Black American Portraits, on view at The Spelman College Museum of Fine Art through June 30, constitutes one of the most intellectually ambitious and wide-ranging exhibitions of images of Black Americans in perhaps a generation.
Comprising 113 works in its current installation, including one new commissioned work, this group exhibition encompasses over 200 years of visual work mostly by Black artists across two-dimensional, three-dimensional and time-based media.
Black American Portraits originated at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and was co-curated at that institution by Christine Y. Kim, previously of the Studio Museum in Harlem, and Liz Andrews, who is now the Spelman museum’s executive director.
In contrast to the Los Angeles museum’s quasi salon-style installation, in which works were hung densely in roughly chronological order, the Spelman exhibition is hung smartly (and to better effect) in tight thematic and aesthetic groupings.
For example, a collection of family portraits includes five delicately juxtaposed works: Consuelo Kanaga’s black-and-white photograph, She Is a Tree of Life to Them (1950), presents two small children cast in the shadow of a mother figure who stands like a rigid arrow anchoring the family to the ground while remaining staunchly vertical in a gesture of both protection and tense vigilance.
By contrast, the two young children and father figure in Laura Aguilar’s photo diptych Clothed/Unclothed #34 (1994) are all softness and fleshiness and graceful ease. The grouping is rounded out by an Elizabeth Catlett lithograph that resembles a Byzantine Madonna, a theatrical collaborative lithograph of a couple by Kara Walker and Deborah Willis’ textile family scrapbook Living Room Picture Stories (1994).
Such deft curatorial hopscotching is also on display in a trio of color photographs by Renee Cox, Genevieve Gaignard and Isaac Julien. All three vividly reimagine antebellum scenes that move Black subjects to the center of the early American story or place Black subjects where they have not historically been depicted.
Julien’s Serenade (Lessons of the Hour) (2019) presents a stoic Frederick Douglass with two companions in pristine historical garb. Gaignard’s Trailblazer (A Dream Deferred) (2017) deploys Gaignard’s usual tools of dress-up and self-styling to offer an anachronistic meditation on race and place.
And Cox’s stunning The Signing (2017) reconfigures the signing of the Declaration of Independence with an all-Black assembly of delegates in a carnivalesque riot of color and pomp. Cox is cast here as George Washington, dressed in bright purple with thigh-high leather boots, standing above a cast of revolutionaries erupting as if from behind the wood paneling of history into an Afrofuturistic moment outside of time.
Other groupings in the exhibition consider sexuality and gender, political achievements, the Harlem Renaissance, political resistance and simply “Black joy.” These thematic groupings make visible the common resources of human thriving and human longings across time and place.
The organization of the works receives a further boost from the architecture of the museum itself. The museum’s numerous alcoves, passageways and cul-de-sacs not only serve as natural containers for each of the curators’ ideas, they reward works that demand a more intimate viewing. The delicate archival images of Lorna Simpson come to mind here, as does Tourmaline’s gripping self-portrait, equal parts exposure and defiance.
Although the Spelman installation of Black American Portraits represents only a portion of the works from Los Angeles museum (113 out of 140 works), Spelman does include four works that were not on view there. These include two small Augusta Savage sculptures in terracotta and plaster; an ethereal and haunting photograph of Spelman alumna Stacey Abrams by Atlanta photographer Sheila Pree Bright; and a new, monumental commissioned painting by Spelman alumna Calida Rawles, Thy Name We Praise (2023).
Black American Portraits is varied and sprawling enough that no two viewers are likely to have the same list of favorites. Standout pieces for me included the 1960s, mod-era fashion photography of Kwame Brathwaite; Clifford Prince King’s lyrical study of Black men forming an intimate connection, Safe Space (2020); and Umar Rashid’s tiny gem of a drawing Yolanda, Lady of Yerba Buena (2015), a stately, federalist-style lady bedecked with doorknocker earrings in the hip-hop mode.
Although the exhibition adroitly spans two and a quarter centuries of visual production, the Spelman installation contains only one video work: Nicole Miller’s The Conductor (2009). I would have liked to see more new media work bringing us right up the current moment in digital and video art, perhaps with entries by artists such as Cauleen Smith, Jacolby Satterwhite, Nettrice Gaskins or even the more experimental works of Renee Cox.
Black American Portraits began as a counterweight to the pervasive news images of Black pain and destruction, particularly images of Trayvon Martin. Early in the curatorial process, however, the murder of George Floyd and the massive protests that followed seemed to demand an even larger mission: to rectify the lack of Black images in the Los Angeles museum’s collection. (Seventy of the 140 works in the show were acquired by the museum.) The current exhibition not only accomplishes that task, it creates a whole new benchmark for the exploration of Blackness and of portraiture across the American landscape.
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Cinqué Hicks is a Warhol grant-winning art critic and writer who has written for Public Art Review, Art in America, Artforum.com, Artvoices and other national and international publications. He has served as senior contributing editor of the International Review of African American Art and as interim editor-in-chief of Art Papers. He was the founding creative director of Atlanta Art Now and producer of its landmark volume, i.
