{"id":9291,"date":"2021-03-14T22:46:37","date_gmt":"2021-03-14T22:46:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/media-archive.blackartinamerica.com\/?p=9291"},"modified":"2021-03-19T11:35:15","modified_gmt":"2021-03-19T11:35:15","slug":"black-artists-and-collectors-are-facing-their-most-critical-decision-in-american-art-history-by-debra-hand","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/earthexhibitions.org\/media-archive\/?p=9291","title":{"rendered":"Black Artists and Collectors Are Facing Their Most Critical Decision in American Art History by Debra Hand\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"

Black Artists and Collectors Are Facing Their Most Critical Decision in American Art History<\/b><\/h3>\n
\u00a0by Debra Hand<\/span><\/pre>\n
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After centuries of exclusion from the mainstream art world, we have finally made the VIP list.\u00a0 Here we are, Black artists and collectors, lined up at the velvet ropes with invitations in hand.\u00a0 All the marquees blinking \u201cWelcome!\u201d All the institutions from museums to international art fairs, to mega galleries, to auction houses — are here.\u00a0 All are smiling and extending handshakes.\u00a0 \u201cWelcome to the room,\u201d they say.\u00a0 \u201cWelcome to the tables where the main feasts take place.\u201d\u00a0 But, hold up.\u00a0 What\u2019chall servin\u2019 up in there?\u00a0 Because if the mainstream art-world has only invited us to the meal to tell us how to adapt our recipes to suit their taste buds, then Black art culture is about to get slurped-up whole.\u00a0 So, before we move any further down this receiving line, we need to put this thing into perspective.\u00a0 Now, according to the gold-sealed invitation, this feast is about the mainstream art-world trying to make-up for its past purposeful omission of the entire subject of Black art from the entire art-historical cannon of American art, except as a footnote.<\/span><\/p>\n
Okay.\u00a0 That sounds pretty good.\u00a0 There\u2019s a lot of making up to do, so let\u2019s start there.\u00a0 Museums are opening their budgets to collect Black art in a big way.\u00a0 Their curators want to study it and talk about it in a big way.\u00a0 There is the promise of programming and exhibits and ticker-tape announcements; catalogs and bios bearing Black artists and their contributions to American art.\u00a0 This is all good news.\u00a0 It\u2019s like Dr. Maya Angelou said, \u201cWhen you know better, you do better.\u201d\u00a0 So I celebrate this moment in which many mainstream museums are attempting to do better.\u00a0 But, Maya Angelou\u2019s saying also applies to Black artists and collectors.\u00a0 We have also learned better, and now there are things to do with that knowledge.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
This isn\u2019t the first art-themed party we\u2019ve been invited to. \u00a0 We\u2019ve joined many feasts.\u00a0 They\u2019ve been warmed-over for us throughout our history.\u00a0 Just ask Black singers and musicians whose recordings have bought yachts for other ethnic groups while those artists struggled to eat.\u00a0 You see, once inside those feasts where VIP treatment abounds, things happen fast.\u00a0 Accordingly, there are things Black artists and collectors should prepare for, especially if they want to remain in charge of the art images that reflect them, after the meal is over.\u00a0 Remember, it\u2019s their party \u2013 a historical ongoing event planned centuries ago with no intention of you ever being invited.\u00a0 The menu has long been set.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
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(Painting: \u201cI Am The Master Here\u201d by Debra Hand)<\/p><\/div>\n
But let\u2019s see where this goes now that the doors have been flung open and we are being welcomed in on levels never before seen.\u00a0 Plus, all of this is happening under the glare of a world that has risen up against systemic injustice: a system which has had (as its cultural gatekeepers) museums and their past practices of exclusion.\u00a0 So, this is a brand new kind of moment in Black art.\u00a0 One that is critical.\u00a0 As we file into the room to participate in the great smorgasbord that is American art history, we should remember that we have arrived here with our own wealth of recipes and traditions.\u00a0 We should be going in there, not just to feast and learn, but rather, to feast and teach.\u00a0 Remember, the theme of this party, after all, is \u201cBlack Art.\u201d\u00a0 This is supposed to be about <\/span>our<\/span> journey.\u00a0 And we need to stay on topic because, make no mistake, inside this room, we are about to negotiate the terms of the <\/span>last<\/span> art-form we own.\u00a0 It is the only one that has not yet been co-opted by outsiders and sold back to us — copied and repackaged under someone else\u2019s\u00a0 definition of who <\/span>we<\/span> are.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
