Why Have There Been No Great Black Art Dealers?

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The art world of the ’60s and ’70s in general, “was a hostile environment for black folks,” recalls Linda Goode Bryant, who, in 1974, challenged the white establishment in New York by opening a gallery of her own. Black artists then were still embarrassingly absent from museums (a 1969 show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, called “Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900-1968,” infamously contained no work by black artists) and there were wild discrepancies in value between white artists and their non-white peers. Realtors, unreceptive to the idea of showing work by “black artists,” would hang up on Bryant, and it wasn’t until she started calling her gallery a place for “emerging artists” that she could secure a space. She went directly to 57th Street, then the financial heart of the art world, and Just Above Midtown (better known as JAM) was born.

“The art world was angry — they were angry that I was there, and that the realtor had leased me the space,” says Bryant. {snip}

What these art dealers understood is that the gallery, as an entrée into the art market, is the sole platform for an artist to make a living. And in many ways, galleries are where the hierarchy of power in the art world begins and ends. {snip}

In the last decade, major museums have amped up efforts to re-examine the past, unearthing the work of artists who had previously been excluded. For black artists in particular, MoMA hired a consulting curator to broaden its collection in 2014, the same year that the Guggenheim mounted “Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video,” the first retrospective of a black female artist in the museum’s history. Institutions nationwide, including the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Pérez Art Museum Miami, have set aside millions of dollars toward the acquisition of African-American art, and in May, the Baltimore Museum of Art made the controversial announcement that it would be deaccessioning works by Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg to make room for work by women and artists of color. It wasn’t until this year, at age 74, that former JAM artist Howardena Pindell had her first major museum survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. The desire for museums to patch the holes in art history is strong, but for so many artists, it comes too late; LACMA’s 2015 Noah Purifoy survey arrived 11 years after his death, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts’ Norman Lewis retrospective came 36 years after his.

During this newfound institutional interest, critics and historians have described artists like these as “overlooked,” while the more difficult truth is that they were willfully ignored. But if artists of color were, until recently, effectively written out of art history, black dealers have remained almost entirely absent from the narrative of contemporary art. A black-owned gallery is to this day an exception, though in the last few years, a small group of black gallery owners and directors — taking their cue from an even smaller group of forebears — are working hard to prevent the art world from repeating its mistakes.

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But in 2018, even as black artists enjoy growing acclaim, American art continues to privilege the perspective of white men. While Shainman is a longstanding champion of artists of color, Bellorado-Samuels — who has worked at the gallery for ten years — is still one of the few black dealers in Chelsea. This kind of perspective has marginalized black artists in a way that is only just being reversed. All the way back in 1975, a young David Hammons, now one of the most famous and highly valued living artists who would bring his early paintings into Brockman Gallery while they were still wet, described the phenomenon of white curators lumping black artists together in shows, no matter how dissimilar their work, as if being black alone was their only distinguishing virtue. {snip}

“If someone wants to do a ‘black art’ show and put together several of my artists who are only thematically linked only by a thread, we’re going to have a conversation about that,” Bellorado-Samuels says. {snip}

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{snip} Mariane Ibrahim, who grew up in Somaliland, opened her namesake Seattle gallery with a roster largely of African and diasporic artists as a corrective to all the African folk art exhibitions she had seen growing up. To her, they felt as though, “Europe and America were holding a telescope to Africa with white gloves on.”

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The one universal truism among good gallerists, says Joeonna Bellorado-Samuels, a director at Jack Shainman gallery, is that, “At the end of the day, gallery work is advocacy work.” Similar to the Civil Rights movements of the ’60s and ’70s, more recent political shifts that brought black issues to mainstream attention seep into the art world and push it forward: “Black Lives Matter trickled down into a lot of day-to-day, regular life for people in different quadrants and insular economies,” says Haynes. The art world also recently witnessed the organized protest against the depiction of Emmett Till by Dana Schutz, a white artist, as well as the painting of presidential portraits by two black artists, Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald. All of these follow the inauguration of America’s first black president, which Jenkins-Johnson describes as a “sea change”: the normalization of a black man as the most powerful figure in the country.

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WHY HAVE THERE been so few black gallerists? Besides the legacy of their historic exclusion, one reason is that starting a gallery takes tremendous resources; Linda Goode Bryant had been lucky enough to find a landlord who would turn a blind eye to her absent rent payments, and a community of artists and curators who would install the parquet flooring for free. Another reason: The predominantly white art world can still be an uncomfortable space for a person of color to navigate, both in the making of art and the selling of it.

The abstract painter Peter A. Bradley, one of New York’s original black art dealers, has known the highs and lows of both. As a struggling artist he worked as an art handler at Perls Gallery, an Uptown dealer of Picasso and Modigliani’s, until he was promoted to a sales position; as an artist himself, he knew the language of paintings well enough to sell them. As the gallery’s associate director he experienced the joys of tailored suits, expensed lunches with Alexander Calder and business trips to Europe; but still, on two occasions, was assailed with an ugly racial epithet. Both times, his boss verbally smacked down the culprits: The Perls, Bradley says, “really protected me big time because I made them a lot of money.”

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{snip} Alongside the art world, Hollywood is re-examining its own history of exclusion: it clung to the assumption that a film with a black cast couldn’t sell tickets until very recently, when the box office success of “Black Panther” and “Get Out” proved that kind of myth untenable. {snip}

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