Black Art: In the Absence of Light (2021) - full transcript

The black artist in America has had

to put up with a great deal.

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

a 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, 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 LA as a bicentennial exhibition

and it drew overflow crowds.

1976 doesn't seem like that long ago,

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 said, "Well, we've never heard

of these."

Well, of course not,

there's no publication.

There's no exhibition.

What David did was he said:

"This is black art. It matters."

"And it's been going on for 200 years,

deal with it."

BLACK ART

IN THE ABSENCE OF LIGHT

Mr. Driskell, you take 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.

Even though this has happened

throughout the years,

with critical acclaim,

historical analysis, et cetera,

the black artist has not attempted

to set himself apart.

He is trying to be part and parcel

of the main stream.

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 majority culture

and because an exhibition of this

nature gets his work before the public.

Had this exhibition not

being organized,

many of the artists who are shown

here never would have been seen.

The show opens in the Los Angeles

County Museum of Art.

There was a lot of resistance,

even at that museum.

There was 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.

I guess it was a teaching moment

for them. At the same time,

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.

It really gave us this enormous sense

of the legacy of African-Americans.

I would have been 21 years old in '76.

And I saw that show.

The scope of the show, the amount

of work that was available

that you'd 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.

People from all over coming for that

opening. 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.

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, Lewis Jones,

Selma Burke, Richmond Barthe,

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.

These were images that I saw

before I could really say the names.

They were just sort of imprinted in

me.

And there was definitely a sense

of communication education

I was getting from those images

because you have to remember

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 nuanced,

idiosyncratic, abstract imagery.

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. It's a beautiful thing.

That's what this book

and this exhibition

and what David Driskell

has done represents for me.

I grew up in a home that had the work

of Charles White,

Hale Woodruff, Faith Ringgold,

Elizabeth Catlett.

Those were works that were around my

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.

When I was in junior high school,

I got a summer scholarship

to take a drawing class

at the Otis Art Institute.

The 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 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 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 a work

that he had made.

You train yourself to a certain way

of seeing form and understanding form

by copying what somebody else did.

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 made work

it ought to be about something,

and it ought to be about something

that matters

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 to do

with the history of black people.

That's what I set myself to do,

to make pictures

that had historical relevance

in terms of the story,

the narratives told,

but also because they

had a relationship to the way

in which the narrative of painting

as an activity developed over time.

I think that Kerry James Marshall

has all but redefined

the whole concept

of what black art is about.

I will 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.

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

has 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 had to make a collage and then

to bring that collage back again

the next week and to have it changed

and then to bring it again

and change it again,

so that you never really

became too attached

to not make everything you do seem

so precious

that it can't be transformed,

modified or improved.

I was very interested

in non-Western philosophies

and the spiritualism

and the images that they used.

I had seen a Black Girl's Window

before.

It was certainly an image

that was in the back of my mind.

When I look back at that work,

it certainly has a relationship

to a painting I did in 1980

that was really transformative for me

and set me on the path to doing

the work that I'm doing now.

And I made a painting called

The Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow

of His Former Self,

which is a black figure

against a black ground.

It was the first time I had used this

simplified, reductive representation

of a black figure.

And so that painting was 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 l

aid 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 a 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 gray scale.

You take black, you add white to it

you can create a gray scale

and then you can actually

start doing modeling with values.

Black is not the absence of color.

Black is a particular kinds of color.

If I went to the paint store,

and I bought black paint,

I could buy three different variations

of black paint.

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.

They're seven. Every one of these

tones is on the later figures.

Every one of these colors is on

there.

They all look the same, but when you

stack them on top of each other,

the variations start

to become more pronounced.

I can end up with six, seven, eight,

or nine different colors

that are all made from black.

That means I have a pallet that's as

complex and as broad in its range

as any other color

that's on the spectrum.

I think in general, the paintings

have 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 that having that

extreme color, that kind of black,

is amazingly beautiful.

There's a lot of overlap in terms

of the structure

between the way artists handle color

and the way musicians handle color

and note and tone and all of that.

Because you use the same kind

of language.

It's tone, it's texture, it's color,

it's intensity.

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

because he's looking

at every aspect of our being.

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, yet 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 shocking. For all

of the desires of the curators,

they are missing the mark.