Original visual art is the only area of Black culture where Black people still control the production and economy, by and large.\u00a0 We still get to decide what images represent us and how they do it. \u00a0 We have that power because we believed in us despite validation from the mainstream art world.\u00a0 Black art lovers and collectors interested in cultural dignity have always cultivated and fed Black artists.\u00a0 They have given Black visual artists an artistic freedom that rarely exists anywhere else in our creative endeavors: not in music, film, dance, or theater.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
In all of the aforementioned industries, Black artists have created some of the world\u2019s greatest masterpieces, but what makes it to the light of day is usually controlled by corporations headed by those who don\u2019t look like us.\u00a0 In fact, they don\u2019t even want <\/span>us<\/span> to look like <\/span>us<\/span>.\u00a0 They want us to look like <\/span>their<\/span> version of us.\u00a0 The film industry has been notorious for their packaging and branding of us as a cultural group incapable of operating on any level other than the lowest of humanity.\u00a0 Too many music careers are also being manufactured thusly.\u00a0 Black music creators who don\u2019t comply with their record label\u2019s version of \u201cus\u201d are shelved.\u00a0 Singers rarely are the ones who get to decide which songs get made by them, or distributed.\u00a0 Record labels decide who gets to say what and how, and whose projects will be promoted and pumped into the mainstream culture, or discarded.\u00a0 The labels declare who is worthy, or not.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
This is the formula that is about to be applied to Black visual art:\u00a0 who you get to see and who you don\u2019t; what kind of art gets crowned and pushed to the forefront.\u00a0 Will that art represent us well? Or will it only be sorted through and curated to depict us as film has?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
Once beyond those velvet ropes, Black art could quickly become more about what museums want to see from us than what Black artists desire to create.\u00a0 It could easily become all about what only investors want\u2026 their versions of who we are, until finally Black visual art is contorted into something we no longer recognize as art, or us.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
Basquiat left us a dire warning during his brief lifetime.\u00a0 While living in that world amongst the art-star makers, Basquiat left us the writing on the wall to ponder.\u00a0 Unfortunately, he didn\u2019t survive the dance of exploitation.\u00a0 But his art did, and now new narratives of his life are constantly adjusted or manufactured for the benefit and commercial gain of others in the mainstream art-world<\/span>.<\/b> This was a practice that had begun in Basquiat\u2019s lifetime.\u00a0 It became so prevalent and insulting to him that, across one of his pieces, he scribbled the words, \u201cNot For Sale.\u201d\u00a0 Presumably, these words symbolized Basquiat shouting to the world that he was not for sale and, by extension, neither was his soul nor culture.\u00a0 Ironically, that work is worth millions.\u00a0 Decades after his death, his highest selling auction piece broke records at $110 million.\u00a0 But what was the price to this Black artist during his lifetime — locked in constant battle to retain his own identity as the art world tried to rewrite and redefine him to his face?\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
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Jenkins Johnson Gallery, Art Miami 2017 (Photo credit: Najee Dorsey)<\/p><\/div>\n
Black creators are not just generating millions, it\u2019s in the billions and trillions, once you include their creative content from the myriad of industries where they create; where they break the molds and change the game.\u00a0 But how many billions of dollars generated by Black music makers (for instance) have funneled down to those artists, their families, or their communities? \u00a0 Who owns the master recordings?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
No offense to Clive Davis, but he has lived quite richly from Black music, yet he has never sang a single note.\u00a0 He, more than his artists, called the shots that defined generations of Black music.\u00a0 While these relationships brought some of the best Black talent to the forefront, the artists were never intended to be the main benefactors of their talent and work.\u00a0 Music companies quickly separated those artists from the rights to their masters, and set-up contracts to control future supply and content.\u00a0 This has happened throughout our creative history in America.\u00a0 We lose control of our art, and we lose control of the narratives that we want to reflect us.\u00a0 We manage to secure everyone else\u2019s financial legacies, but our own.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
