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-MAN: Dear son... -WOMAN: Daughter...
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Dear son...
MAHERSHALA ALI: There was before you...
and then there was after.
WOMAN 2: It was only after you that I understood this love.
ALI: And I knew then that I must survive
for something more than survival's sake.
I must survive for you.
-GROUP: You. -You.
♪ (DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYS) ♪
The Black artist in America has had to put up
with a great deal over the years.
It's not been simply a matter of mastering the art
while surviving as a person.
This has been the experience of most white artists, of course.
For the Black artist, it has also been the matter
of being taken seriously as an artist and as an individual.
Last week, a major historical survey of Black--
Art by Blacks in America
called Two Centuries of Black American Art,
opened at the Brooklyn Museum in New York.
David Driskell, a professor of art
at the University of Maryland and formerly chairman
of the art department at Fisk University in Nashville,
has organized this show.
Incidentally, it opened
last year in Los Angeles as a bicentennial exhibition,
and it drew overflow crowds.
1976, um, doesn't seem like that long ago.
♪ (JAZZ MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
VALERIE CASSEL OLIVER: But it was remarkable
that David Driskell could mount an exhibition
called Two Centuries of Black American Art.
Because up until that point, you really do not have
an exhibition which is authored by a Black curator
which talks about the history...
and the contemporary manifestations
of Black art production in the visual arts.
It just didn't exist.
For the most part,
the general public was not that aware
of the contributions that African American artists
had made to American culture in general in the 19th
or even the 20th century.
It was a surprise to most people when you come up
with a list of 50 to 100 Black artists
who had been working all the time.
They say, "Well, we've never heard of these artists."
Well, of course not.
There's no publication, there's no exhibition.
MAURICE BERGER: What David did was he said,
"This is Black art."
It matters. And it's been going on for 200 years.
Deal with it.
♪ (RHYTHMIC MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
♪ (MUSIC CONCLUDES) ♪
Mr. Driskell, you take, uh, issue with the fact
that it has been called an exhibition of Black art,
or we have been describing it this morning
as the history of Black art.
Why do you not think of that as being Black art, so to speak?
Well, first of all, when one says Black art,
it more or less isolates the Black artist
from the mainstream of American art.
And even though this has happened throughout the years,
but we have critical acclaim, historical analysis, et cetera,
the Black artist has not attempted to set himself apart.
He has tried to be part and parcel of the mainstream.
But aren't you setting them apart, in effect,
by putting the show together with just Black artists?
Only because he has not had an audience
with a-- a majority culture for the most part.
And because, uh, an exhibition of this nature
gets his work before the public.
Had this exhibition not been organized, many of the artists
who were shown here never would have been seen.
♪ (PIANO MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
MAURICE: The show opens
in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
There was a lot of resistance, even at that museum.
There were some who said,
"No. We shouldn't be even involved with this."
And yet when push came to shove, the board and the curators
agreed that Two Centuries of African American Art
would be a good idea.
DAVID DRISKELL: I guess it was a teaching moment for them,
at the same time that I had a chance to really say,
"This is something that ought to be done
because the American canon is not complete without it."
When you understand how difficult that was,
what a triumph it was that it was actually done,
then you start to understand
the enormous struggle and journey
that this country has been on to feature and to display
and to honor the work of Black artists.
What Driskell did is he demonstrated,
absolutely, that there was a lineage,
there was a history.
And that history was filled not only with painting
and sculpture, but also, the decorative arts.
Architecture, drawings. I mean, it-- it-- it really gave us
this enormous sense of the legacy of African Americans.
♪ (MUSIC FADES) ♪
I would have been 21 years old in '76.
Yeah. And I saw that show.
The scope of the show, uh, the amount of work
that was available, there was work in that show
that you had only seen in books before.
And so, for an artist,
I mean, always seeing the work in person,
seeing the real thing matters a lot.
I was there. I remember the electricity.
I remember the fact that it was packed.
There were lines down Wilshire Boulevard.
DAVID: People from all over coming
for that opening and it-- it was just spectacular.
After the count was taken
and after that exhibition closed there
and went to The High Museum in Atlanta the next year,
they found out that more people attended that exhibition
than any other exhibition...
originated in the United States.
So the show opens and it travels to Dallas,
it travels to Chicago,
it travels finally to the Brooklyn Museum.
And it sends a message.
And what it says is that these are the manifestations
of African American artistic brilliance over two centuries.
Artists who were still practicing,
who were living,
Richard Mayhew, Loïs Jones, Selma Burke, Richmond Barthé,
Charles White, Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence,
when they saw all of their work together,
it was like a homecoming.
I didn't attend the show, I was too young.
Maybe I did, I wouldn't remember.
But I remember the book.
The book was in my home.
It was in my sister's bedroom.
So these were images that I saw
before I could really say the names.
They were just sort of imprinted, um, in me.
And there was definitely a sense of communication
and education I was getting from those images.
Because you have to remember, at that time,
there were very few positive images of Black folks
that were widely available.
The artists of that time,
not only were presenting Black people,
they were presenting nuance, idiosyncratic,
abstract, beautiful imagery.
JORDAN CASTEEL: I just feel a sense of belonging
when I look at this book.
My community of Black American artists that come before me
have created the ground for me to build on.
And that's a beautiful thing. That's what this book
and this exhibition and what David Driskell has done,
um, represents for me.
I grew up in a home that had the work of Charles White...
Hale Woodruff...
♪ (PIANO MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
JORDAN: ...Faith Ringgold, Elizabeth Catlett.
Those were works that were around my, um, home,
so I felt they belonged to me. I felt ownership of those images
because they were a part of my intimate and immediate space.
♪ (JAZZ MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
KERRY JAMES MARSHALL: When I was in junior high school,
I got a summer scholarship to take a drawing class
at the Otis Art Institute.
The, uh, drawing teacher had a book
that he put on the opaque projector,
it was Images of Dignity: The Drawings of Charles White.
Because prior to that, you know,
almost all of the artists I had encountered
in our history books were European.
When I was 15, the first oil painting I made
was a painting-- an original painting that I made
in the style of Charles White, so that I could understand
exactly what it was he was trying to do,
how he used form, how he used color and tone,
and to try to make an original work
that did some of the same kinds of things that he did
without copying the work that he had made.
You train yourself to a certain way of seeing form
and understanding form
by copying what somebody else did.
And at another point, you break free from that,
because then you can do your own thing.
When I met Charles White,
one of the things that stuck with me that he said was that,
"Whenever you make work, it ought to be about something,
and it ought to be about something that mattered."
Because all of the work I was doing
had some relationship to the history of art.
It seemed to make a lot of sense
that it also should have a lot in rel-- a lot to do
with the history of Black people.
So that's what I set myself to do.
To make pictures that had historical relevance
in terms of the story, the narratives they told,
but also have historical relevance
because they had a relationship to the way
in which the narrative of painting
as an activity sort of developed over time.
I think that Kerry James Marshall has
all but redefined the whole concept
of what Black art is about.
I would say he had the audacity...
to concentrate on just the Black subject
and not bring all these other elements in.
And I think it's fascinating, not only from the point of view
of what Black people feel about themselves,
but it's intriguing to whites as well.
KERRY: In the history of painting
that we are introduced to...
you don't find many images of Black people in pictures.
You certainly don't see a lot of images
of Black people making pictures.
At the end of the 19th century,
and in the beginning of the 20th century,
this notion that representation
was a useless artifact of old-fashioned ideas
about what it meant to make art
had sort of set in, and people started thinking
that abstract painting is a more advanced form of painting
than representational painting.