Mr Hoving, what do you think

of the exhibit?

-Well, I personally like it.

-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 or a large area

of New York City over a period

of about 70 years.

Some people, especially some Harlem

citizens have criticized the exhibition.

They've said, it's not art.

It's all photography.

They've said that the Harlem people,

Harlem born people

were not intimately involved.

They've said it's too slick

and that it lacks sensitivity.

I know some people have said that.

On the other hand there've been

others that have been

on the advisory committee

and working for many months

who said that they thought

it was moving

and they thought it was powerful

where it should be powerful

and soft and lyrical

where it should be.

These are diametrically opposed

opinions,

we're going to get a lot of that.

And 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.

With one exception and that exception

is that they had 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.

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 a chance

to bridge the gap

to a certain extent

between what I thought the Met

should have been doing from day one.

People like Romare Bearden,

Benny Andrews were out protesting

as well as people from the community

because it was not reflective

of Harlem.

Why are museums so resistant

to opening their doors

to artists of color and particularly

African-American artists?

For the first time perhaps ever I

think

people really started 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.

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.

I met Faith Ringgold when I was

in graduate school at Syracuse.

What I heard was this, that she had

gone to the Studio Museum in Harlem

and tried to get a show.

And Studio Museum did not give her

a show.

For whatever reason, there weren't

a lot of women back in those days

who were getting solo exhibitions

at the museum.

And she had all these big paintings

she couldn't get shown in New York.

And so she started doing

these 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 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 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.

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.

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 mind scapes.

What we mean by mind scape?

All internalized thinking and feeling.

I started painting very, very young.

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 color,

the dip in paint and images come out

the other end on the canvas.

That kind of thrilled me seeing that

and that kind of challenged me

about the whole idea of painting,

the mystique and the magic of it.

I was drawing all the time,

constantly drawing.

How I learned to draw I can't

imagine,

because I could draw almost anything

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.

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 legacy that they've left

is unbelievable.

They were very special people.

They weren't just artists,

these were the mentors

of the future of American society.

Spiral began

in Romare Bearden 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 there should be a group

of black artists who should go

to the March on Washington.

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.

When they got together,

they really discovered

that they had an enormous

amount to talk about.

There was Hale Woodruff,

Charles Alston, Richard Mayhew,

Romare Bearden.

Emma Amos was the only woman

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 him to join?

Yes, I did.

-What he did is critic your work.

He never responded to the questions.

He basically said: "You need to go back

to the drawing board."

The final line was something like:

"In time, your work will find

its own friends."

There you go.

I didn't ask them for a critique. I had

all the credentials they had and more.

The fact that Norman Lewis is part

of it 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?

The fact that Norman Lewis is asking

the question for me is interesting

because if you teach the history

of modernism,

you have to teach

about Norman 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 in Spiral.

He was about spiritual painting,

not painting on the canvas.

You're inside the canvas. You're inside

of the painting, painting out.

When I met this group,

there wasn't just artists.

There was composers and writers

and that was fantastic.

Reginald Gammon was

a graphic designer.

He taught Romare Bearden

how to do paste-ups,

cut out the right 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

"this is what you should

continue to do".

So he took off in that direction.

That was the beginning

of the whole collage development.

The story that I've heard is that Romy

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,

Norman Lewis, Emma Amos,

Mayhew,

and he said none of them

were really into it.

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.

Romy continued to work on his

collages

and one of the artists from Spiral

came and saw the work and said:

"You know what?"

It was Reginald Gammon.

"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 really

was a milestone for him.

I started working on this piece

last week

and wasn't sure as to where

I was going to take it.

Bearden was the main inspiration

for my collage work

and I did a piece in the 70s

after he came to visit me at Fisk.

And I called it Homage to Bearden.

And I exhibited it

in New York in 1980.

He came to the exhibition

and he saw it and he said:

"I'm taken with the notion that

you like what I do well enough"

"to kind of celebrate it,"

"but what you're doing there

is not David, it is more of Romy."

And he went over to another piece

that I had done

and which I had torn the pieces.

He cut his out a lot.

I had torn to pieces and he said:

"You're using collage there

and that's you."

He said: "That's your voice."

And only a friend would tell you that.

Hilton Kramer, 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.

