As the California African American Museum Celebrates 50 Years, Its Leader Looks Ahead

This week, the United States marks its 250th birthday, arguably no closer to agreeing on how that story should be told—or who gets to tell it. Under the second Trump administration, museums have become one of the clearest arenas for that struggle. These are places where America’s myth of exceptionalism collides with its lived reality: a contested memory of race, class, and political ambition. As the unfolding case of the Smithsonian attests, museum leaders occupy a pivotal position in American public life, balancing obligations to historical truth, institutional stakeholders, and the communities whose record they are entrusted to keep.  

Against this backdrop, the California African American Museum (CAAM) marks its 50th anniversary next year, offering a blueprint for how museums can hold fast to their mission, regardless of what gathers at their periphery. Chartered by the State of California in 1977, CAAM is widely considered the nation’s first state-supported museum devoted to African American art, history, and culture. Its permanent home in Exposition Park—a building designed by African American architects Jack Haywood and Vince Proby—opened in 1984 with “The Black Olympians, 1904–1984” (curated by Lonnie Bunch, decades before he would go on to lead the Smithsonian Institution).

Its programming suggests that a valuable historical record is one of constant complication. Over the past five decades, CAAM has explored Black Californians’ relationship to leisure and public space, reframed who settled the American frontier, and challenged the myth of California as a “free state” during the Gold Rush through contemporary responses to the state’s buried history of slavery. Today, visitors to CAAM will find “Free and Queer: Black Californian Roots of Gay Liberation” alongside a survey of Langston Hughes’s lesser-known travels in the American West, a show of work by Willie Birch, among more.

For a glimpse of the museum’s next 50 years, ARTnews spoke with Cameron Shaw, CAAM’s executive director since 2021. Shaw joined the institution in 2019 as deputy director and chief curator after leading the New Orleans arts nonprofit Pelican Bomb, working in research at David Zwirner, and building a career as a cultural critic—a résumé that reflects the breadth of expertise required to lead one of the nation’s most important Black cultural institutions. 

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and concision.

ARTnews: In a role like yours, how do you decide what your priorities are—especially when you’re responsible not just to artists, but to a broader community? 

Cameron Shaw: CAAM has a really clear mission, and our foremost guide is that mission. It’s been unchanged since 1977. We’re the first state-supported museum of African American art, history, and culture, and now we’re gearing up for our 50th anniversary next year. 

There’s this great photo from the ’80s of our founders at the ribbon-cutting for the building we’re still in today in Exposition Park, and I look at that picture all the time. They look beautiful, but it’s also a reminder to myself that we have to be as visionary in 2026 about what a Black institution can be as our founders were in 1977, when they believed this museum should exist. 

So that aspect of vision is always with me. At the same time, I have to be really strategic and pragmatic, and that’s about ensuring that our institution is sustainable and stable for future growth for the next 50 years. For me, that’s a balancing act: prioritizing artistic vision and creative experimentation alongside practical needs like renovating our facilities, restructuring our staffing, and creating funding pathways. 

I think I’m really good at cutting through the noise. I can assess the most pressing problem and solve it. Becoming a mother has definitely further sharpened that skill. I have less time and energy for nonsense. You’ve got to get to the problem and solve it. 

You’ve worked across a lot of different parts of the art world. What experiences or lessons are you carrying into this role? 

I’ve had the privilege of working in a lot of different environments and facets of the art world—museums, commercial galleries, journalism, nonprofit management—so I really know how to get things done. But I also understand different perspectives and how to balance different priorities. For me, the most important lesson has been translating theory into practice. It’s one thing to have a vision for what an institution can be; it’s entirely another to create the systems, cultivate the relationships, and do the work that allows that vision to function. That takes a great deal of knowledge, patience, and faith, frankly, to push through the challenges. And that’s especially true right now. 

How do you define your vision for the museum at this point in your tenure? 

I’m seven years into my tenure at CAAM, and it’s an interesting moment. Preparing for an anniversary is an incredible time because I’m really deep in our institutional history, our archives, and our collections, and I’m talking with staff and others about the moments that have really defined and shaped us. 
I’m excited to share some of that history right now, but it’s also got me thinking about how we want to share our hopes for the future and how we’re defining them. There are things I’m really excited to share, but I don’t think this is the moment to share them. 