And that's what abstraction sort of says, in a way,
that representing yourself is no longer a viable approach.
But I don't look at it that way.
There's work that needs to be done
using the Black figure in painting as a meaningful part
of the historical narrative.
Kerry James Marshall was a student of mine.
He made a very good sketchbook in my class.
And he was a good artist.
One of the exercises she had us do in that class
was to make a collage. We did a series of collages.
You had to make a collage and then bring that collage back
again the next week and have it changed.
And then to bring it again and changed again.
So that you never really became too attached
to not make everything you do seem so precious
that it can't be transformed, that it can't be modified,
or it can't be improved.
I was very interested in, uh, non-Western philosophies
and the spiritualism and the images that they use.
KERRY: I had seen, uh, Black Girl's Window before.
It was certainly an image that was in the back of my mind.
When I looked back at that work,
it certainly has a relationship to a painting I did in 1980
that was really transformative for me
and it really sort of set me
on the path to doing the work that I'm doing now.
And I made a painting called
A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self.
Which is a Black figure against a black ground.
And it was the first time I had used this simplified,
kind of reductive representation of a Black figure.
And so that painting was the-- the one that established
the Black figure as a mode of operating for me.
One of the things I was trying to do was to embody in a picture
the concept that Ralph Ellison had laid out
in his novel, Invisible Man.
He describes the condition of invisibility
as it relates to Black people in America.
This condition of being seen and not seen simultaneously.
And that's what I think a Black figure
against the black ground,
where if you change the color temperature of the black,
it creates enough separation so that you can alternately
see and then sometimes not see
the figure that's present there.
I started creating the sense of volume in those figures
by using the grayscale.
So, uh-- You take black, you add white to it,
you can create a grayscale,
and then you can actually start doing modelling,
you know, with-- with values.
Black is not the absence of color,
black is particular kinds of color.
And so if I went to the paint store, as I did,
and I bought black paint,
I could see I could buy three different variations
of black paint.
So I could buy an ivory black, I could buy a carbon black,
and I could buy an iron oxide black,
or something that's called Mars black.
And if you look at each one of those colors,
they are not the same thing.
This is the full range of the black flesh tones.
There are seven.
Every one of these tones is on those-- the later figures.
Every one of these colors is on there.
But, I mean, they all look the same,
but when you stack them on top
of each other, then the-- the variations
start to become more pronounced.
So I can end up with six, seven, eight or nine
different colors that are all made from black.
So that means I have a palette
that's as complex and as broad and as ranged
as any other color that's on the spectrum.
♪ (JAZZ MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
KERRY: I think, in general, the paintings had been really well received.
But there's a lingering controversy around
the sort of unequivocally Black,
kind of emphatically Black figures.
I wouldn't have done them if I didn't feel it.
But I tend to think having that extreme, uh, color,
that kind of black, is-- is amazingly beautiful.
There's a lot of overlap in terms of structure
between the way artists handle color
and the way musicians handle color
and note and tone and all this.
Because we use the same kind of language, basically.
It's tone, it's texture, it's color. It's intensity.
And it's-- it's all basically the same sort of structural language.
I found my own sound. I found my own tone.
Very often, something that we wouldn't even consider major,
like a family picnic, or the barbershop,
how we live, what we do.
He kind of popularized the ordinary.
And in so doing, he made it his own personal statement.
We see ourselves in so many different ways.
'Cause he's looking at every aspect of our being.
♪ (QUIET JAZZ MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
VALERIE: The first major exhibition
that focuses on Black art or cultural production,
before Two Centuries of Black American Art
is Harlem on My Mind by The Met in 1968.
Which received a huge backlash from the community itself.
Why? It was not authored by anyone who looked like
the subjects of that exhibition.
It framed it almost in an anthropological framework,
which was the sights and sounds of Harlem
from the 1900s to 1968.
It did not take into account
the wealth of cultural and artistic production emerging.
That was, uh, shocking.
For all of the desires of the curators,
they are missing the mark.
REPORTER: Mr. Hoving, what do you think of the exhibit?
-Well, I personally like it. -REPORTER: Why?
I like it because I think it is true.
I think it is an honest portrayal
of a very difficult subject, which is millions of people
living in one area, a large area of New York City,
over a period of about 70 years.
REPORTER: Some people, especially some Harlem citizens
have criticized the exhibition
and said it's not art, it's all photography.
They said that Harlem people, Harlem-born people,
were not intimately involved.
They said it's too slick,
and that it lacks sensitivity.
Well, I know some people have said that.
On the other hand, uh, there have been others,
that have been on the advisory committee
and working for many, many months
who said that they thought it was, uh, moving,
and they thought it was, uh,
powerful where it should be powerful
and, uh, soft and lyrical where it should be.
Again, this is, uh, these diametrically opposed opinions.
We're going to get a lot of that.
And, uh, I think that's good.
Harlem as a kind of fanciful, mystical magical subject
was fine for The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
But the artists who were doing the work,
who were walking the walk,
were somehow irrelevant to the story.
MARY SCHMIDT CAMPBELL: With one exception.
And that exception is that they included the photographs
of James Van Der Zee.
The fact that they included him turned out to be a revelation.
Because Van Der Zee's work documented much of the cultural
day-to-day life of Harlem.
The rituals and ceremonies of people who lived there.
And his name became a name we all knew,
and the content of what he did became known to people.
DAVID: My reaction was that
if The Metropolitan Museum wanted to really
give a real depiction of what Black artists
had been doing in the period
of the Harlem Renaissance and thereafter,
why not deal with the art?
Doing The Two Centuries gave me the chance
to, uh, bridge the gap to a certain extent
between what,
uh, I thought The Met should have been doing from day one.
MARY: People like Romare Bearden,
Benny Andrews, were out protesting,
as well as people from the community,
because it was not reflective of Harlem.
MAURICE: Why are museums so resistant
to opening their doors to artists of color
and particularly African Americans artists?
For the first time, perhaps ever,
I think people really start to think of their museums
as being their museums, as belonging to them
in a different way.
Faith Ringgold was a prime agitator in this time period.
She was protesting at The Whitney,
protesting at The Met, protesting all around the city.
FAITH RINGGOLD: We are Black. But we are equals.
I believe thoroughly and completely in freedom of speech.
And no one's going to change that.
I'll just stay out till I get in.
♪ (QUIET MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
MARY: I met Faith Ringgold,
when I was in graduate school at Syracuse.
And what I heard was this,
that she had gone to The Studio Museum in Harlem
and tried to get a show.
And, um, Studio Museum did not give her a show.
Um, for whatever reason.
They weren't a lot of women back in those days
who were getting, um, solo exhibitions at the museum.
And she had all these big paintings
she was-- couldn't get shown, uh, in New York.
And so she started doing these, uh, soft sculptures.
And she would take the soft sculptures
and she would lecture on women artists.
Not only Black women artists, but on women artists in general.
Because she understood that it wasn't just an issue
about Black artists,
it was an issue of gender as-- as well as race.
I was not invited to sit down with the men
who were in the struggle with me.
I realized I was really doing the right thing
by becoming a feminist,
and trying to start a feminist movement in the art world.
Faith Ringgold is an artist who hasn't received
the recognition she deserves,
in part because of the form that she decided to use,
but also because of just how incendiary
her political style was.
Her paintings in particular.
Her political work also had such an invective,
that some places weren't willing to be that radical.
I did what I wanted to do, and, uh, paid the price.