In many cases, these persons

are not familiar

with what we might refer

to as the black experience.

They don't know what it's like

to suffer injustices

or what it's like to live

in the poverty

that many of these artists

experienced.

Consequently, they have no real

sensitivity, no real feel

for what is has taken for these artists

to achieve what they achieved.

I got to throw out props

to David Driskell at this moment

because he got all sorts of flack

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.

I'm looking at African-American art

historically, in a more complex way.

And he fought real resistance

on the parts of institutions to say:

"There is something else

that we can show."

"There's 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 or black historians

on television talking about black art

and said: "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:

"Who is Hilton Kramer?"

It wasn't an exhibition that was

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 200 years up until that time.

The selection process

was not an easy one.

First of all, you realize that you're

going to be subjecting yourself

to criticism because people

are going to say:

"Why'd you leave such

and such a person out?"

You have to accept that

when a curator does an exhibition,

it's going to 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

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,

artists like Joshua

Johnston from Baltimore

in the late 1700s or early 1800s.

The assumption was that 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:

"He's painting within the boundaries

of the Hudson River School tradition."

Edward Mitchell Bannister

a little later and they said:

"Well, he's very much like the Barbizon

painters out of France."

Those artists from the past

really influenced my work.

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.

I'm an artist, a black artist,

African-American artist

and I'm an artist just in general.

I wanted to go to college and play

baseball, I wanted to play ball.

Then I realized that that was a dream

and I went back towards

where my mother guided me

and I ended up going to art school.

Went to art school thinking I was going

to study something like graphic design

and then I heard a lecture

from an artist

and I remember hearing

about the artists talking about his work

and he was having so much fun

that I said:

"No, I need to make art,

make objects."

And then I just went full throttle

towards that.

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

close to 500 sets of piano keys

and I didn't know

what I was going to do with them,

but I remember bringing them into the

studio and dropping them on the floor

and right then and there

that was the piece.

The piano keys basically turned

into the ocean

and I was thinking about the

connections between the oceans.

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 in sea

to the 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

during the Middle Passage.

And the figure itself was like a bust,

that is 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 bits 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, represents

the wonder and joy of an artist.

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.

I have to tune out everybody,

everyone.

Sometimes it's in the middle

of the night.

It's probably around midnight.

I kind of come in here when I can

actually hear nothing moving around.

I just want to create beauty.

All painting is about light.

The obsession with light is at once

visual, religious and erotic.

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

stands in as a representative

of someone that you love,

a landscape that you like...

It's like alchemy.

This week the official portraits

of former President Barack Obama

and his wife, Michelle were revealed.

To be the first African-American

painter to paint

the first African-American president

of the United States

is absolutely overwhelming.

I think his portrait of Obama

in the National Portrait Gallery

is both beautiful

and it's a challenge.

What I always struck by whenever

I saw his portraits

was the degree to which they

challenged our conventional views

of power and privilege.

There's something about that

portrait which is really rich,

full and exciting in a way that none of

the other portraits of presidents are.

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 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 issues

that we were trying to negotiate.

I tried to negotiate less gray hair,

I tried to negotiate smaller ears.

Struck out on that as well.

I showed up in 2016 while

he was still in the oval office,

incredibly nervous 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 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 as a form,

but rather I would be looking at him

as a man,

his physical presence in the world.

The first thing I did when I found out

that I was chosen

was go online and look at the millions

of images of Michelle

and the kind of person that

she presented to the world.

And then I wanted 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.

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

that I can pay back my school loans.

Becoming an artist is not empirical,

so it's not about hard work.

You have to put the work in, but that

doesn't mean you're going to make it.

And then the breakthrough comes

and you're like,

"Yeah, that's who I am.

This is who I am."

With that commission, Amy literally

inspired by the person,

Michelle Obama, creates this image,

which is not only deeply

Michelle Obama.

Her whole gesture,

the beautiful fashion.

She created such an incredible image

of a powerful, beautiful black woman.

It's become an international symbol,

and that shows the power

of an image.

Here's part of what the former

first lady, Michelle Obama said

at the unveiling at the unveiling

of her portrait. Take a listen.

I'm also thinking about all

of the young people,

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.

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'd been archived

in this institution

and it was a woman...

For her to walk away with that sense

of being is really important.

