The Artistic Void in the Collections of L.A.’s Museums

In the permanent collections of Los Angeles’ major art museums there is a glaring absence of works by significant African American artists. The omission is striking in a city that sculptor John Outterbridge calls an “innovative, fresh, challenging environment” that “embraces multitude.” L.A.’s art museums, furthermore, are an influential force in a city that only recently could honestly boast of a formidable cultural presence. Because these museums are so important, their neglect of African American artists has that much more of a negative impact on community and civic culture.

Explanations for such indifference vary. Some think it is a product of simple ignorance. Others cite insufficient acquisition budgets. But the priorities implied in museums’ collections are clear. The record adds up to exclusion based on race, not artistic merit.

From the 1880s, when Henry Ossawa Tanner, the first African American to be elected to the National Academy of Design, was tied to his easel and left in the street by fellow art students, to 1988, when an underground arts-group ad taunted Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) over arts funding--”Relax Sen. Helms, the art world is your kind of place! The number of blacks at an art opening is about the same as one of your garden parties”--the arts establishment operated as a whites-only preserve. There have been important exceptions, and the last two decades have witnessed much change. But L.A. lags behind.

In the late 1960s, the Black Arts Council picketed the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, then L.A.’s only major arts venue, to protest the museum’s lack of African American art. In response, LACMA hosted two shows and a lecture series that drew huge crowds. But since then, leadership in support of the visual arts has waned in black L.A.

In many ways, the California African-American Museum in Exposition Park, which isn’t strictly an arts institution, has had to pick up the slack. Chartered by the state to reflect and preserve the history and culture of African Americans, it has an 800-piece collection of black art. The museum was also the first to exhibit retrospectives of such figures as Elizabeth Catlett, Noah Purifoy and Outterbridge. Next year, it plans to showcase a Gordon Parks retrospective from the Corcoran Art Gallery, a show rejected by LACMA and the Museum of Contemporary Art. If it wasn’t for the Exposition Park museum, major black artists would be relegated to the sidelines in the city’s big museums, outside the main gallery spaces or not shown at all. But as black feminist artist Faith Ringgold once put it, “If you’re not [at the elite museums], you’re not anywhere.”

A collection is the heart of any museum, telling the public what it esteems most in the culture and is worthy of an investment. It is the basis of a museum’s public education, docent training and staff knowledge. When a museum hosts traveling exhibits or originates a solo exhibition or group show and does not purchase the art, the artists featured in the show become, ultimately, invisible in the life of a city’s culture. Works in a permanent collection live on for deeper consideration.

There are plenty of opportunities to rectify the absence of black art in museums’ collections. In the Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Co. building on Western and Adams, there are nearly 250 works by African American artists painstakingly assembled by artist William Pajaud, beginning in 1957, during his 30 years at the company. Since Pajaud left, the condition of the stored collection has been uncertain. Now it is threatened by the recent merger of Golden State Mutual and an Alabama company. The real tragedy is that the city’s arts institutions are so isolated from African American artists that they are unaware of the potential loss of the legacy at Golden State Mutual. While many who regularly walk its business lobby may take for granted the murals by Hale Woodruff and Charles Alston, or Richmond Barthe’s bronze sculpture of William Nickerson Jr., the company founder, the arts establishment hasn’t even entered the building.

Ironically, the number of black art works at a corporate outpost like Golden State Mutual far exceeds that of all L.A.’s art museums combined. LACMA lists only 32 African American artists in its collection. In the 20 years since its founding, MOCA owns only 15 works by 11 black artists, none from Los Angeles, and these were donated as part of larger collections. The Getty Museum has photographs by African Americans and has commissioned works by Alison Saar and Martin Puryear; Puryear’s monumental sculpture “That Profile” was unveiled in November. The Norton Simon collection in Pasadena includes only one piece by a black artist, the late printmaker, teacher and Altadena resident Charles White. The UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum does not collect black art but has managed to offend many black artists with two exhibitions, the 1995 Whitney Black Male show and the current Kara Walker installation.

The exhibition schedules of these museums are more inclusive, but shows of black artists are infrequent and can be misleading. For example, LACMA hosted traveling exhibitions of Harlem Renaissance artists, photographs by Roy DeCarava, paintings by Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence prints. But beyond a recent sculpture show, LACMA has not originated an exhibition with a major African American presence since “Two Centuries of Black American Art,” organized during the 1976 Bicentennial.