I think it's also partly that she is...
extremely courageous, ahead of her time.
Very fierce in her work, loving in her work.
She doesn't accept anyone else's leadership
about how art should be.
Which by the way, I think is what it means to be an artist.
♪ (QUIET MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
DAVID: One of the great American artists,
Richard Mayhew, was part of Two Centuries.
His work was a continuum of sorts.
It was in the tradition
of the great Black American landscape painters.
Of Bannister, of Duncanson,
of others that we think of when we say, "America the Beautiful."
RICHARD MAYHEW: My paintings were based on mood space,
feeling of time, and mood of the moment.
It's a joy. It's like a dance.
They look like landscapes, but they're mindscapes.
(CHUCKLES)
So what we mean by mindscape is it was all internalized
thinking and feeling.
I started painting very, very young.
I-- I used to see painters,
and I used to go to the museum and watch them paint.
And it was fascinating, watching the magic wand as you call it,
a dip in the paint
and images come out the other end... (LAUGHS) on the canvas.
So that kind of thrilled me just seeing that
and that kind of challenged me about
the whole idea of painting.
The mystique and the magic of it.
Well, I was drawing all the time, constantly drawing.
How I learned to draw I can't imagine that,
because I could draw almost anything as in-- Very early-- very early on.
I went to study at The Art Academy
in Florence, Italy
and I went to study at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
I met Spiral when I came back from Europe.
♪ (JAZZ MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
SARAH LEWIS: In 1963, Mayhew joined The Spiral Group,
founded by painters Romare Bearden and Norman Lewis
in response to the civil rights struggle.
They discussed the plight of Blacks in America
and the direction African American art
should take.
The, uh, legacy that they've left is unbelievable...
and very special people.
So they weren't just artists,
these were the mentors of the future of American society.
SARAH: Spiral began in Romare Bearden's studio.
The fifth floor of his Canal Street loft.
Spiral came into being in 1963
at the height of the civil rights movement.
And in fact, they got together
because there was an idea that, uh, there should be
a group of Black artists
who should go to the March on Washington.
SARAH: The question became how can artists
engage with the civil rights movement?
Artists who were working in abstract means
and artists who were more overtly political.
And Spiral was trying to find a way to create a bridge
between these two seemingly separate worlds.
And it was really the first major group
of Black artists that assembled since the 40s.
And when they got together, they really discovered
that they had an enormous amount to talk about.
So there was Hale Woodruff, Charles Alston,
Richard Mayhew, Romare Bearden.
I think Emma Amos was the only woman... (SCOFFS)
they permitted into the group.
I tried to join Spiral, and they told me no.
Didn't you write a letter to Romare Bearden
-asking to join? -Yes, I did. Yes, I did.
-MICHELE WALLACE: Actually, what he did... -Oh, actually--
-...was critic your work. -Yeah, that's what he did.
-MICHELE: He never responded to the question. -Absolutely.
-It's coming back to-- -MICHELE: Basically, he said,
"You need to go back to the drawing board,"
and the final lines were something like,
"In time, your works will find its own friends."
There you go, yes.
And I didn't ask them for a critique.
I-- I-- I was-- I had all the credentials they had and more.
SARAH: The fact that Norman Lewis is part of it,
for me, is an important signal here.
Norman Lewis asked a question of those gathered
at one of the meetings, "Is there a negro image?"
is how he put it.
What is a Black aesthetic? Is there one? Right?
The fact that Norman Lewis was asking the question for me is interesting
because if you teach the history of modernism,
you have to teach about Normal Lewis' work.
He becomes a kind of metaphor for how difficult it is
to engage with Black abstraction.
Norman Lewis was one of the artists from Spiral.
He was involved with spiritual painting.
You're not painting on the canvas,
you're inside the canvas,
you're inside the painting, painting out.
When I met this group, it wasn't just artists.
It was composers and writers,
and those who came and met with this group.
And that was fantastic.
Reginald Gammon was a-- a graphic designer.
He taught Romare Bearden how to do paste-ups,
cut out Xerox pieces and pasting them together.
That was the first Romare Bearden collage.
Now, the gallery saw what Romare Bearden was doing
and they clapped and applauded
the fact that, "Oh, this is what you should continue to do."
So he took off in that direction
and that was the beginning
of the whole collage development that was taking place.
The story that I've heard is that Romy, um,
brought this brown bag of scraps to one of the meetings one day,
and he tried to get some of the artists
interested in doing a collage.
Uh, Norman Lewis, Emma Amos, Mayhew,
and-- and he said none of them could really-- were really into it.
Um, he said they all were doing their own thing.
And he didn't mean that pejoratively,
he just meant that nobody was interested
in this collaborative work.
So Romy continued to work on his collages.
And one of the artists from Spiral came
and saw the work and said,
"You know what?" That-- it was Reginald Gammon.
He said, "You ought to photograph that and blow it up."
And so that's how he came upon taking those small collages
and blowing them up.
And they became his projections, which was the work that, um,
he really-- really, uh-- It was a milestone for him.
DAVID: I started working on this piece last week,
and, uh, wasn't sure as to where I was gonna take it.
Bearden was the main inspiration for my collage work.
And, uh, I did a piece in-- in the 70s...
after he came to visit me at Fisk.
And I called it Homage to-- to Bearden.
And, uh, I exhibited it in New York in 1980.
He came to the exhibition and he saw it.
And, uh...
he said, uh, "I'm taken with the notion that you
like what I do well enough to kind of celebrate it."
He said, "But what you're doing there is not David,
it's-- it's more of Romy."
And he went over to another piece that I had done...
(CLEARS THROAT)
in which I had torn the pieces, you know,
he cut his out a lot. I had torn the pieces.
And he said, "Now that's--
You're using collage there, and that's you."
He said, "That's your voice."
And, you know, only a friend would tell you that.
Hilton Kramer, who was the art critic
for the New York Times
has had a rather mixed review of your show,
saying that it was not generally of the highest quality.
-Does that disappoint you? -No, not at all.
I expect that from what one refers to as a mainstream critic.
Uh, because in many cases, these persons are not familiar
with what we might refer to as a Black experience,
they never had the experience of knowing what it was like
to, uh, suffer injustices, uh-- Knowing what it's like to live
in the poverty that many of these artists
have experienced, and consequently,
they have no real sensitivity. No real feel
for what it has taken for these artists
to achieve what they've, uh, achieved at this time.
I got to throw out props to-- to David Driskell at this moment
because he got all sorts of flak from the New York Times,
from various mainstream media.
People-- People who are supposedly authorities on art,
who did not know anything about African American art,
and he provides this very, very important lesson
on looking at African American art historically,
looking at African American art in a more complex way...
And he fought, you know, real resistance
on the parts of institutions
to say there is something else that we can show.
There is something else that we can engage with
that shows a much more complex side
of both modernism and American art.
No one had been accustomed to seeing Black artists,
Black historians on television
talking about Black art. They'd say, "Black art?
What is it?" Even the critics, Hilton Kramer,
who was just so taken with the notion
that we had the audacity to be talking about Black art.
And my response was,
"Hilton Kramer? Who is Hilton Kramer?"
It wasn't an exhibition that was supposed
to do everything for everybody.
It wasn't supposed to include everybody.
It was supposed to be a cross section of work
that had been made in the United States
over the past 200-- over the 200 years up until that time.
The selection process was not an easy one.
Uh, first of all, you realize that you're gonna be
subjecting yourself to criticism because people are gonna say,
"Why did you leave such and such a person out?"