I see myself as an American realist,

which maybe some people

would disagree with.

My artistic process, the emphasis of it

is really my life.

I think the most interesting work

that is being made

has an autobiographical aspect 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

are just black people being black.

There's something which people

have written about

in an 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.

She's depicting or representing

in some way the gaze

that the white dominant culture

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 confrontational.

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.

So this is my way of nodding my head

to that narrative

and empowering the image in a way.

I liked the paintings hung

a little lower for that reason

so when the viewer walks up,

it's a different conversation.

You're not looking up at it.

It's almost looking directly at you

and I think that creates

a different kind of sensation.

She gives us this image of a person.

And what's interesting is that

almost always,

they're not painted

in their actual skin tone.

They may be kind of charcoal

or bluish.

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'm 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 into

a real tension on her paintings.

I can just stand in front of one

of her paintings for hours.

I think a lot of galleries

are now picking up black artists

because there is this gold rush.

I say that it's because we're making

some of the best work

and the most relevant work.

I think there's absolutely kind

of something happening right now,

but I always really want to not kind of

make this moment seem so singular

and special because I think there

have always been black artists,

there have always been black curators,

black collectors.

They just perhaps have not been part

of the mainstream.

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 living artists.

African-Americans, we have

to tell our own story.

The work is amazing.

I'm definitely not just a collector.

I love being a disrupter.

I love activism.

Coming from the Bronx

and coming into money very early

I got the bug

and then what I did was I started

going around to local galleries.

Most of the galleries

used to not take me serious.

Baggy pants, braids,

but I didn't let that deter me.

I admire Swizz Beats 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 Puff Daddy and Jay-Z

and Beyonce are collecting now.

It really elevates the game

and there are a lot of people who look

at what they're doing

and what is important to them.

Over the last few years,

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 Gordon's legacy

for the next generation

to have access to it.

The Dean Collection started out

as this imaginary museum for my kids.

And then what happened was I started

posting artists on my Instagram

that people weren't familiar with

and then I started getting people

writing me back saying:

"Man, I appreciate you.

Thank you."

For what? Your work is great.

"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.

The Kaws piece and the Kehinde piece

were the two pieces

that 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.

This is from the Laying Down series.

The fact that a human's hand

did this...

It looked like he just did it yesterday.

I can't show this piece enough.

We put the Dean Collection museum

on our property

so the public can see the collection.

This is Hank Willis' ball

and we have artists 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 Beats,

Bernard Lumpkin and many amazing

African American collectors

that I've gotten to engage with

over the years

is that they have a joy, a verve

and enthusiasm for the work.

That really is affirming.

That really gives you confidence.

I think it's absolutely necessary

that black people with money buy

African American art.

It's important when they see Beyonce

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 imprinting

art is to be collected,

it is to be lived with,

it's part of a quality of life.

The collectors, the patrons

and 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

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.

But I'm also grateful when people

give museums, institutions funds

to bring that work

into public collections,

because that's the way that I,

as a young artist, got to see the work,

not in people's houses,

but in museums.

I think it's super important that black

collectors or any collectors

think about public institutions.

I go into an institution

and just absorb that place.

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 maintenance

to the chairman of the board.

It's often not what anyone says

specifically in conversations,

it's what they don't say that

give me some 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 pallet basically.

I usually have a notebook

and I just write down things

during the period of research.

It's things that I see that I want

to see again, objects, images

and from that I build the exhibition.

What you see on view is one thing,

but what people have in storage

can be entirely different.

It brings up questions, the public only

sees what is created for them.

And those kinds 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, but it's not what

they're putting out to the public.

Museums now understand that they

need to tell a counter narrative

about American life

and about black art.

They need to correct what stories

haven't been told

through their collecting practices,

through the displays,

through the exhibitions

that they've had.

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.

Belmont 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

masculinity 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 fusion.

There had been all of this talk about

a negative aspect of black lifestyle,

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 lure and loathing

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.

I think what a lot of people don't

remember or even folks in the art world

is that back in the early '90s it was

still very difficult to pull off a show

with African-American content

in 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.

That was an historical show.

It's a show that now has been in

hindsight considered highly historical

despite the reactions at the time.

There was a Lyle Ashton Harris

picture in the tutu,

which was incredibly disturbing

at the time and alluring at once.