Now, today, here we are, with the last remaining art-form we control, still in our hands.\u00a0 For that reason it has been able to evolve on its own terms, free of outside input.\u00a0 With the exception of Western-rooted art schools, our art has remained an in-house affair because mainstream museums wanted no part of Black art. And for the most part, the mainstream art-world wanted no part of Black art.\u00a0 It was completely unimportant to them.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
Even as mainstream museums attempted to consider Black art. It was always them attempting to tell us what it is, even as they lacked the scholarship and experience to judge or critique it.\u00a0 They were just too uninformed to understand that comparing art created by a cultural group who has spent 400 years as kidnap victims might lead to different stories, genres, and processes than the genres and processes created by Western artists whose ancestors had done both the\u00a0 kidnapping and benefitting.\u00a0 They didn\u2019t make room in their historical canon for Black artist, or for the differences between techniques evolved from painting with sable-haired brushes, and those evolved from painting through quilt strips or other methods.\u00a0 They didn\u2019t understand that Black artists were never failing to keep up with them and their traditions, but rather, Black artists were creating from their own rightful historical perspectives using ingenious methods created by them for that purpose.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
In effect, even if a Black artist creates in the identical style of Rembrandt, he cannot be separated from the consciousness of life that flows through him as he creates.\u00a0 As an artist, whatever a person has come through to become <\/span>them<\/span>, all of that gets processed in the process of creating art.\u00a0 Even if a Black artist chose to copy the style of Rembrandt, right down to the brush stroke, he did so as a Black man with a story to tell about why he chose to mimic the world through Rembrandt\u2019s eyes, rather than his own.\u00a0 Likewise, Beethoven and Quincy Jones could never have seen life through a similar social lens.\u00a0 Still, both their artistries were influenced by the worlds before them and each created timeless masterpieces.\u00a0 The fact is, the expertise of one does not diminish or cancel the other\u2019s legacy or history.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
This is the part that mainstream museums got wrong.\u00a0 They\u2019ve looked to Western and European art history to try to judge the cultures of everyone else\u2026 demonstrating in no uncertain terms that they deemed no other cultural group worthy to grace their pristine walls.\u00a0 Their experts assigned Western art to the top of the art pinnacle and suppressed the rest.\u00a0 Not because Black artists weren\u2019t equally talented, but because they reserved no place for them to exists among their masters.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
Nevertheless, it has been historically shown, in every area of creativity where Black people have functioned, they have not only quickly mastered the art-forms, but also, they have taken them to new, unimagined levels:\u00a0 music, dance, storytelling, poetry, whatever.\u00a0 We are a people that, given the same tools or given no tools at all, we create our way to new heights and possibilities.\u00a0 The fact that our visual artists have largely gone un-studied by museums has not kept their creativity from flourishing.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
Despite mainstream art world rejection, Black artists kept right on creating and inventing new techniques.\u00a0 Black collectors kept right on curating their own stories through the masterpieces that reflected their complicated journeys.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
Now that being Black in America is a mainstream topic, it\u2019s no longer acceptable to be a clueless non-participant in the world outside of those hallowed museum walls.\u00a0 It\u2019s even worse to be clueless within them since it is the charge of their leaders and staff to help tell the story of this nation.\u00a0 Across the board, museums are stepping up to ensure their collections and programs encompass Black art, or at least their versions of what Black art should reflect.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
Beneath the welcome banners, Black artists and collectors have begun to file into the room in bigger numbers.\u00a0 But, it\u2019s not just time to feast.\u00a0 It\u2019s time for Black artists and collectors to advocate for the right to switch up the menu.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
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The Dream Series #5 by Jacob Lawrence. Collection (PAFA) The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. (Photo credit: Najee Dorsey)<\/p><\/div>\n
