The Year in Black Art: Six Group Exhibitions

As part of its “Turn Again to the Earth” initiative, which explores environmental justice, climate change, and colonial histories through art, the Baltimore Museum of Art presented “Black Earth Rising,” a group exhibition of 13 African diasporic, Latin American, and Native American contemporary artists including Firelei Báez, Wangechi Mutu, Frank Bowling, and Yinka Shonibare. The exhibition focused the discussion of climate change on the Southern Hemisphere, which is most affected by global warming while contributing to it the least. The curator, Ekow Eshun, a British writer and journalist, has authored a companion book for the exhibition.

This group exhibition of 60 African diasporic artists working in Africa, Europe, and the Americas covered a quarter century of art and included works by Mark Bradford, El Anatsui, Nick Cave, and Deana Lawson. As curator Dhyandra Lawson wrote in her introduction to the exhibition catalog, this LACMA show was conceived in response to the BlackLivesMatter movement. While the exhibition showcased the variety of ways that artists interpret Blackness, it never lost sight of the shared struggle for equality and the need for solidarity.

This exhibition, now making stops in Brussels, London, and Barcelona after its run at the Art Institute of Chicago, features 350 artworks by 100 artists from Africa, Europe, and North and South America, including art by Kerry James Marshall and Chris Ofili. The show opens with works made after the emergence of the Pan-African movement at the end of World War I and covers Garveyism in the United States and the Caribbean, Negritude in Africa and Francophone countries, and Quilombismo in Brazil. The ideas of freedom, community building, and self-determination resonate throughout the exhibition, which was curated by Antawan I. Byrd, Elvira Dyangani Ose, Adom Getachew, and Matthew S. Witkovsky.

Though photography is known to have played a central role in the civil rights movement, as images of protesters reached the public through the printed media, this exhibition is the first of its kind to articulate the role of the medium in the Black Arts movement, which employed literature, theater, music, art, and yes, photography to create an aesthetic of Black beauty and power. For this exhibition, running through January 11 at the National Gallery, co-curators Deborah Willis and Philip Brookman have included 150 works by more than 100 artists, including Kwame Brathwaite, Ming Smith, Roy DeCarava, and Lorna Simpson. Brookman is consulting curator of the Department of Photographs at the National Gallery of Art; Willis is a professor at, and chair of, the Department of Photography and Imaging at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and director of NYU’s Center for Black Visual Culture.

This year was the last chance to see an exhibition which started its rounds at the University of Maryland; the University of California, Riverside; the University of Pennsylvania; and Wilkes University beginning in 2023. The late David C. Driskell, an acclaimed curator, artist, and scholar, was a champion of African American art and established deep friendships with many of the most notable Black artists of his day. This exhibition showed Driskell’s own work in conversation with some of these artists, among them Romare Bearden, Aaron Douglas, Elizabeth Catlett, Alma Thomas, and Jacob Lawrence. Conceived and organized by Sheila Bergman, Curlee Raven Holton, and Heather Sincavage, the show featured 70 artworks by 35 African American artists from the collection of the David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland.