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). [1] It "received greater visibility and validation from the mainstream art world than any other group exhibition of work by Black artists." [2] 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." [1]
LACMA has organized three exhibitions of work by African Americans: Three Graphic Artists: Charles White, David Hammons, Timothy Washington (1971), Los Angeles 1972: A Panorama of Black Artists (1972), and Two Centuries of Black American Art (1976). The Black Arts Council was a driving force behind all three shows. Founded by Cecil Fergerson and Claude Booker (black art preparators who worked at 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. [3]
Following Panorama, the Black Arts Council lobbied LACMA to hold an exhibition of African-American art in its main galleries; Panorama had been held in the basement Art Rental Gallery. After years of pressure, LACMA's deputy director asked David Driskell (then the chair of Fisk University's art department) if he would be interested in guest-curating a survey of African-American art, and requested that he make a formal proposal to LACMA's Board of Trustees. [4] [1] [5]
LACMA's reception of Driskell's June 1974 proposal was decidedly mixed. LACMA's chief curator of modern and contemporary art, Maurice Tuchman, refused to attend the presentation. Fergerson, Tuchman's curatorial assistant at the time, was not invited to the presentation; he later commented that this was likely because he was deemed too radical and "too Black". Board members Franklin Murphy, Sidney F. Brody, Charles Z. Wilson, Jr., and Robert Wilson, however, supported the exhibition, and their opinion prevailed. Donelson Hoopes (curator of American art) and Ruth Bowman (LACMA's director of education) both resigned in response to the board's decision to hold the exhibition. [6]
Phillip Morris and the National Endowment for the Humanities funded the exhibition with $125,000 and $75,000 in grants, respectively. [5]
Driskell said that he deliberately did not select art relating to a unified theme. [7] He said that he believed black art was a "sociological concept" rather than an artistic one, and that his goal in the exhibition was to show that black artists have continuously participated (and "in many cases [have] been the backbone") in American visual culture throughout the country's history. [7]
Works were collected from private collections, living artists themselves, museums, galleries, historical societies, and other institutions. [5] Assembling the exhibition was a challenge because—given the art world's neglect of black artists—many works by talented black artists had not been conserved, and the locations of other works were unknown. [5] In the end, over 200 works by 63 known artists and a number of unknown artists were included in the exhibition.
The exhibition covered the period from 1750 to 1950, though a few works post-dated the ostensible cut-off date. [5] Though covering a broad time period, the exhibition was limited in the number of works it incorporated (as one critic jeered, "Two centuries in five rooms!"). [5]
The exhibition was on display at LACMA between September 30 and November 21, 1976. [5] Approximately 88,000 people visited the exhibition—then, the highest attendance figure for any exhibition of American art at LACMA. [5] [7] The exhibition later traveled to Atlanta's High Museum of Art (January 8, 1977 – February 20, 1977), the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts (March 30, 1977 – May 15, 1977), and the Brooklyn Museum (June 25, 1977 – August 21, 1977). [5] [8] Other major museums, including those in Chicago and Detroit (each with sizable African-American populations), turned down the exhibit. [5]
Ebony magazine called the exhibition "an impressive and vastly educational exhibit, running a range of folk, classical, ethnic, universal, realistic and imaginative orientations, tracing the development of Afro-American art from anonymous slave artisans through the traditional academic work of the late 18th and 19th centuries, the dynamic 'Negro Renaissance' of the '20s, and the government-sponsored works of the Great Depression era and the social protestations of the '30s and '40s as well as the diverse offerings of the '50s." [5]
It is the "only historically comprehensive exhibition of art by Black Americans ever to be presented by a major American art museum." [2] The La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, a smaller museum, had presented Dimensions in Black, another comprehensive survey, in 1970. [5] [9]
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.
Events from the year 1976 in art.
David C. Driskell was an American artist, scholar and curator; recognized for his work in establishing African-American Art as a distinct field of study. In his lifetime, Driskell was cited as one of the world's leading authorities on the subject of African-American Art. Driskell held the title of Distinguished University Professor of Art, Emeritus, at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Donelson Farquhar Hoopes, Jr. was an American art historian and curator. Hoopes was a scholar of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American art, especially the work of Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, and Marco Sassone.
Charles Wilbert White, Jr. was an American artist known for his chronicling of African American related subjects in paintings, drawings, lithographs, and murals. White's lifelong commitment to chronicling the triumphs and struggles of his community in representational from, cemented him as one of the most well-known artists in African American art history. Following his death in 1979, White's work has been included in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Art, The Newark Museum, and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. White's best known work is The Contribution of the Negro to American Democracy, a mural at Hampton University. In 2018, the centenary year of his birth, the first major retrospective exhibition of his work was organized by the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Modern Art.
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Maurice Tuchman is an American curator. He worked as the first curator of twentieth century art at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), where he organized several exhibitions which were influential in the development of the Southern California art scene.
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.
The Black Arts Council (BAC) was an organization founded in 1968 to advocate for African-American artists and support their community. Founded by Cecil Fergerson and Claude Booker, 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.
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