater visibility and validation from the mainstream art world than any other group exhibition of work by Black artists." According to the Grove Encyclopedia of American Art, the "landmark" exhibition "drew widespread public attention to the contributions to African American artists to American visual culture."
Cecil Fergerson was an African-American art curator and community activist. He is widely credited with fostering African-American and Latin-American art communities in Los Angeles for more than 50 years, and was named a "Living Cultural Treasure" by the city in 1999. While working at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Fergerson co-founded the Black Arts Council (BAC) to advocate for African-American artists and support their community. His advocacy at LACMA and BAC led to seminal exhibitions of African-American art in the early 1970s.
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Christine Y. Kim is an American curator of contemporary art. She is currently the Britton Family Curator-at-Large at Tate. Prior to this post, Kim held the position of Curator of Contemporary Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Before her appointment at LACMA in 2009, she was Associate Curator at The Studio Museum in Harlem in New York. She is best known for her exhibitions of and publications on artists of color, diasporic and marginalized discourses, and 21st-century technology and artistic practices.
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