Up until the 1950s, many American museums, particularly in the South, held separate days for Black people to see art and artifacts. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC), whose members included artists Faith Ringgold and Romare Bearden, protested the exclusion of Black artists and Black curators in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art. It wasn’t until the latter part of the 1970s that Black artists started to have a significant presence in museum programming, and only in the last decade has Black art seen widespread representation in museum collections.
Now, at the end of this century’s quarter mark, museums are increasingly exhibiting comprehensive and nuanced shows of Black art that introduce important concepts like Negritude, Black Power, and Afrofuturism and acknowledge and articulate the complexities of Black life. This Black History Month, cultural institutions across the country have mounted shows examining how Black artists see nature, technology, and humanity. Here are ten of them.