You don\u2019t need to be invited to the room and told what to consume and enjoy; and you don\u2019t need your existing recipes to be stirred and folded into the existing recipes chosen by them, for them.\u00a0 You need to be heard and accepted on your own terms.\u00a0 In this moment you must decide not to give up control of your own story as reflected through visual art.\u00a0 This is the critical decision Black artists and collectors are facing.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
We need museums and others in the mainstream art-world to know that examining Black art for the purpose of art history is not the same as re-contextualizing it so that it can be neatly fit into collections preassembled to reflect only their culture.\u00a0 This is a moment that is wholly about examining Black visual art, on its own merits.\u00a0 If Black collectors join more museum boards and invest in the rooms where art relationships are created and nurtured, that will help to insure a cultural narrative that reflects their truth.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
Right now Black artists and collectors still own \u201cthe masters.\u201d\u00a0 They can afford to enter the feast confident in their authorship and authority.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
As for the mainstream art-world and its non-Black experts, here\u2019s what I would ask of you as\u00a0 you invite Black artists and collectors into your spheres.\u00a0 Welcome these experts as your colleagues \u2013 and not as a psychiatrist might invite patients to the couch.\u00a0 They are not lost, or new to art as a cultural practice.\u00a0 They don\u2019t need you to help them acclimate to your version of culture.\u00a0 They\u2019ve brought their own.\u00a0 It is a creative culture that doesn\u2019t need fixing, or editing, or updating, or adjusting.\u00a0 They are coming to you fully human with a culture that is just as valid as yours.\u00a0 Start the conversation by listening and learning.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
Understand that Black art didn\u2019t evolve out of Western rejection and exclusion.\u00a0 It evolved out of Black creativity, despite those forces.\u00a0 Black people were creating art before the historic kidnapping.\u00a0 Vestiges of the original culture has survived, evolved, and expanded — despite the fact that the hyphen between the words African and American literally represents a slave ship plus 400 stolen years, in every literal sense.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
Black art has its own singular history.\u00a0 Sculptures stolen from Africa, those which inspired the likes of Picasso and Matisse, were used by our ancestors as tools for living.\u00a0 In many ways, the tradition survives.\u00a0 Art is how we live.\u00a0 It\u2019s how we laugh, cry, grieve, celebrate, protest, galvanize, heal, and refresh ourselves for the struggle of being Black in America.\u00a0 Art is the connective tissue of our culture.\u00a0 Please understand that we have not failed to master your art subjects, or your techniques.\u00a0 We have simply excelled at our own.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
We welcome your study and accept your invitation to the table but, from the standpoint of scholarship, the question — \u201cWhat is Black art?\u201d — is one for you to ask, not to answer.\u00a0 Even with your best intentions to right the wrongs of the past, still know that it would be illogical for the offspring of our ancestors\u2019 kidnappers to be the ones to define how we should artistically reflect those experiences.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
Black art is not the museum\u2019s story to control or rewrite.\u00a0 It is only theirs to gather and record from the witnesses and griots — namely those Black artists and collectors who have captured and preserved it.\u00a0 This time, it is your turn to listen to our experts, rather than to inform.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
Because, when it comes to Black art and culture, we are the masters here.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
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Paul Laurence Dunbar by Debra Hand<\/p><\/div>\n
DEBRA HAND<\/b>\u00a0is a museum-collected sculptor, painter, and writer.\u00a0 She is the creator of the historic bronze statue of Paul Laurence Dunbar in Dunbar Park.\u00a0 Among the history makers who own her works are former President Barack Obama; Hillary Clinton; Harry Belafonte; Cicely Tyson; Smokey Robinson; Yo-Yo Ma;\u00a0 Spike Lee; Seal; Sinbad; and the renowned sculptor, Richard Hunt; the late Winnie Mandela, and the late Dr. Maya Angelou also owned her work. Debra Hand holds a Master of Science Degree from the Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern University.\u00a0 She is a self-taught artist whose talent was discovered by the legendary Dr. Margaret Burroughs, principal founder of the DuSable Museum. It was Burroughs who arranged for Hand\u2019s first public exhibit.<\/p>\n
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