Representing African American Art

This January, the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s exhibition Represent: 200 Years of African American Art drew 10,000 visitors in just its first few weeks. Co-curated by Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, an associate professor of history of art, the exhibition highlights selections from the museum’s entire collection of African American art, including early fine and decorative arts and outsider art by those with no formal training. 

“I really wanted to show the larger sweep of African American art history and the way that black art production has always been integral and integrated into the history of American art,” says Shaw. The exhibition complements a catalogue, edited by Shaw, that examines the breadth of the PMA’s African American collection. While the catalogue was long-planned as a project of its own, museum director Timothy Rub decided an exhibition should accompany its publication after beginning his tenure at the PMA in 2009. Shaw says, “I don’t know that we all anticipated what a great success it would be, and how much desire was pent up for the exhibition.” 

In both the catalogue and exhibit, Shaw is trying to diversify and widen people’s experience of art history: “A lot of the work I do is for an academic audience, but academic writing is not often all that pleasurable for non-academics.” 

She also gives the works historical context. Near the beginning of the exhibition are silhouettes made by Moses Williams, who was the slave of Charles Willson Peale, Philadelphia’s foremost artist in the early 1800s. Williams was raised as part of Peale’s family and was freed when he was 27 (the law required slaves to be freed at 28). “Early African American art was produced alongside but less visibly than work by European descendants,” says Shaw.

Given this larger context, she addresses the usefulness of studying artists by race or gender or other identity groups today. “Does it make sense in this increasingly pluralistic world to do these kinds of exhibitions?” she asks. “Artists have every right to be identified however they decide. But it doesn’t change who they are when people look at them from the outside.” The PMA’s visitor services are frequently asked for the location of artworks by African Americans and distribute a handout identifying them throughout the museum to viewers that request one. “People don’t know many of these artists’ names, so they cannot always recognize them on their own,” says Shaw. “Until we give equal time to artists of African descent, so that one can say Jackson Pollock and Norman Lewis at the same time, and people know Norman Lewis is a black abstract expressionist, doing these sorts of exhibitions is important.”

Looking at the success of the Represent exhibition so far, Shaw says, “One of the misconceptions is that only black people are interested in seeing this work. Museum-goers who are interested in going and seeing art are interested in going and seeing art. Because some of them may see this and say, I didn’t know this existed. That’s great.”

Represent: 200 Years of African American Art runs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art through April 5.