How is the institution thinking about this milestone anniversary? 

We’re thinking a lot about the world that made us and the Los Angeles that made us. I’m from L.A. I moved away for 17 years, but coming back to CAAM is very much a homecoming. I’m also not that much younger than the institution, so there’s a way of mapping CAAM in the ’80s, ’90s, and 2000s, and then, of course, the watershed moment of 2020, which so transformed museums and our experience of the world. 

These are the kinds of things we’re thinking about right now: What does it mean to be a Black institution at these various moments in history? And what does it mean to be a Black institution right now in a city like Los Angeles, which is one of the most racially and culturally diverse places in the world—a place of cultural production of all kinds, increasingly an epicenter for visual arts production and museum-making, frankly, and a place where Black culture has thrived and been shared with the world in really particular ways? Thinking about where our institution sits within those larger histories is important. 

Did you go to CAAM as a child? 

I did. I came to CAAM as a kid and spent time in museums. But the thing I’m dreaming of, I haven’t exactly seen yet. 

What did those early experiences with art mean to you? 

It’s funny—I’ve been asked this before, and I feel like my first experiences with art were actually not in a museum. They were in my home. My parents were not art collectors in any traditional sense, or as we might define that in the art world, but they made things, found things, and put things together in ways that were beautiful and unique to them. 

They thought of the home as a space of gathering and belonging that was informed by aesthetics. So when I think about creating space, I think it’s informed by those ideas from my home: What does it mean to create space for people to gather, to be joyful, to be themselves, and to feel comfortable—but also to take in new and challenging aesthetic experiences? I was always making something. 

I’ve been thinking a great deal about what museums can be for future generations, and I think that comes very personally from having a child in this moment. I’m thinking about museums as spaces for children to feel safe, to see themselves, to grow, and to learn about their communities, but also about others. I’ve also been increasingly thinking about the museum as a space for play, and that’s where I’ll be devoting time and energy in the coming years: imagining what that means in the context of our museum. 

How do you define “play” in a museum?

It’s early to talk about it, but I’ve been thinking about play in terms of spontaneity, collaboration, and resilience—how play-based spaces help us imagine and build positive interaction, and how that could be part of museums. I’m really asking myself: What would that look like in a historically Black institution? What would it mean to create a culturally specific play space that gave Black and brown children room to be children, and to be children in proximity to art—or to think about art and play as integrated? 

In looking back through the museum’s history, what has struck you most?

So many things. Recently, I found out that we had the shovel from the groundbreaking. There’s that photograph I mentioned of our founders, and there’s another similar one where they’ve got the shovel in the ground. I didn’t realize we had the shovel. It’s those things that bring the history to life. 
I was also at Frieze, and there was a work by American Artist—we worked with them recently—that included a flyer from Octavia Butler’s archive about a talk she gave at CAAM. It mentioned the lecture series that the talk was part of. It was just a little flyer, but I hadn’t seen it before. It was one of those moments where I could go back and say to our collections manager, “I saw this work, and I need you to find this flyer and figure out what this lecture series was. I need to know what was going on at CAAM at that particular moment.” 

There are consistently those moments of discovery. And when I joined CAAM, there were people on staff who had been there 10, 15, 25 years, so I had the great pleasure early on of talking with a lot of people about the museum’s history. It feels like a full-circle moment, seven years later, to be getting ready for the 50th anniversary after encountering these pieces of knowledge in so many different ways. 

How does an exhibition like “Free and Queer” reflect the museum’s mission? 

“Free and Queer” presents California as a pioneering site of sustained Black-led struggles for LGBTQ equality, civil rights, and recognition. It’s an exhibition that directly addresses the intersectional nature of liberation struggles and the multiplicity of the Black experience. Those two truths are core to our mission of researching, collecting, preserving, and interpreting Black art, history, and culture. 

But as you pointed out, the exhibition also reveals a deeply Californian story, which is essential to our role as a state museum. I was actually watching a video yesterday that we’re getting ready to post, and our curator of that exhibition, Susan D. Anderson, says it best: “Black history is queer history, and queer history is Black history.” 

When we spotlight these under-told and underappreciated narratives, which have largely been excluded from the historical record. That’s how we ensure that the archives we build and the histories we preserve are as inclusive and nuanced as the communities we serve. 

