Two Centuries of Black American Art: The 1976 Show That Built a Field

Two Centuries of Black American Art was a 1976 exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, curated by David C. Driskell, that gathered two hundred years of work by Black American artists into one show. That lineage runs straight to the the African American art collection that Noirci Studio sells today.

In January 1975, a museum made a bet. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art appointed David C. Driskell as guest curator for its major American bicentennial show, and he came to the job as chairman of the Department of Art at Fisk University. He had roughly eighteen months of runway. What he delivered would still be described, decades later, as the first historically comprehensive survey of African American artistic achievement.

I keep coming back to that appointment. It's the kind of institutional decision that looks small in a press release and turns out to reorganize a whole field.

A Bet Placed in January 1975

The details are on record. LACMA appointed Driskell guest curator in January 1975, per the museum's own who's who for the exhibition, and it wanted a centerpiece for the country's two-hundredth birthday.

Two Centuries of Black American Art opened at LACMA on September 28, 1976, and ran through November 21. The museum framed it, in its exhibition record, as the first comprehensive survey of African American art. Read that claim slowly. Not the first show to hang Black artists. The first survey, the first serious attempt to gather two hundred years into one set of rooms and argue that they held together as a story.

What Driskell Actually Built

Scale first. Drawing on LACMA's exhibition facts, the show gathered over 200 works by 63 known artists, plus several artists whose names history had lost, and it spanned 1750 to 1950. It moved across painting, sculpture, drawing, graphics, crafts, and the decorative arts.

That last inclusion carried more weight than a media list usually does.

For most of the twentieth century, a quilt or a piece of wrought iron sat outside the fine-art conversation. Anonymous makers, many of them enslaved, got filed as folk footnotes if they got filed at all. Driskell put them in the survey anyway. The message was quiet and complete. If you wanted to tell the real story of Black art in America, you could not open the book in a gallery in 1920 and pretend that was the beginning.

Think about what it takes to make that argument at a bicentennial. The country is busy celebrating itself. A curator uses the moment to say the celebration has been reading from an incomplete list this whole time.

Three More Cities

After Los Angeles, the show traveled.

Atlanta: the High Museum of Art

It opened at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta (January 8 to February 20, 1977).

Dallas: the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts

It moved to the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts (March 30 to May 15, 1977).

Brooklyn: the Brooklyn Museum

It closed at the Brooklyn Museum (June 25 to August 21, 1977).

Four museums in under a year.

Driskell didn't just sign the loan forms and wave the crates goodbye. He served as LACMA's envoy to the Atlanta and Brooklyn venues, which means the curator carried the argument city to city and stood behind it in person, in front of new audiences and new boards. An exhibition can be dismissed as one museum's experiment. A touring survey with its curator on the road is harder to wave off. It starts to look like a position the art world has to hold an opinion about.

The Catalog That Became a Textbook

A show closes. A book stays.

Driskell wrote the catalog, and Alfred A. Knopf published it in October 1976. Knopf's own description called it the first book to encompass the entire span of Black art in America. That framing belongs to the publisher, so I'll pass it along as a publisher's claim rather than treat it as settled fact.

Here's the part that outlasted the galleries. Catalogs from touring exhibitions usually gather dust. This one went the other way. It became a reference that students, curators, and collectors reached for when they needed the shape of the whole field in one volume. The show gave you six months in four cities. The book gave anyone with a library card the same two-hundred-year map, indefinitely.

That shift matters for how power works in art. A single exhibition can be praised and then quietly forgotten once the walls come down. A published survey, sitting on syllabi and curators' shelves, keeps making its argument long after the crates go home. Driskell built both, and the second one is why the first one never really closed.

Before and After 1976

Now the phrase that gets used about this exhibition. LACMA credits Driskell with having "pioneered the field of African American art history" through this show, and I want to sit with what "pioneered the field" is actually saying.

Scholarship on Black American art existed before 1976. Alain Locke had written decades earlier. Faculty at historically Black colleges had been building this knowledge for years, often with almost no institutional backing. So the change in 1976 was not that the knowledge appeared. The change was its address.

Before the show, a major museum could ignore two hundred years of Black American art and pay no professional price for it. After the show, there was a canon on the table, authored by a serious scholar, published by Knopf, road-tested through a bicentennial-year tour of four museums. Scholar Bridget Cooks characterizes the exhibition as having received more mainstream validation than any prior group show of Black artists' work. Validation of that size is hard to un-see.

Institutions had to answer it. That's the whole difference between a body of scholarship and a field. A field has an argument that the powerful rooms are now obligated to respond to, and this is exactly the terrain we dig into across our series on who decides what hangs on a museum wall.

Your Wall Is a Survey Show, Too

I think about that January 1975 appointment every time someone tells me they're "not really a collector." A curator got a room and eighteen months, and he chose to argue that the story was older and bigger than anyone had bothered to hang before.

You get to make a version of that same choice, at smaller scale, on your own wall.

Every home collection is a small survey show. You decide what era it opens in, whose hand you honor, what counts as worth framing and lighting well. Curate it like it counts, because it does. If you want the deeper thinking behind putting an artist's own words up alongside the work, we get into that in our piece on quoting Elizabeth Catlett on your gallery wall.

Start where Driskell started, from the belief that the work belongs in the survey in the first place.

Browse our art from the Harlem Renaissance for pieces rooted in the decades that Driskell's show fought to canonize, or step back to the wider Melanin wall art and begin building your own two-century wall.

Sources

• LACMA: Two Centuries of Black American Art at LACMA: Who's Who
• LACMA: Two Centuries of Black American Art
• LACMA: Exhibition Facts
• LACMA: In Memoriam: David C. Driskell, 1931