"Why did you choose this one over that one?"
I mean you have to accept that
when a curator does an exhibition sometimes,
I mean, they-- By definition, it's gonna be limited
to the scope that the curator has imagined.
And if it doesn't include everything I like,
that's not particularly problematic for me
because I expect that there would be
other exhibitions to follow.
I think it was probably
the first major modern exhibition...
uh...
which brought the Black subject period
to the attention of the American public.
I came up with the notion that in order to do it properly
and to do it historically,
I ought to talk about the fine arts tradition
of portrait artists, and artists like Joshua Johnston
from Baltimore in the late 1700s, early 1800s.
The assumption was that Black artists, uh...
There were no Black artists, first of all,
but those who considered themselves artists
were not capable, intellectually or practically,
of delivering a product
that fitted the so-called European canon.
And so when artists like Johnston came along,
people started buying his portraits.
Artists like Robert Duncanson came along
and people saw the beautiful landscape and said,
"Oh, he's painting within the boundaries
of the Hudson River School tradition."
Edward Mitchell Bannister a little later,
and they said, "Well, he is very much like
the Barbizon painters out of France."
RADCLIFFE BAILEY: Those artists from the past really
influenced my work.
But I think it's important for us,
those that are younger, to constantly mention
and bring up the names
of those that have opened doors before us.
♪ (JAZZ MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
RADCLIFFE: I am an artist, Black artist.
African American artist.
And I am an artist just in general.
I wanted to go to collage and play baseball.
I wanted to play ball.
Then I realized that that was a dream.
And, um, I went back towards where my mother guided me.
And I ended up going to art school.
I went to art school thinking
that I was going to study something like graphic design.
And then I heard a lecture, um, from an artist.
And I remember...
hearing about the artist talking about his work
and he was having so much fun that I said, "No,
I need to make-- make art, make objects."
And then I just went full throttle towards it.
I see myself as a vessel and things come through me.
I found an old piano shop in my neighborhood,
and I just remember these guys tearing out these piano keys
and throwing them away.
And it just struck me like, "No, don't throw those away."
So I collected maybe about... close to 500 sets of piano keys.
And, uh, I didn't know what I was gonna do with them.
But I remember bringing them in the studio
and dropping them on the floor.
And right then and there, that was the piece.
And, uh, the piano keys basically turned into ocean.
And-- and I was thinking about the connections
between the oceans.
So it was a combination of that, plus the experiences of me
as a kid going fishing with my father.
And my father would go so far out into the sea
to a point where we couldn't see land.
And it just reminded me of that experience of being lonely,
but that's also based on those
that were lost at sea, um, during the Middle Passage.
And the figure itself was like a bust that is, uh...
It was like a death mask.
He loves the materials that he's using.
And it's paint and it's glass, and it's photographs,
and it's bit of paper, and it's fabric.
And he has an ability to
bring all of those fragments together.
It's telling a story. It's telling us about our past.
And it's telling us something about where we're going.
Radcliffe Bailey, for me, kind of represents
the wonder and joy, uh, of an artist.
♪ (JAZZ MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
RADCLIFFE: This is where I pray.
This is where I think about the future.
I think about the past, I ask questions.
I have to separate myself from everyday life...
when I start working.
So I have to tune out everybody, everyone.
Um, it's usually sometimes-- it's in the middle of the night.
It's probably around midnight.
And then I kinda come in here
when I can actually hear nothing moving around.
I just wanna create beauty.
Oil painting is about light.
The obsession with light is at once visual,
religious and erotic.
♪ (QUIET MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
The fact that you could take a hairy stick and colored paste
and through the act of your mind and your hand,
you cook something into being that-- that stands in
as a representative of someone that you love.
A landscape that you like.
There is something al-- It's like alchemy.
This week, the official portraits of former president Barack Obama
and his wife Michelle were revealed.
(AUDIENCE APPLAUDS)
To be the first African American painter,
to paint the first African American president
of the United States is absolutely overwhelming.
(AUDIENCE APPLAUDS)
I think that canvas portrait of Obama
in the National Portrait Gallery is, um...
it's both-- it's both beautiful and it's a challenge.
What I was always struck by, whenever I saw his portraits...
was the degree to which they challenged
our conventional views of power and privilege.
MAURICE: There's something about that portrait
which is really, um, rich and full and exciting
in a way that none of the other portrait of presidents are.
I-- I googled portraits of presidents
and there they were. All of them.
All of the terrible, terrible portraits of presidents
and they were mostly really conservative and really boring, and--
And it got me thinking about how really far
the envelope got pushed.
I think what Kehinde understood was the stakes were different.
When you have two centuries
of straight, white men who are president,
and then you have Barack Obama,
that portrait better be different.
There were a number of issues that we were trying to negotiate, um...
I tried to negotiate less grey hair.
I tried to negotiate smaller ears.
(AUDIENCE LAUGHS)
-BARACK OBAMA: Struck out on that as well. -(AUDIENCE LAUGHS)
I showed up in 2016
while he was still in the Oval office.
Incredibly nervous.
Uh, and trying to get words out to communicate what it is
that I could bring to the picture that's new.
That's different from those paintings
that you see in the museums
and that's different from all the contemporary art
that you see today.
I think I must have said something right
because I got the gig.
But ultimately, uh, what I tried to communicate was that
I will be looking not only at the presidency,
or the history of received power,
or the evolution of power's form,
but rather, I would be looking at him as a man.
His physical presence in the world.
(AUDIENCE APPLAUDS)
The first thing I did when I found out that--
that I was chosen
was I'd go online and, like, look at the millions of images
of Michelle and the kind of person
that she presented to the world, and then, you know,
wanting to capture something really private.
It's about capturing that moment
when they're giving you something different,
or where they're a little more relaxed,
and that can happen in a split second.
BERNARD LUMPKIN: Amy Sherald did not become a household name
until she painted the portrait of the First Lady Michelle Obama.
Tell us how game-changing this moment is?
I am relieved... (CHUCKLES)
that, um, I can pay back my school loans.
You know, it's something that--
I mean becoming an artist is not empirical,
so it's not about hard work. I mean, you have to put the work in,
but that doesn't mean that you're going to make it
and then the breakthrough comes and then you're like,
"Oh yeah, that's who I am. Like, this is who I am. Yeah."
With that commission...
Amy, literally inspired by the person Michelle Obama,
creates this image which is not only deeply Michelle Obama,
I mean that is her-- You know, the whole...
Her whole gesture, the whole-- the beautiful fashion.
She created such an incredible image of a powerful,
beautiful Black woman.
It's become a-- an international symbol.
That-- That-- And that shows the power of an image.
Here's part of what the former First Lady,
Michelle Obama, said at the unveiling of her portrait.
-Sure. -Take a listen.
I am also thinking about all of the young people,
uh, particularly girls and girls of color...
who, in years ahead, will come to this place
and they will look up and they will see an image
of someone who looks like them hanging on the wall
of this great American institution.
AMY SHERALD: I think for me, little Parker Curry,
being captivated by that image of Michelle
and seeing her own greatness in it
and being able to go into a space
and realize that there were people
that existed before her, whose legacies were so great
that they've been archived in this institution,
and it was a woman.
Um, for her to walk away with that sense
of being is really important.
♪ (JAZZ MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
AMY: I see myself as an American realist,
which maybe some people would disagree with.
My artistic process, the impetus of it,
is really my life.
I think the most interesting work
that is being made
has that autobiographical affect to it.
