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."