It looked at the body as a sign

of strength,

it looked at masculinity as a sign

of performance,

it looked at femininity

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

by just 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 realize

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.

In a survey of major American museums

it was determined

that 85% 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% black.

If the person sitting at the table

in a curatorial meeting,

or the people sitting at that table

are all white,

you're going to have a problem,

a problem of interpretation,

in terms of trying to figure out what

you're doing right or wrong.

And most importantly, you're going

to have a problem in terms

of the work you're going to select.

If all of the critics writing are white,

the same problem exists.

Until the institutions become more

diverse and it's happening...

You'll be getting to see young,

brilliant curators of color

assume pretty important roles

in American museums.

But until it happens

in a widespread way,

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 going to change

as fast as it needs to.

I feel like it's important for us to own

our own culture as African-Americans,

because it's our culture and we hate

the way other people tell our story.

There's always flaws in it

because they didn't live it.

Most of 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 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.

There are more exhibitions featuring

women. Those are exhibitions.

They don't always translate

into acquisitions.

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 give some color

in those museums

to balance that scale.

So it is only a matter of time that

greatness will shine through.

We love heroes. We love celebrities.

We love the one.

It is just part of our culture.

It's our culture in music,

it's our culture in visual arts,

it's our political culture.

We like superheroes.

John Michel Basquiat emerges

in the art world in the early 1980s.

This was a moment where the art

world was kind of hungry

for something fresh, something

exciting, something different,

something youthful.

He's also doing work that really kind

of grabs that certain kind of notions

of the street and 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 got a lot of publicity from being

around the right people at that time.

The meteoric rise of his career

was unprecedented

in terms of black visual artists.

And this is also the moment when

many of these younger artists,

like Glenn Ligon, Lorna Simpson

and Kara Walker are in art school.

So by the time we get to the early

1990s when they explode,

I think that Basquiat's legacy and the

message he sends to the art world

is something that they are

the beneficiaries of.

I remember distinctly going

to the Whitney to see

a Kara Walker exhibition.

I was struck by several things.

She has such an incredible mastery

of that medium of the silhouettes

and she has that attentiveness

to her materials and representation

and a sense of space and design

and dramatic scenario.

The cutouts I started doing partly

as an antidote to painting.

Painting was too readily recognized,

too quick from the hand, too gestural,

too personality laden perhaps.

And I wanted to distance myself from

the idea that this was me talking,

but that it was kind of a masked

character talking

about masked characters.

Kara Walker is a crucible for the field

of African-American art.

She's a crucible for the field

of modernism.

I have an enormous amount of respect

for her willingness to go

into the 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 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.

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.

To pull on that history and to play upon

that history is something that she does

much to the chagrin

of the black community.

I'm not trying to drop a bomb

on the public necessarily.

But sometimes I think the work

does have that impact.

My approach initially was

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, anxieties.

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 want to support what artists

do. What do you want to 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 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 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

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 sailing us downriver.

I mean, those are phrase 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 find it incredibly entertaining

and black America will look at it

and almost cringe at the pain

that's being depicted 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 are about us.

But again,

we're not a monolith either.

And for moments where there were

enslaved Africans,

there were also free 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.

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."

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've 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 about being reviled

and criticized,

but it's that activity that makes

the art important.

I think she's shown extreme courage

and strength in doing her work.

So to me, that's inspirational.

When I came to New York in the '60s,

I was very young,

I was as moving between

San Francisco and New York

and I discovered

the Studio Museum fairly early.

Everything happened there.

It was a focal point for anybody

that was interested in culture.

And so I became instantly a part

of that group

and wanted to be a part of that

group 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

principally because it's one of the

most desired Artists-in-Residences

in the world.

There's a stamp of approval that comes

from having the Artist-in-Residence

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.

Knowing all the people who would

come through the Studio Museum

in Harlem program, being a part

of that space that is magic

and 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.

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 a 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.

It's an opportunity to really connect

with them

and then I can make everything

else happen once I've done that.

What can I say about Jordan?

She's amazing.

She is working in the tradition

of African-American portraiture

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

and in their everyday lives.

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 initial decision in representing

them nude was featuring black men

centered in their homes,

trying to capture them in their most

vulnerable and intimate spaces.