So few L.A.-based African American artists are collected, or even exhibited, by the city’s museums that one artist has called the situation a “shutout.” But Los Angeles is the real loser. Take the legacy of White, only the second African American elected, in 1972, as a full member of the National Academy of Design and described as “one of the finest draughtsmen in contemporary America.” Few in this most Mexican of U.S. cities are aware that White cultivated ties with the great artists of Mexico when he and Catlett lived in the home of muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros in the 1940s and contributed to the publications and workshops of the famous Taller de Grafica Popular. Few know that Harlem Renaissance sculptor Barthe, whose work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney, spent his last years working in Pasadena until his death in 1986.

L.A.’s indifference to black artists has led many of them to go elsewhere. MacArthur “genius” award-winner David Hammons, whose former studio near Slauson and Van Ness was a gathering place for L.A.’s black artists more than 20 years ago and where he created his famous “body prints” such as the 1970 “Justice Case,” moved to New York. Painter Alonzo Davis, co-founder of the now-defunct Brockman Gallery, teaches at the Memphis College of Art. Public sculptor Maren Hassinger is director of sculpture at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Painter Kerry James Marshall, another MacArthur winner, and USC-trained abstract sculptor Melvin Edwards have relocated as well.

Other museums have drawn upon L.A.’s untapped talent. For example, this year’s group show of contemporary work “Beyond the Veil: Art of African American Artists at Century’s End,” at Cornell Fine Arts Museum in Winter Park, Fla., was curated by L.A. scholar Mary Jane Hewitt. The currently touring exhibition “When the Spirit Moves: African American Dance in History and Art” was organized by the National Afro-American Museum and Cultural Center in Wilberforce, Ohio, and curated by Samella S. Lewis, another L.A. scholar.

Betye Saar remains the only local African American artist to have a solo exhibition at a major Los Angeles museum. Other artists who have stuck it out and remained in the city are well-exhibited and collected--elsewhere.

It’s not just L.A.-based artists who get scant attention from the city’s big museums. Major contemporary and historical black artists are ignored as well. To see their works, Angelenos must travel.

With respect to black artists, the main difference between L.A.’s art institutions and those elsewhere can be summed up in one word: commitment. The Art Institute of Chicago is dedicated “to acquiring important works by the nation’s black artists, as well as a desire to research and showcase these acquisitions not only so that their significant contributions will be recognized, but also to provide a fuller and more accurate picture of the multifaceted nature of American culture.” In New York, museums and galleries easily surpass L.A.’s in terms of exhibiting African American innovators. Two 1998 shows explored forgotten works: the Whitney Museum’s first-ever retrospective of Beat-era painter Robert Thompson, and the Studio Museum in Harlem’s review of the late abstract-expressionist painter Norman Lewis, a member of the 1950 Artists Sessions at Studio 35.

In California, San Diego’s Museum of Contemporary Art has more than 30 works by 16 African American artists in its permanent collection, including L.A. artists Edgar Arceneaux, Hammons, photographer Carrie Mae Weems and White. The museum, which was the only West Coast site for Hammons’ retrospective in 1991, also annually hosts weeklong showcases of “cutting edge” artists, curated by poet Quincy Troupe. Northern California museums, including the Berkeley Art Center, the Oakland Museum and the de Young Museum in San Francisco, have built reputations for providing their audiences with lively multicultural inquiries into art that include a special commitment to rare works by 19th-century African American landscape painter Grafton Taylor Brown and Harlem Renaissance sculptor Sargent Johnson, both former Bay Area residents.

There is no irreversible reason why Los Angeles museums’ commitment to African American art and artists cannot live up to the city’s reputation as a center for innovation. Most local museums have new directors, some only on the job for a few months, who can diversify their collections. One of them is Jeremy Strick, who came from the Art Institute of Chicago to head MOCA. He is quite willing to broaden the museum collection he inherited.

The new directors can start by consulting with local artists, scholars, gallery owners and collectors. At the top of the list is Samella Lewis, museum founder, artist and author of a standard text in the field, “African American Art and Artists.” This first step may eventually lead to Eleanor Roosevelt’s goal, which she urged at the dedication of the South Side Art Center in Chicago: “What we need is to develop an audience for our artists of every kind. The power to appreciate is often just as important as the power to actually create something.”