News & Events

The National Gallery of Art in Washington DC (NGA) has acquired 40 works by 21 African American artists from the non-profit organisation Souls Grown Deep Foundation, a move described as a “milestone” by the foundation president Maxwell Anderson. Souls Grown Deep Foundation is dedicated to documenting and promoting the work of African American artists from the US South. Anderson says that the purchase of numerous works by Black painters, quilters and sculptors is significant “because the NGA is not an encyclopaedic museum given to making acquisitions of multiple works at one time, tending more often to acquire single significant objects made at the apogee of a noted artist's career”.

The National Gallery of Art in Washington has announced the acquisition of 40 works from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, a nonprofit organization that for the last decade has dedicated itself to promoting the contributions of African-American artists from the South. The purchase adds the work of 21 Black painters, quilters and sculptors to the museum’s art collection.

The National Gallery of Art is pleased to announce a major acquisition of 40 works from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation by 21 African American artists from the southern United States. The acquisition is made possible through the generosity of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation in addition to funds from the Patrons’ Permanent Fund. Some highlights of this important acquisition are nine quilts by the artists of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, including Mary Lee Bendolph and Irene Williams; three paintings, three drawings, and one sculpture by Thornton Dial; works on paper by Nellie Mae Rowe, Henry Speller, Georgia Speller, and “Prophet” Royal Robertson; four sculpted heads by James “Son Ford” Thomas, which were featured in the National Gallery’s Outliers and American Vanguard Art exhibition (January 28–May 13, 2018); and three sculptures by Lonnie Holley.

At Alison Jacques Gallery there is an opportunity to see some 13 quilts made by three generations of women from Gee’s Bend, Alabama. This is the first European solo outing for the Gee’s Bend quilts, a selection of which were included in the recent exhibition ‘We Will Walk: Art and Resistance in the American South’ at Turner Contemporary, Margate. There have been several shows in the United States, the most important being ‘The Quilts of Gee’s Bend’, organised by the collector and entrepreneur William Arnett (1939–2020) for the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and travelling to a dozen other venues to great acclaim in 2002. They are for sale and have been sourced via the Souls Grown Deep Foundation set up by Arnett, as part of the foundation’s Collection Transfer Program that grants a five per cent resale royalty to the quilt-makers.

Since 2018, the Louvre Museum in Paris has allocated five percent of its €250 million (~$301 million) endowment to socially-responsible investments, including artisan and traditional craft, cultural tourism, and cultural heritage. It’s one example of how an institution with a sizable endowment — a pool of money whose principal is reinvested to yield an income — can grow its own assets while benefiting the greater good. In financial parlance, the practice is known as “impact investing”: making investments to generate positive social or environmental change, in addition to financial returns. And while some institutions like the Louvre are already doing so, a new guide released by Upstart Co-Lab, a think tank of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, argues that impact investing could be much more widespread in the US, where museums hold more than $40 billion in their combined endowments.

Loretta Pettway Bennett remembers well the moment everything changed for her tight-knit, rural community. The 20th century was drawing to a close. She was in her late 30s, living with her husband and sons on the site of an old cotton plantation on a deep bend in the Alabama River. Any spare time she could muster was spent stitching quilts alongside her grandmother, mother and aunt, to pile on beds or hang on walls to stop the damp river air from snaking in between the logs of their cabin walls.

Imagine if Black jazz and blues musicians from the South had been excluded from the world of music because they didn’t receive formal training in conservatories and lacked representation in the entertainment industry. What would this historical omission have meant for American culture? An omission not so different from this one has played out in the art world. There are 160 artists in the collection of Souls Grown Deep, the foundation which I serve as president. It supports the legacy of African American artists from the Southern United States. A few weeks ago, we launched the Resale Royalty Award Program (RRAP) to address the fact that, historically, many of these artists were bypassed by the art market, marginalized as a result of their race, gender, geography, and because they were “self-taught.”

The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation announced today that it will award $15 million to a range of nonprofit organizations working against systemic racism, part of a larger set of commitments that the foundation pledged this summer. The 15 recipient organizations include charities working across a broad swath of issues—from health to education to human rights—to advance the cause of racial justice, fight against anti-Black racism and amplify the values, aspirations, and power of Black communities.

Greg Lauren knows the power of names. When the artist-turned-fashion designer launched his eponymous line in February 2011, it was his last name — and specifically the fact that he’s Ralph Lauren’s nephew — that helped open doors and give his meticulously sliced and spliced artisanal take on menswear early exposure. Today, as his label stands on the cusp of its 10th anniversary, he’s determined that the lesser-known names who have been part of his creative journey — from the stylists working on his look books to the Black quilters of Gee’s Bend, Ala., who inspired his patchwork aesthetic — be recognized for their contributions.

American patchwork quilts, which sprang up in large part out of the pragmatic need for warmth during wintry months, may not seem particularly interesting in today’s art world. Yet those historic hand-sewn pieces frequently tell stories of injustice and inequality that are just as relevant today as they were when they were first made. Now, with two U.S. museums and one London gallery opening exhibitions on quilts that contain compelling messages of racial injustice and gender equality, the artistic American subgenre is once again rightfully center stage in the public’s imagination.