Part II: Righting Art History's Racist Wrongs, in which I explore some thoughts on how black artists are represented to the culture at large.

In researching yesterday's post, I figured I'd say a few words about The Studio Museum in Harlem's "Black Romantic" show, but didn't get it into the essay. In that show (April, 2002), curator Thelma Golden went outside of her admitted comfort zone and mounted a show of black popular art, what I've called the "mainstream," albeit the cream of the mainstream crop.

Artforum did an article on the show complete with a bunch of nonsense about how the show shifted paradigms and challenged artistic notions of this, that and the other, and about how everyone better go home and re-examine what they consider real art. No.

"Black Romantic" gained its artistic currency from two facts: 1) that no one, black or white, was used to seeing this kind of art in a museum and 2) white people in general weren't used to seeing that kind of art at all. Neither reason has much to do with the art, per se, but with the position the art occupies, en masse, in the culture. In short, it was as much an anthropology show as an art show. So the show's organizers were free to rhapsodize about the importance of a whole category of art "out there" being made by this teeming mass of underappreciated movers and shakers, thereby shortcircuiting the idea that the artwork could, or should, be viewed and judged as individual works that failed or succeeded by their own merits. (At right, Kadir Nelson's "Kiowa Dawn," one of the artists featured in Black Romantic.)

In so doing, the Studio Museum did a thing it otherwise never does: it openly subsumed itself within the framework of the white art world. It positioned itself as a magnanimous, highhanded institution curious about "those people" outside and only too eager to let them in, provided they stick together and essentially be regarded as a social category rather than an artistic school. That's why the ideas in the art were not open to criticism. They were, like tiki idols from some South Pacific island, to be taken whole and assumed to be discontinous from the viewer's own frame of reference and judgment criteria. The Studio Museum became the Smithsonian, and the whitest part of the Smithsonian at that. (At left Fred Brown's "Prince Street," 1977-1996. More typical of the studio museum.)

That's also probably why it made the cover of ArtForum--an inset, but the cover nevertheless. The "Black Romantic" inset is one of 2 pieces of art by black artists worldwide to have made the cover of ArtForum in the last 2 and a half years, by my very unscientific count. That's 2 out of about 76 images, give or take (Each issue carries a main image and an inset, plus the year-end issues carry a montage of 15 or so images). That's dispicable. Why? ArtForum considers itself the publication of record about what's going on in the worlds of fine art and ideas, and sadly the demographics of its covers are probably a pretty accurate depiction--not of what's being made, but what's being paid attention to.

This struggle for recognition is paramount for black artists and takes on a double meaning for "Prog-con" black artists (see yesterday's post for a definition of that term). Prog-con artists often have few outlets other than predominantly white galleries and publications and then these spaces (in the words of art critic and professional curmugeon Charlie Finch) tend to prefer their blacks one at a time. Thus in a field where nobody has it easy to begin with, black artists unsurprisingly find it that much harder to rise out of obscurity.

Such obscurity becomes historicized. I became a visual artist only after years of being a writer. When I knew that my direction had in fact changed, I figured I had a lot of catching up to do. So I read. A lot. A lot of art history, art philosophy, and art criticism. And in all of these thousands of pages it's still stunning to me how polarized these art histories are. Many of the volumes still in use in art history classes today completely or mostly avoid art made by black artists. (Actually, the common strategy seems to be to offer an African art section, which pretends that art stopped being made on that continent 2 centuries ago.)

I have to imagine that art history professors have awakened to this problem and use supplementary texts to fill out art history studies. Still, what does it say to a young mind when Gardner's Art Through the Ages, one of the most often used basal textbooks, fails to even mention as of the eight edition Henry O. Tanner, William Henry Johnson,Wifredo Lam, Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, and Jean-Michel Basquiat? It says that black artists, if considered, should only be considered apart and as a specialized subcategory of art, rather than simply participants in the parade of art history. It's what allows galleries the steam valve release of being able to say, "We've covered black art" with the display of a single black artist. (At right, William Henry Johnson's "Jitterbug V," 1941-42)

I am an optimist in the end, though. And I do believe we are seeing fundamental shifts in how black artists are being represented within the culture at large. The Internet has not only helped to decentralize the dissemination of information, it has turned a high-capital venture, publishing, into a low-capital venture. It's now possible to get more information out from and to a greater number of people with fewer resources than has ever before been possible. We have quite a ways to go in achieving parity--obviously, no web network comes anywhere near having the power that Viacom or Time Warner exert over information. That's fine. The underground is alive, nevertheless, and it's happening, and right now it gives us the best shot of shaping our own futures.