It's really been about writing a visual diary of me
trying to figure out who I am as a person, as an individual.
I consider the people in my paintings archetypes.
They represent something that's bigger
than who they are as an individual.
It's important for me that
they're just Black people being Black.
BERNARD: There is something
which people have written about in Amy Sherald's paintings,
which is the gaze.
Her figures are often faced
with a very strong, fixed gaze at the viewer.
And people have written a lot about and she's talked about
what that means and what's happening there.
And one of things that's happening is
she's depicting, or representing,
in some way, the gaze that,
you know, of the-- the white, dominant culture
has on-- has on Black bodies.
That sense of always being looked at
through the eyes of someone else.
That sense of a doubleness of identity.
Your African self. Your American self.
And so I think painters are very interested
in representing that gaze.
The eyes tell you what's in the soul and for me,
the people that I paint,
they're no longer themselves in the painting.
They are these archetypes that know they are present.
These aren't passive portraits.
They're maybe subversively, um, confrontational, if you will.
But it's definitely a response to a lot of images I saw growing up
where our gaze was always averted,
or thinking about the fact
that you couldn't look at a white person in the eye.
You know, so this is my way of nodding my head
to that narrative, and empowering the image in a way.
And so, I like the paintings, um,
hung a little lower for that reason,
so when the viewer walks up, it's more of a...
of a-- it's a different conversation.
Like you're not looking up at it.
It's almost looking directly at you.
And I think that creates a different kind of sensation.
MARY: She gives us this image of a person.
And what's interesting is that almost always,
they're not painted in, um, their actual skin tone.
They may be kind of charcoal or blueish.
So already, she's alerted you to the fact that,
"I'm painting what appears to be something that's super-real."
But in fact, I am giving you clues
that this is just an exterior that has been constructed
and that, in fact, behind this exterior,
there is also this world.
So she puts the exterior-interior, I think,
into kind of a real tension on her paintings.
For that reason, I can just stand in front
of one of her paintings for, you know, hours. (LAUGHS)
I think a lot of galleries are now picking up Black artists
because there is this, you know, like, gold rush.
I say that it's because we're making
some of the best work and the most relevant work.
I think there is absolutely, kind of,
something happening right now, but I'm also--
I always really want to not, kind of, make this moment
seem so singular and special.
Because I think we-- There have always been Black artists.
There have always been Black curators.
There have always been Black collectors.
They just perhaps have not been part of the mainstream.
♪ (HIP HOP MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
♪ It's me, snitches ♪
KASSEEM DEAN: Art and music are brothers and sisters.
I got into collecting by accident.
Collect what you feel. Collect what you love.
The Dean Collection is promoting, uh, living artists.
African Americans have to tell our own story.
The work is amazing.
I am definitely not just a collector.
I love being a disruptive. I love activism.
Coming from the Bronx
and coming into money, uh, very early.
I got the bug. And then what I did was
I started going around, uh, to local galleries.
Most of the galleries used to, uh, not take me serious.
Baggy pants, braids.
But I didn't let that, um, deter me.
♪ (MUSIC STOPS) ♪
MICHELE: I admire Swizz Beatz and Alicia.
Because Swizz has allowed himself to be positioned
as an African American collector of African American art.
And he and Alicia are about the culture.
Swizz and, um, Puff Daddy
and, uh, Jay-Z and Beyoncé are collecting now.
Um, it really, um, elevates the game.
And there're a lot of people who look at what they're doing
and what-- what is important to them.
Over the last few years...
uh, Swizz has built a collection of Gordon Parks' photographs
that is unequaled in private hands.
In fact, it is the largest collection
of Gordon Parks photographs.
All we want to do is preserve a piece of, uh, Gordon's legacy
for the next generation to have access to it.
The Dean Collection started out
as this imaginary museum for my kids.
♪ (JAZZ MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
KASSEEM: And then, what happened was
I started posting artists, um, on my Instagram
that people weren't familiar with.
And then I started getting, uh, people writing me back saying,
"Man, I appreciate you, thank you," this, that.
I'm like, "No, thank you for what?"
Like, "Your work is great." "No, my show sold out.
Galleries that wouldn't talk to me are calling me now."
Then I started understanding the importance
of promoting living artists.
They used to laugh at me for collecting art.
I've been having fun with this for 20 years.
♪ (MUSIC STOPS) ♪
KASSEEM: The Kaws piece and the Kehinde piece
were the two pieces
that kinda, like, started the Dean Collection.
Nobody ever thought that this sculpture would be in a house.
This is the first time a sculpture like this
is under a roof.
Well, this is-- this is from the Laying Down series.
The fact that somebody's hand, like the t--
A human's hand, did this,
and it looked like he just did it yesterday.
I can't show this piece enough.
You know, we put the Dean Collection museum
on our property, uh, so the public can-- can see the collection.
This is Hank Willis' ball.
We have artist of all colors from all around the world.
When someone buys your work,
it's not ever really about the money for an artist,
it's about the vote of confidence.
It's really someone saying, "Keep doing what you're doing.
I'm making space for you to make new things."
And what's exciting about Karen Jenkins-Johnson,
Swizz Beatz, uh, Bernard Lumpkin
and many, many amazing African American collectors
that I've gotten to engage with over the years,
is that they have a-- a joy, a verve,
um, an enthusiasm for the work,
um, that really is affirming,
that really gives you confidence.
I think it's absolutely necessary
that Black people with money buy African American art.
VALERIE: It's important when they see
Beyoncé and Jay-Z in The Louvre.
It's important when they know that P. Diddy
has acquired a Kerry James Marshall.
They see the people that they celebrate and admire doing that,
and hopefully, that is an imprinting.
Art is to be collected. It is to be lived with.
It's part of a quality of life.
The collectors, or the patrons, or supporters
of really good art, really have to have a kind of a vision.
And have to have a kind of a mindset that says,
"I want to engage with something that-- that may not be
universally appreciated or loved,
but I see power in that, I see potential in."
I'm always grateful that people collect my work, um,
but I'm also grateful when people give museums,
institutions, funds to bring that work into public collections.
Because that's the way that, you know, I, as a young artist,
got to see the work.
Not in people's houses, but in museums, you know.
So I think its super important that Black collectors,
or any collectors really, think about public institutions.
♪ (JAZZ MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
FRED WILSON: I go into an institution
and just absorb that place.
Uh, and for me, it's about looking at everything
and talking to everybody.
I look at their collections as much as I can,
and I talk to everybody from the, you know, the maintenance
to the chairman of the board.
It's often not what anyone says specifically, in--
in conversation, it's what they don't say,
that gives me some, you know,
ideas about what's going on in the museum
that creates the image that the public sees.
I'm just using the museum as my palette, basically.
I usually have a notebook
and I just write down things during the period of research.
It's, you know, things that I see, that I want to see again,
objects, images.
And so, from that, I build the exhibition.
What you see or view is one thing
but what people have in storage...
you know, can be entirely different.
It brings up questions.
Whereas the public only sees what is created for them
and those-- those kind of incongruities
are all smoothed out.
And I'm seeing what's not being discussed,
that may not be of interest to the curator
or part of their scholarship.
It's the underbelly, it's what the museum-- It is,
but it is not what they're-- they're putting out to the public.
Museums now understand that they need to tell a counternarrative
about American life and about Black art.
They need to correct what stories haven't been told
through their collecting practices.
Through the displays that--
Through the exhibitions that they've had.
♪ (HIP HOP MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
KEHINDE WILEY: In 1994, I was 17 years old
and I see Thelma Golden's Black Male exhibition.