How did 2020 change the museum, and what are you carrying forward from that period? 

I think that was a moment when many institutions started to think about what it meant to center Black voices, and people of color more broadly, but particularly Black voices. CAAM has been doing that work for over 40 years—coming up on 50 now—so I started thinking about what else we could model. 
For me, that looked like depth and breadth. It meant thinking about sustained ideas over time. It meant interconnectedness. We started thinking about our seasons as thematic. The last season we did was about home. Right now we’re in a season looking at the poetry of the everyday: What is the beauty and learning in our immediate communities, in the immediate world around us? How we spend our time, who we love: these small choices we make every day are actually what define the world we live in and the world we want to live in. 

Next season we’ll be looking further afield at the Black traveler and the Black radical imagination through travel. That’s literal travel, like an artist going to Europe, but also time travel, sort of an Afrofuturist idea of the cosmic traveler. 

As we plan toward 2030, we’re thinking about the different ways we can make connections and create context, as well as what different strategies of support look like for Black artists, curators, and scholars. That includes administrative structures and funding structures. How are we helping usher revolutionary ideas into the world through what we do as a museum? And how does that look different for a Black museum in particular? 

What are some of the ways CAAM is supporting artists right now? 

We launched a residency with support from the Mellon Foundation, and our first participating artist was Sage Ni’Ja Whitson. We recently closed their exhibition, “These Walking Glories”. Right now we’re working with Cauleen Smith as our current resident, and she’ll be presenting a project at the museum in 2028. That residency comes with significant financial support for an artist to pursue a project that might otherwise be impossible for them, and that takes time. It’s focused on California-based artists with research-based practices—work that doesn’t always have a clear outcome, but where development is part of the journey. 

What kinds of projects feel especially compelling to you in that context? 

I can tell you about Sage’s project. They traveled across the country to sites where Black trans people had been murdered or had died by suicide and performed a ceremony there to honor those people. Aspects of that work were then translated into the museum setting through ritual essences they had created at the sites, as well as photographs and other elements of the ceremony. With Cauleen’s work, one of the things we’ll be helping to do is produce a new film. There will be other aspects to what she presents at CAAM, but we’re also producing a film. 

Can you tell us more about CAAM’s more recent film program?

Something we’ve also been doing is supporting filmmakers. We have a small theater that we’ve transformed into a black box, and we’ve worked with a number of filmmakers to commission or premiere work in a museum setting. The work we’re doing with Cauleen continues that on a broader scale. 

I think the work we did with JJ Anderson is exemplary. Sometimes I Feel Like I’m Almost Home is a new film she created that we commissioned. JJ Anderson has been a friend of the museum for a decade, and as her practice grew and she became interested in what it meant to show film in a museum setting, we were able to come together and offer her that first opportunity. She traveled to her grandmother’s hometown, where much of her family still lives, and engaged in intergenerational conversations about healing trauma. The film she produced is incredible, and we were so proud to show it at CAAM. That’s an example of a Black woman filmmaker wanting to do something new, and if we can’t support that, then what are we doing here? It was a great honor to work with her. 

As the museum’s 50th anniversary intersects with the national semiquincentennial, how are you thinking about CAAM’s role? 

We don’t have an exhibition or program specifically named as a “250” program, and for me, Free and Queer is our answer to that. We were founded 50 years ago, and we’re still here. We navigate different administrations and political moments by keeping our focus on us: the scholarship, the stories, and the people that define us, and the people who have struggled and fought to create the progress they’ve made in this world—and the progress we hope to see in the future. 

Part of Black history is innovation in the face of oppression and a determination to create safe, inclusive, and joyful spaces for ourselves and for everyone. It’s often about making a way when there seems to be no way. For me, that’s the lesson we need right now. That’s the “250” lesson: We’re still here. 

There’s a broader question museums are being asked right now: Is art political? Is there a place for politics in art? 

It comes back to our founding. CAAM came out of a Black museum movement happening across the country, but CAAM in particular was the result of a multi-year, sustained campaign by our founders. They were politicians, artists, and arts advocates working together. For them, creating the space was civic work. It was, by its very nature, political work. And I think that’s the torch we continue to carry.