Museums in America have a storied past that has been repositioned recently to reconcile with the trends of today. Art museums, born out of the hallowed halls of the wealthy and their curated collections of curiosities from travels far away, have found themselves within the last two decades at the intersection of established practice and the priorities involved in greater accessibility. This movement is an experience of “convocation” to explore the beautiful works submitted by artists to museums for approval and acceptance. Convocation, defined as an assemblage from distant lands, symbolizes the gathering of artistic talents from all parts, representing small towns and large cities, whose works have convened in museums for admiration, engagement, and learning. Opportunities like Leading with Objects: Engaging the Community in Institutional Change offers the substrate for constructive change at the Weatherspoon Art Museum at UNC Greensboro.
As the accelerating move toward diversity, access, and inclusiveness faced opposition and resistance in the mid-twentieth century, many artists reacted by becoming artist-activists, using their talents and career status to move the agenda forward. Two early events shaped this ongoing paradigm shift in U.S. museums: the founding of the Spiral group in 1963 in New York City, and the 1976 opening of the exhibition titled Two Centuries of Black American Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. These events captured the activist trend within the art world and the art community’s growing need for diverse exhibitions.
Spiral, a collective of African American artists, was initially formed by Romare Bearden, Charles Alston, Norman Lewis, and Hale Woodruff on July 5, 1963. It was inspired by the growing civil rights movement in America and the planning for the legendary March on Washington in August of the same year that sparked Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s ascension as a civil rights figure with his “I Have a Dream” speech. Woodruff suggested the name “spiral” in reference to the Archimedean spiral that moves outward in every direction yet continually upward as well. The group initially came together in North Carolina–born artist Romare Bearden’s loft to hammer out logistical issues such as obtaining buses to travel to the March on Washington. Soon, however, their attention turned to aesthetic concerns, including what author Ralph Ellison called a “new visual order.” The members of the group, who ranged from emerging to established artists, had differing views as to what their place was in the fight for civil rights, but the ability to mount a shared response through their collective gave them the courage to act. From the summer of 1963 through 1965, the group met weekly to explore the role of African American artists in politics and the civil rights movement, as well as in the larger art world,and they organized one group exhibition. They also discussed topics such as the African American experience and the African American image in art.
About a decade later, the Two Centuries of Black American Art exhibition opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) after a great deal of negotiation between museum parties involved in its inception. The Black Arts Council at LACMA had been founded by Cecil Fergerson and Claude Booker (black art preparators who worked at LACMA) in 1968 and included African American artists, staff members, and other city residents who aimed to promote African American art in Los Angeles. LACMA also had a board of trustees, all of whom were white. The Black Arts Council started lobbying LACMA to hold an exhibition of African American art in its main galleries, and LACMA’s deputy director asked David Driskell, chair of the Art Department at Fisk University, if he would be interested in guest-curating it. Driskell was requested to make a formal proposal to the board of trustees in June 1974. Unfortunately, LACMA’s chief curator of modern and contemporary art, Maurice Tuchman, refused to attend the presentation, and Fergerson, Tuchman’s curatorial assistant at the time, was not invited to it at all. Board members Frank Murphy, Sidney F. Brody, Charles Z. Wilson Jr., and Robert Wilson, however, supported the exhibition and ultimately prevailed. Donelson Hoopes (curator of American art) and Ruth Bowman (LACMA’s director of education) both resigned in response to the board’s decision to hold the exhibition.
Driskell’s 1976 exhibition was one of the best attended in the history of LACMA, featuring sixty-three artists and some two hundred works dating from 1750 to 1950, including those of Alma Thomas, Thomas Day, and Hale Woodruff. The exhibition’s success also enabled it to travel to the High Museum in Atlanta, the Dallas Museum of Fine Art, and the Brooklyn Museum over the subsequent year.
Taken together, the Spiral group and the LACMA exhibition spurred museums to begin to offer more diverse exhibitions and provide increased access to all their art. Historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) such as Fisk University, Hampton University, Howard University, Spelman College, Bennett College, and North Carolina A & T State University found new spotlights placed on their permanent art collections. African American artists such as Dox Thrash, Robert Colescott, Edmonia Lewis, and Kehinde Wiley saw their work acquired by such museums as the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, the Ackland Museum of Art at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Weatherspoon Art Museum at UNC Greensboro, and the North Carolina Museum of Art.
These events and the pathways they paved regarding institutional accessibility have shaped my ideas about the inclusive museum. Work like that which is being done at the Weatherspoon with its exhibition Making Room continues to resonate with the ideals and the actions of the aforementioned efforts to change how museums and their collections are seen and how responsive they can be to their communities. As the executive director of the Contemporary Art Museum (CAM) in Raleigh, North Carolina, I applaud this effort and add to it CAM’s own institutional initiatives, including equity policies to ensure that a sizeable percentage of all exhibitions involve artists from underrepresented communities; more public art on the museum’s exterior to enable access to it at all times; and the museum-sponsored development of art installation projects in schools and libraries to increase the exposure of younger students to visual art. Good work is being done, and there is a long way to go.
