News & Events

This release brings us music from the isolated African-American community of Gee’s Bend in the heartland of Alabama State: a collection of 19 traditional sacred spirituals sung by a close-knit group of four quilters (all bearing the surname Pettway, which implies a sibling connection). The tradition of quilting in that region goes back to the 19th century, and the singing that accompanies this activity is regarded as a healing for the soul; as one member of the quartet, China Pettway, also puts it: “while quilting, I sing because it’s a sound of whistling humming God gave me”.

This week’s episode spotlights two strikingly different approaches to addressing gaps in our understanding of American art history by more fully including African-American artists in our national narrative. First, Souls Grown Deep Foundation president Maxwell Anderson discusses his organization’s project to document, preserve and promote the work of artists from the African-American South and to more fully include their cultural traditions within American art. Then, Kellie Jones, an art history professor at Columbia University, discusses the Getty Research Institute’s new African American art history initiative. 

In the US, authors, musicians, actors, and others in the creative industries have royalties and residuals that reward their enduring stake in the redistribution of their intellectual property, when properly enforced. Yet while visual artists are entitled to royalties on commercial reproduction, there is currently little to no legal recourse for them to benefit from the resale of their work.

An assemblage with political overtones and undertones of history—a show that reaffirms the truth that black lives matter. This exhibition presented thirty paintings, sculptures, drawings and quilts by self-taught contemporary African-American artists to celebrate the 2014 gift to The Metropolitan Museum of Art of works of art from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation. The artists represented by this generous donation all hail from the American South.

The Atlanta-based group boasts work by roughly 160 artists of colour and a string of deals with major US museums hints at a vital shift in the art world.

Through the 1960s and 1970s, Purvis Young, a self-taught artist from Miami, roamed the inner city streets of Overtown, scouring for cardboard, wooden crates and secondhand doors to use as canvas for his expressive paintings. He learned the chops of art history—from Rembrandt to Van Gogh—through library books. He was often called an outsider artist and would paint trains, trucks and railroads to suggest an escape from inner city life, while his pieces told visual tales of racism, poverty and hypocrisy.

In the 1920s, the women of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, made quilts from spare scraps of cloth to keep their families warm. In the 1960s, Civil Rights leaders declared the quilts to be unlike any they’d ever seen, and helped locals sell them by mail order for $25 each. Now, the quilts of Gee’s Bend live in the permanent collections of major museums from coast to coast, valued at tens of thousands of dollars each. They are widely acknowledged as masterpieces of American art.

NPQ has for some time been following trends that reflect a lack of diversity in US art museums, as well as the many initiatives being developed by individual institutions and funders to reconfigure the museum landscape. These efforts include diversifying the artists represented, diversifying the executives and curators who oversee collections and exhibitions, and even diversifying the trustees who serve on the boards of nonprofits arts groups.

The Brooklyn Museum, Dallas Museum of Art, Morgan Library & Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Spelman College Museum of Fine Art have acquired a total of 51 works by 30 African American artists of the South from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation (SGDF). The acquisitions include a large number of quilts by the revered quiltmakers of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, which are heading to the Brooklyn Museum, the Dallas Museum of Art, the MFA Boston, and Spelman College. The Brooklyn Museum will also acquire works by Thornton Dial, Lonnie Holley, and James “Son Ford” Thomas; the Dallas Museum of Art is acquiring works by Dial, Ronald Lockett, and Nellie Mae Rowe; and the Morgan is acquiring drawings by Dial, Rowe, Henry Speller, Luster Willis, and Purvis Young.