And it was life changing.
Here for the first time, you're seeing Black masculinity
not as something on television that's menacing,
or at arm's length,
but rather artists embracing it as the subject matter.
Another color on their palette.
It was mind blowing.
An exhibition that really tore down
the meaning of the Black body itself.
GLENN LIGON: Thelma asked me to participate in that show
at the Whitney. It was all kinds of artists
of all races, all genders, who were dealing with
Black muscularity as a subject matter.
It was really, really engaged with notions of identity,
but in a provocative way around gender and sexuality
and race in this kind of surreal melding and-- and fusion.
DAVID: There had been all of this talk about
a negative aspect of Black lifestyle,
and especially amongst men.
When an exhibition was put together
which represented so much of what people did not know...
about the African American male, it was a shock.
And yet it was a revelation,
because nothing like that had been presented
in the museum before.
To show the nuances, the beauty,
the allure and loathing, if you will,
that comes with the Black male body
in particular...
was very important to put that into the larger conversation.
The fears of otherness are so played out
most often around this notion of Black masculinity,
that I think it's very important that in looking at it,
we understand much of what comes to be racism or even sexism
or even the homophobia that exists in this culture.
MAURICE: I think what a lot of people
don't remember, even folks in the art world,
is that back in the early 90s, it was still very difficult
to, uh, pull off a show with African American content
at a mainstream art museum
mostly because the curators in that museum
weren't interested
or, in the case of something like Black Male,
it would engender controversy in a very mixed audience.
It's an historical show. I mean, it's a show that now has been, you know,
in hindsight considered highly historical
despite the reaction, you know, at the time.
♪ (JAZZ MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
There was a Lyle Ashton Harris picture in the tutu,
which was incredibly disturbing at the time
and alluring at once.
It-- It looked at the body as a site of strength.
It looked at masculinity as a site of performance.
It looked at femininity as-- as an invention.
And it really threw open this question of,
how does choice become the central role of the artist?
I think people were shocked, um,
by just the-- Maybe the boldness and the rawness of the works.
It's speaking your truth.
It's not so much trying to make the work stand out,
as opposed to trusting your process, your ideas,
and your inner guidance.
I think, in retrospect, people look back at Black Male,
and realized that Thelma was really on to something.
And what came out of it was a really definitive work
on the meaning of Blackness and maleness in visual culture.
♪ (MUSIC STOPS) ♪
MAURICE: In a survey of major American museums,
it was determined that 85 percent of artists
in major American art museum collections are white.
If you break down the number of artists of color
in those collections, it's 1.2 percent Black.
If the person sitting at the table in a curatorial meeting,
or the people sitting at that table are all white,
you're gonna have a problem.
You're gonna have a problem of interpretation.
You're gonna have a problem in terms of trying to figure out
what you're doing right or wrong,
and most importantly, you're gonna have a problem
in terms of the work you're gonna select.
If all of the critics writing are white,
the same problem exists...
until the institutions become more diverse.
And it's happening.
You're beginning to see young brilliant curators of color
assume pretty important roles in American museums.
But until that happens in a widespread way...
and-- or until white critics and curators and journalists
look into themselves...
research the world around them,
and look into the past openly and honestly
until they change, until they're open minded,
it's not gonna change as fast as it needs to.
I feel like it is important for us to own our own culture
as African Americans, because it is our culture.
And we hate the way people-- other people tell our story.
There's always flaws in it because they didn't live in it.
Most of the-- the primary institutions,
most of the cultural institutions have been behind.
They've been behind in film. They've been behind in TV.
They've been behind in popular culture generally.
They've been behind in, you know, in museums
and sort of cultural institutions.
They're simply behind.
There are more exhibitions
featuring African American artists,
Black artists,
whether they're African American or not.
Um, there are more exhibitions featuring women.
Those are exhibitions.
They don't always translate into acquisitions.
I always, when I go around to museums
and I see the work of Black artists up,
I do this little game where I look at the wall label
and look at the acquisition dates.
And when I look at those dates, I find in a lot of museums
that they're very recent.
So I think institutions do have a long way to go
in terms of catching up.
Now I guarantee you they're selling off pieces
to get some color in those museums
to balance that scale.
So it is only a matter of time that greatness, uh,
will shine through.
♪ (JAZZ MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
♪ (MUSIC FADES) ♪
MARY: We love heroes.
We love celebrities. We love "the one."
It is just part of our culture.
It's-- It's our culture in music.
It's our culture in visual arts.
It's our political culture.
It-- You know-- We just-- We just like superheroes.
RICHARD J. POWELL: Jean Michel Basquiat emerges, uh, in the art world
in the early 1980s.
This was a moment where the art world was kind of--
they were kind of hungry
for something fresh, something exciting,
something different, something youthful.
He is also doing work that really kind of grabs
at certain kind of notions of the street,
and of the urban decline that we're all experiencing
towards the end of the 20th century.
I think he changed the conversation in a big way.
He just got a lot of publicity, uh,
from being around the right people at that time.
The meteoric rise of his career was un-- unprecedented for--
In terms of Black visual artist.
And this is also the moment
when many of these younger artists,
um, like Glenn Ligon, and Lorna Simpson,
and Kara Walker are in art school.
And so by the time we get to the early 1990s,
when they explode, I think that Basquiat's legacy
and his-- and the message he sends to the art world
is something that they are the beneficiaries of.
♪ (JAZZ MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
MARY: I remember distinctly going
to the Whitney to see a Kara Walker exhibition.
I was struck by several things.
One, she has such an incredible mastery
of that medium of the silhouettes.
And she has that, um, attentiveness to her materials
and-- and representation, and the sense of space,
and design, and dramatic scenario.
KARA WALKER: The cut-outs I started doing
partly as an antidote to painting.
Painting was too readily recognized,
too quick from the hand, too, um, gestural,
too personality-laden perhaps.
And I wanted to distance myself from the idea
that this was me talking, but that it was a-- a kind of,
uh, a masked character talking about masked characters.
SARAH: Kara Walker is a crucible
for the field of African American art.
She's a crucible for the field of modernism.
You know, I have an enormous amount of respect for her willingness
to go into that kind of underbelly
of the neo-Confederate narrative in American culture,
and bring it to our attention through forms that disturb,
that command and that reshape our understanding
about Black life
and-- and white Americans in this country.
Love the work. Hate the work.
You have to reckon with the work.
If you don't, you're not reckoning
with the history of this country, effectively.
VALERIE: I think what people push against...
is a sense of irreverence
about the moment or time and space
where Africans were enslaved.
I think they push against what they see is the perversity...
sexual perversity, degradation of Black bodies
or complicitness in that perversity
that she brings to bear.
So to pull on that history and to play upon that history
is something that she does,
much to the chagrin of the Black community.
KARA: I'm not trying to, like,
drop a bomb on the public necessarily,
but I-- sometimes I think the work does have that impact.
My approach initially was, um...
decidedly tongue in cheek.
Your reality, my reality.
My fantasy, my fear, my humanity, my clownishness,
all of that has to kind of come to bear.
There's all these narrative tropes,
stereotypes, mythologies that we live with.
Some are very overt.
Some are parading around in broad daylight.
Some are unconscious fantasies,
fears, wishes, loathings, uh, anxieties.
♪ (JAZZ MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
KARA: In 2013, I was approached to do a public art project
in the Domino Sugar factory.
This old, derelict plant on the waterfront.
It was a good collaboration,
and the best kind of collaboration is the kind
where an organization says,
"We really wanna support what artists do.