I wanted to treat the black body

with 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

I also wanted them to feel like they

were 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 said that my work

reminded her of landscape painting.

And I remember thinking that that

felt very farfetched and distant

from what it was that I was

identifying around this work.

"I am a portrait painter".

That's how I was 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 have been somewhere

and met someone and then they have

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 finger tips

and the prospect of that I knew

was immense.

There's an oasis for you there

and a place to always go back to.

There's a real community of people

who care about me still

and are invested in me.

And that investment can take you

beyond anything you ever imagined

when other people believe

in you from the beginning.

The Studio Museum has created

this extraordinary program

called the Artist-in-Residence

program.

It gives artists studio space, time,

a community,

and 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.

I was an Artist-in-Residence

at the Studio Museum in 1985.

You can understand from experience

the value of places like that

for creating what people understand

to be community.

It's the place where you can go

and if you want to meet people

who are in the art world, you can only

meet them at the Studio Museum.

That matters. 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

were all black folks.

That mattered too. 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.

Why do you even need a museum?

The fact that people were asking

that question was a clear evidence

that we really did need that museum.

I'm still with the Studio Museum.

The Studio Museum

is still the focal point

of African-American cultural

production

and artistic production in the country

if not on the planet.

It is one of the most important

institutions that we have

and what Thelma is doing there,

what she's done there,

the way she's led the organization

into the 21st century

is absolutely extraordinary

and really important.

I don't see the Studio Museum as the

only place for funneling black talent

into the mainstream if there's 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.

The HBCUs have not been given

the credit that they're due.

When nobody else was out there

championing these artists,

HBCUs were there, claiming them,

showcasing them,

putting them up on the wall,

teaching about them.

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 hundreds of years.

They were the patrons

of African-American artists.

That's why these institutions now have

some of the most important works

by those kinds 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've said:

"You know what? My artistic forebears

have paved the way for me"

"to make work of a whole different

range of topics"

"in a whole different kind of way."

Being a clay guy isn't about

a tea bowl

or a teapot.

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.

This idea that we could be active

participants in the reshaping

of nothingness

is super important to me.

The actors, the makers of the '60s

and '70s were all too aware

of the truth of the complexity

of nothingness.

When I was an undergrad

studying ceramics,

I was studying all the greats.

There were all these

amazing makers.

None of them looked like me.

I read and read and found the story

of Dave Drake.

I just thought: "Finally an individual

in the history of American making"

"that I could root myself in."

And so I remember trying

to embody Dave.

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

illegal for a slave to know how to read,

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.

It also reminds us is that the

arts were a way to exert power

even in a moment of slavery.

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 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 was 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

there were other things I wanted to say,

and they couldn't be done

through the material.

So I graduated, if you will,

into using whatever.

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's one of the earliest

civil rights tapestries.

It's basically fire hoses

that had been discontinued,

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 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.

Sound had its own material form.

Its own ability to transform space.

Its own ability to resurrect the

soul.

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 has 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 he's utilizing his artwork

to really expand

modes of how one produces,

how art could spearhead

economic vitalization.

Theaster Gates is one of the beacons

of this kind of change.

He's done this through the Rebuild

Foundation with his actual spaces.

He's done this through the creation

of the Black Artists Retreat.

He's done it through his own practice,

his own art making practice,

and he's done it through the fellowship

that he offers to other artists.

Going to a Black Artists Retreat

in Chicago was the first time

I was ever able to meet

my contemporaries

because I didn't live in New York,

so I wasn't going to openings.

It was a magnificent experience.

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.

-Are you an 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

and make the painting primary.

I devoted my life to teaching

through collecting, through curating.

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 a significance of him sending

the elevator back down.

He was a trailblazer for all of us.

When there were no black voices in

the art world for him to assert himself

in the way that he did helped

move us forward during a time

where we were still fighting for space

in museums and in galleries.

Traditionally there was a moment when

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 are 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.

If blackness has something to do

with the absence of light,

does black art mean that sometimes

I'm making when no one's 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 figure 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 don't want to work only

when the light comes on.

My fear is that we're being trained

and conditioned to only make

if there's a light and that makes us

codependent 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.

This film is dedicated to the memory

of David Driskell and Maurice Berger.