News & Events

The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco has acquired 62 works by African American artists from the South, which will be added to the museums’ permanent collection of American art this spring, officials announced. A visual record of the challenges and resilience of the African American community in the southern United States, this is the first collection of its kind acquired by the city’s largest public arts institution, and is one of the largest collections of African American artwork in the country.

Max Hollein, Director and CEO of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, announced today that 62 works by contemporary African American artists from the Southern United States have been acquired by the Museums from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation in Atlanta. This major acquisition from the Foundation’s William S. Arnett Collection was achieved through a purchase by the Fine Arts Museums and a gift from the Foundation.

“The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco house one of the nation’s greatest 350-year survey collections of American art, with the renowned Rockefeller Collection as its cornerstone,” says Hollein. “This groundbreaking acquisition of contemporary art adds an integral—and exceptional—chapter to our signature collection of American art.”

Ronald Lockett, whose emotionally raw and politically trenchant paintings and assemblages are featured in “Fever Within: The Art of Ronald Lockett” at the American Folk Art Museum, did not have a lot going for him. Poor, young, black and with only a high school degree, he lived his whole life (1965-1998) in a working class suburb in Bessemer, Ala., and he died at 32 from AIDS-related pneumonia. But he had some things in his favor: talent, drive and a powerful role model residing two doors down the street in the form of an older cousin, Thornton Dial (1928-2016), one of the late 20th century’s most celebrated self-taught artists.

A seated nude of ambiguous gender, fashioned from strips of rusted tin, floats in an expanse of the same distressed metal. Titled Fever Within, this image was made by Ronald Lockett (1965–1998) in 1995, three years before his death from AIDS-related causes. Born into a close-knit extended family in the declining industrial city of Bessemer, Alabama, Lockett was one of a network of local artists that included his cousin and mentor, Thornton Dial (1928–2016), and his friend Lonnie Holley. Without formal training (in Lockett’s case, deliberately so) and working largely with found materials, Lockett, Dial, Holley and peers like Joe Minter took their visual language from traditional black Southern vernacular art forms like the scrap quilt and the yard show but adapted it to speak of personal philosophies, social issues and the African-American experience.

It has been said that when gods fall, the earth shakes. Yesterday night, the news broke that the Alabama-based African-American artist Thornton Dial had died on Monday at his home in McCalla, just southeast of Birmingham, at the age of 87. A master of what label-loving art historians and merchants might refer to as post-Cubist assemblage or postmodern appropriation, not to mention of his own variety of unaffected expressionism and a fluid style of draftsmanship that was both lyrical and semi-abstract, Dial was an artist whose ideas and creations fit into all and none of those establishment-dictated categories at the same time. As with the most innovative, most remarkable self-taught artists of any time or place, both his worldview and the evidence of his artistic achievement were and remain unique and, ultimately, unclassifiable.

The painter Norman Lewis rarely complained in public about the singular struggles of being a black artist in America. But in 1979, dying of cancer, he made a prediction to his family. “He said to us, ‘I think it’s going to take about 30 years, maybe 40, before people stop caring whether I’m black and just pay attention to the work,’ ” Lewis’s daughter, Tarin Fuller, recalled recently.