What do you wanna do?"
And you say, "I want to build a 40-foot sphinx...
made out of sugar."
The scale was determined by the space.
The sphinx became a-- a kind of monumental marker.
It was such a new way of working and collaborating
and working with the team and working three-dimensionally.
I'm always interested in the challenge of working, uh,
in, sort of, public space
and the challenge being new audiences for the work.
I wanted to create a compelling space to enter.
I got a longer historical lens to view sugar production
that enslaved African people who were commodified
and then segregated, excluded, oppressed, destroyed.
It brings a lot of feeling forward.
I think that my approach in making art doesn't involve, um--
Or doesn't actually know what the rules are
of what can and can't be said.
"She hasn't paid her dues."
"She doesn't know her history."
"She's selling us downriver."
Um, I mean, those are just phrases I heard.
"She must hate Black people as much as she hates herself."
The experience of white America
and Black America is very different.
Because white America very often will look at this
and find it incredibly entertaining.
And Black America will look at it and-- and almost, uh,
cringe at the pain that's being depicted.
And-- And that's, in and of itself, very telling.
I think there is something about the Black community
that feels we have ownership
of these stories
because they come out of us.
They come through us. They're about us.
But again, we're not a monolith either.
And for, um, moments where there were enslaved Africans,
there were also freed Africans.
We're a composite of many different histories coming together.
So, to say that this is a monolithic reaction...
to artwork, I think, is, at best, skewed.
And then to say that that relationship
of how people react should only be cast in white,
which is not a monolith,
and black, which is not a monolith,
is also a bit skewed.
DAVID: There are those who feel that
Kara represents certain aspects
of our history that is being negatively portrayed in her art.
Be that as it may,
you can't say to an artist,
"You have the freedom to do whatever you want to,
however, you can't do such-and-such a thing.
I won't let you do this. I won't let you do that."
Either you have the freedom to do it or you don't.
She put herself out there, or her work was put out there,
when she was very young.
It was very hard to digest.
Everybody attacked her,
and then some people totally embraced her.
It must have been very confusing.
But she stayed with her program, and she's still on her program,
and, to me, that's a huge inspiration.
It's not always about being appreciated and liked.
Sometimes it's being about, you know, about being reviled
and, um, criticized.
But it's that activity that makes the art important.
And I think she's shown extreme courage and, um...
strength in doing her work. So, to me, that's inspirational.
♪ (JAZZ MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
CARRIE MAE WEEMS: When I came to New York
in the 60s, I was very young.
I was moving between San Francisco and New York.
And I discovered the Studio Museum fairly early.
Everything happened there. It was like-- It was a--
It was a focal point for anybody that was interested in culture.
And so I became, sort of, instantly a part
of that group and wanted to be
a part of that-- that group of-- of intellectuals
and artists asking questions
about the moment in which we lived.
Shortly after leaving Yale, I was accepted to become
the artist in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem,
which came as a great shock to me.
Uh, principally because it's one of the most desired
artist in residencies in the world.
There's a stamp of approval that comes
from having the artist in residency
at the Studio Museum.
For Black art to thrive, it's always required spaces,
fellowship, community.
The Studio Museum has provided that
when really no other institution did.
JORDAN: Knowing all the people
who had come through the Studio Museum
in Harlem program,
being a part of that space,
that is clearly-- There's magic that must exist there.
Uh, knowing what that magic was,
was something I wanted to be a part of.
I knew that that was a moment of real,
potential change in my life.
♪ (QUIET MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
JORDAN: This is a painting that I am working on currently.
I spend time looking at the image and really trying
to parse out from it an emotion or sense of feeling
that I think is going to be the aura of the painting as a whole.
I'm pulling colors that I think are most vibrant
or most important that I want to make sure
that I include in the painting.
As it comes to life, I get really excited.
I always start with their faces and their eyes.
Um, it's an opportunity to really connect with them.
And then I can make everything else happen
once I've done that.
BERNARD: I mean, what can I say about Jordan?
She's amazing.
You know, she is working in the tradition
of African American portraiture.
You know, in a realist tradition.
But she's bringing to it her own unique perspective
as a woman and, I think, as a young person also,
depicting young people today in their everyday realities
in-- in their everyday lives.
JORDAN: I made the decision
to explicitly represent Black men and boys,
in an effort to push against the narratives
that I felt were kind of dominating
the public sphere at that time.
And my, um, initial decision in representing them nude
was featuring Black men, um, centered in their homes,
trying to capture them in their most vulnerable
and intimate spaces.
♪ (FUNKY MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
JORDAN: I wanted to treat the Black body
with, um, as much care and attention as possible.
When I started to decide
that I wanted to make these paintings,
the scale was really important.
I wanted them to feel like they could step out of the canvas
and be participants in our day-to-day lives.
♪ (FUNKY MUSIC CONTINUES) ♪
JORDAN: I also wanted them to feel like they're pushing
against the confines of the canvas itself.
When I was a resident at the Studio Museum in Harlem,
I had the opportunity to have a studio visit with Thelma.
And she came into my studio and she, uh, made a comment
that my work reminded her of landscape painting.
And I remember thinking that that felt very far fetched
and-- and distant from what it was
that I was identifying around this work.
It was like, "I'm a portrait painter,"
was probably how I was, um, recognizing myself.
And the fact that she said landscape
really resonated over time,
specifically thinking about the landscape
in the full breadth of the environment that we occupy,
and the spaces that we move throughout.
I look at my body of work and I see
a scrapbook of my life,
that there are various moments in time
where I've been somewhere and met someone
and then they've been invited to participate in my practice.
Being at the Studio Museum in Harlem brought me home.
All the resources within that institution
would be at my fingertips,
and the prospect of that I knew was immense.
There's an oasis for me there,
and a place to always go back to.
There is a real community of people who care about me,
still, and are invested in me.
And that investment can take you, you know,
beyond anything you ever imagine,
when other people believe in you from the beginning.
SARAH: The Studio Museum has created
this extraordinary program, called
the Artist in Residency Program.
It gives artists studio space, time, a community
an exhibition of their work at the end.
Mentorship along the way.
From that, we have some of our--
What you might call "art stars" today.
KERRY: I was an artist in residence
at Studio Museum in 1985.
You can understand from experience,
the value of places like that
for creating what people understand to be community.
So it's the place where you can go
and if you wanna meet people who are in the art world,
you can only meet them at The Studio Museum.
That matters.
I mean, it matters that there's a place you can go and do that.
And it mattered, that there was a place
that was run by Black folks, that was owned by Black folks
in which a whole lot of people
who came through there were all Black folks.
That all still-- That mattered too... (CHUCKLES)
you know, it mattered.
The Studio Museum had always been a beacon.
It was one of the places that appreciated and showcased
our work at a very, very early point
in the conversation.
And I was very honored to be invited to New York City
as a Studio Museum in Harlem resident.
That's how I moved to New York City.
The people who funded the arts and who supported the arts,
some of them thought that what we were doing was laughable.
Why do you need a Black fine-arts museum?
You have MoMA, you have Met, you have the Guggenheim.
You know, why do-- why do you even need a museum?
So the fact that people were asking that question
was a clear evidence that we really did need that museum.
I am still at the Studio Museum. (LAUGHS)
I mean, assuming the Studio Museum is...
is still the focal point
of, uh, African American culture production
and artistic production in the country
if not... on the planet.
It is one of the most important institutions
that we-- that we have.
And what Thelma, uh, is doing there, um--
What she's done there.
