Category: African American Art

By Angelica Villa, ARTnews Historically, there have been no auction houses in the United States devoted entirely to selling work by black artists—until now. The new Indianapolis-based Black Art Auction house aims to fill that gap, and it’s launching its inaugural sale on Saturday with a sale of art spanning the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. With […]

The coronavirus has pushed Deborah Roberts’s art exhibition at the Contemporary Austin at least to January. She is looking at the postponement as a gift. Deborah Roberts could have given up long ago. With a mother who worked as a maid and a father who worked as an electrical lineman for the city of Austin, […]

By Kymberly S. Newberry, The Massachusetts Review In the summer of 1941, A. Philip Randolph, founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, called for a march on Washington to draw attention to the exclusion of African Americans from positions in the national defense industry, then a feverishly growing enterprise supplying material to the Allies […]

By Leah Melby Clinton, Elle Amongst the never-ending, century-spanning talk about what art means—the ways it can impact society; how to define it—today’s political climate has us looking to gallery walls with an even sharper eye. What is the artist’s role in everything that’s happening out there? Recording, parsing, distracting? “If anything, for me, it has […]

IN THE PAST few years, cultural institutions have been trying to create a more inclusive narrative of contemporary art history, one that contains more women and people of color — people who were denied successful careers a half-century ago simply because they weren’t white men. Today, it’s not uncommon to see black artists with solo […]

In the first cartoon Elizabeth Montague published in the New Yorker, two black women stand on a rooftop that overlooks a darkened cityscape. Above them, a Batman-inspired spotlight beams a message into the night sky: PER MY LAST EMAIL. Beneath them, the caption reads: “We’ve done all we can. It’s out of our hands now.” […]

Pamela Newkirk, a professor of journalism at New York University, is the author of Spectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga and, most recently, of Diversity Inc: The Failed Promise of a Billion-Dollar Business. She is currently at work on a biography of the late curator, scholar, artist, and collector David C. Driskell. A 1976 archival film captures a young […]