Uh, the way she's led the organization
into the 21st century is absolutely extraordinary
and, uh, and really important.
♪ (PIANO MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
DAVID: I don't see The Studio Museum
as the only place for funneling
Black talent into the mainstream,
if there is such a thing as the mainstream.
I think it's one of the major places.
I think Black colleges and universities
still play an important role
in that kind of definition of who one becomes as an artist.
Without the work of historically Black colleges and universities,
we wouldn't have a repository of African American art
that we could draw from.
DAVID: The HBCUs have not been given
the credit that they are due.
When nobody else was out there championing in these artists,
HBCUs were there claiming them,
showcasing them, putting them up on the wall,
teaching about them.
RUJEKO HOCKLEY: When we think of Clark Atlanta,
when we think of Spelman,
when we think of Fisk University,
when we think of Howard,
these are all spaces in which Black artists and Black art
has flourished for, you know, hundreds of years.
They were the patrons of African American artists.
So that's why these institutions
now have some of the most important works
by those, uh, kind of important historical figures.
I think one of the most exciting things about
the progression of contemporary African American art
and the artists that are working today inheriting that tradition
is that they said, "Hey, you know what?
My artistic forebearers,
as it were, have paved the way for me
to make work of a whole different range of topics
in a whole different kind of way."
♪ (JAZZ MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
THEASTER GATES: Being a clay guy
isn't about a tea bowl or a tea pot.
It's about having a sense
that a thing that is under-fashioned...
lesser understood, unbuilt...
dirt, that with skill and a knowledge of form...
one could then take this stuff
and turn it into something useful.
And that the only limitation between dirt
becoming a useful form, or just dirt, is ability.
And so, this idea that we could be, uh, active participants
in the reshaping of nothingness
is super important to me.
And that the actors, the makers of the 60s and 70s,
were all too aware of the truth
of the complexity of nothingness.
♪ (MUSIC STOPS) ♪
When I was an undergrad studying ceramics,
I was studying all the greats.
There were, like, all these amazing makers.
None of them looked like me.
I, like, read and read
and found the story of Dave Drake.
And I just thought, "Finally, uh,
an individual in the history of American making
that I can root myself in."
And so I-- I remember trying to embody Dave.
SARAH: Dave Drake was one of the most proficient potters
in the United States at the time in which he was making his work.
And he was subversive with his practice.
He would inscribe, at a time when it was, you know, illegal
for a slave to know how to read,
he would inscribe messages on these pots
to declare his own mastery.
And he was a master. An artistic master.
David Drake was in Two Centuries of Black American Art.
And what it also reminds us is that
the arts were a way to exert power,
even in a moment of slavery, you know?
This is an artist who even defied what the term master meant.
He was a master at his craft.
Introducing Dave's story would mean there was a--
there was a name that people didn't know from the past.
And that by bringing him up, maybe it wouldn't mean
anything to anyone,
but I at least had a Black potter
that I could identify with.
It was the beginning of a kind of hopefulness within Blackness
that I could be myself in this craft
and know that there were some part of it that had a legacy.
When I was only making pots, when I was just working in clay,
I reached a point in the material
where they were other things I wanted to say
and-- and they couldn't be done through the material.
So I graduated, if you will, into using whatever.
So I went from being a potter to being a conceptualist.
It didn't matter what the material was, I was open.
But I needed the right material to tell the right story.
Here is one of the earliest civil rights tapestries.
It's basically, uh, um, fire hoses
that had been discontinued,
um, sewn together and framed.
And this body of work grew out of me
starting to have a conversation about
the history of protests and the use of the fire hose
in places like Selma and Birmingham.
Then there were moments where the material form--
the material world couldn't say certain things for me.
Then I was back to the first route,
which was the immaterial form,
the spiritual form.
And that's when voice became super important.
-Speech acts, choirs, music. -♪ (SINGERS VOCALIZING) ♪
(SINGING) ♪ Oh, I wanna Cross the ocean of illusion ♪
♪ (SINGERS VOCALIZING) ♪
THEASTER: Sound had its own material form.
Its own ability to transform space.
Its own ability to resurrect the soul
and that-- that there was something that I didn't want
to leave behind in the story of my people...
that I felt music could do
in a way that some of these objects couldn't.
He sings.
And to a certain extent, he preaches.
He had that whole vernacular
of understanding the definition of what Black culture is about.
Here's an artist who studied ceramics,
but also studied urban planning.
So utilizing his artwork to really expand...
expand modes of how one produces,
how art could spearhead economic vitalization.
Theaster Gates is-- is one of the beacons
of this kind of change.
He has done this through The Rebuild Foundation,
with his actual spaces.
He has done this through the creation
of the Black Artist Retreat.
He's done it through his own practice,
his own art making practice,
and he has done it through the fellowship
that he offers and provides to other artists.
Going to a Black artist, uh, retreat in Chicago
was the first time I was ever able to meet
my contemporaries.
Um, because I didn't live in New York,
so I wasn't going to openings.
And it was a magnificent experience.
It was, um...
I mean, I think we all left there changed and invigorated,
and we all support each other.
You can get people involved in art on many, many levels,
knowing that art plays a significant role
in the wholeness of life, not just one aspect of it.
You don't have to go to the museum to see it.
You can be part of it in your own community.
He has really revolutionized the whole concept of art
more than any other artist I know.
(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
Are you a artist?
Yes, I'm the artist who made these pictures.
You can see, of course, that I was greatly influenced
by Romare Bearden.
Enamored by his work.
-I wanted to integrate the painting... -VIEWER: Mm-hmm.
...and make the painting primary.
♪ (PIANO MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
DAVID: I devoted my life to teaching,
through collecting, through curating.
But I saw the need to participate
in the cultural awareness,
helping to revise and redefine American art.
In my opinion, David Driskell's presence in the art world
is-- is the significance of him sending the elevator back down.
He was a trailblazer for-- for all of us.
And when there were no Black voices
in the art world,
um, for him to assert himself in the way that he did,
helped move us forward, um, during a time when we were
still fighting for space in museums and, um,
and in galleries.
You know, traditionally, there was a moment
when, you know, there were not many images or representations
of African Americans in paintings, in the visual arts,
in our collective visual culture.
And now, thanks to Two Centuries of Black Art,
the world was given these amazing portrayals
and images about Black culture.
And they became seared in the collective imagination.
And I think we-- we're part of a continued renaissance.
It's been happening.
What I'm most excited about is...
do we have the capacity to be great makers
in the absence of light?
And if Blackness has something to do
with the absence of light...
does Black art mean that sometimes I'm making
when no one is looking?
And for the most part,
that has been the truth of our lives.
Is there a light? Yes.
But until we own the light, I'm not happy.
Until we're in our own houses
of exhibition, of discovery, of research.
Until we've figured out a way to be masters of the world,
then I'd rather work in darkness.
I'd rather work in darkness, because at least I know
that I'm working.
That I'm-- That-- I don't want to work
only when the light comes on.
And my-- my fear,
is that we're being trained and conditioned
to only make if there is a light.
And that makes us co-dependent upon a thing
that we don't control.
Are you willing to make in the absence of light?
There has been an awakening, an awareness.
But that's enlightenment
through education, through desire...
to want, to know, to improve.
And I think a lot of that's going on.
On the other hand, in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,
"We haven't reached the promised land.
We've got a long way to go."
♪ (JAZZ MUSIC FADES) ♪
♪ (RHYTHMIC MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
♪ (MUSIC CONCLUDES) ♪