THE CALIFORNIA AFRICAN AMERICAN MUSEUM (CAAM) announced a new appointment today. Curator, writer, and editor Cameron Shaw has been named deputy director and chief curator of the Los Angeles Museum. Shaw is the co-founder of Pelican Bomb, a New Orleans-based contemporary art nonprofit that provided a platform for exhibitions, public programming, and arts journalism. For...
Lot 273: ALMA WOODSEY THOMAS (1891-1978), “Untitled,” circa 1970 (watercolor on paper, 13.2 x 15.75 inches framed). | Estimate $20,000-$30,000 Women working in Abstract Expressionism and an array of artists active in Chicago are among the highlights of the Sept. 15 African American Fine Art Auction at Treadway Gallery in Cincinnati. The gallery has...
“Untitled #7” (1975) by Howardena Pindell The following review presents a snapshot of recent news in African American art and related black culture: ARTISTS The New York Times profiled Betye Saar in advance of her fall solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Los Angeles County Museum of...
BALTIMORE-BORN, Brooklyn-based artist Derrick Adams is working with two new galleries. Luxembourg & Dayan and Salon 94 announced their collaborative representation of Adams Sept. 5. His multidisciplinary practice spans painting, collage, sculpture, video, sound, and performance. Adams will continue to be represented by Rhona Hoffman Gallery in Chicago. Described by the galleries, Adams’s practice...
“The Sugar Shack” (1976) by Ernie Barnes LOS ANGELES—A master storyteller, Ernie Barnes (1938-2009) painted from experience. He captured the brawn of football and the quotidian of life in the segregated South. His representational images depict what he saw growing up in Durham, N.C., where black people gathered for communion and competition on porches and...
From the New York Times video: Pool Party | Mickalene Thomas and Racquel Chevremont FOR THE PAST SEVERAL YEARS, Brooklyn-based Mickalene Thomas has decamped to a property in Salisbury, Conn., during “kids-away-from-school” time with Racquel Chevremont, her partner in work and life, and their three children. Purchased in 2013, Thomas calls the 19th century...
WHEN THE PASADENA MUSEUM of California Art (PMCA) unexpectedly closed last October, after 16 years, there were three final exhibitions on view, including “Grafton Tyler Brown: Exploring California,” a small survey of Pacific Northwest landscape paintings and commercial lithographs. A pioneer, Grafton Tyler Brown (1841-1918) was the state’s first African American contractor and is...
On View presents images from noteworthy exhibitions PROVIDING A PLATFORM for two up-and-coming artists, Sanford Biggers is presenting the work of Allison Janae Hamilton and ektor garcia at Marianne Boesky. (The gallery has represented Biggers since 2016.) Both artists make complex, narrative works. Garcia employs ceramics, crochet, and weaving techniques working with fibrous materials,...
WORKS BY MORE THAN 60 ARTISTS, including Faith Ringgold, are featured in the international traveling exhibition “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power.” Nearly all the artists are Black, except Virginia Jaramillo, Andy Warhol (1928-1987), and Alice Neel (1900-1984), who contributed a portrait of Ringgold to the landmark exhibition. Rinngold...
FOR ITS FIFTH ANNUAL GALA in New York, the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden is paying tribute to 42 artists, an “intergenerational vanguard” including Jordan Casteel, Faith Ringgold, Amy Sherald, Deborah Roberts, and David Hartt. The museum is assembling the group by inviting 21 artists to identify an additional honoree who “has influenced...
“Black Is Beautiful: The Photography of Kwame Brathwaite,” Skirball Cultural Center THREE PHOTOGRAPHY EXHIBITIONS on view at Los Angeles institutions feature the work of Gordon Parks, Kwame Brathwaite, and photographers who have trained their lenses on the legends of hip hop. The Getty Center is presenting Parks’s 1961 images of Flávio da Silva, a...
WHETHER YOU CALL HIM a figurative painter or a portrait painter, labels he is reluctant to embrace, Henry Taylor paints people, almost exclusively. He paints his family, his friends, people in his neighborhood, and people he meets when he travels. He connects with his subjects and has a real curiosity about their lives, which...
PIONEERING PAINTER Ed Clark, 93, has joined Hauser & Wirth. A vital figure in post-war American painting and Abstract Expressionism, Clark has been based in New York and Paris over the course of his seven-decade career. Currently, he lives and works in Detroit. Hauser & Wirth shared news of its worldwide representation of Clark...
A SUMMER EXHIBITION in Mahon, Menorca, off the coast of Spain, brings together two artists deeply committed to color: Stanley Whitney and Yves Klein (1928-1962). “Stanley Whitney / Yves Klein: This Array of Colors” at Galería Cayón presents six recent paintings by Whitney with Klein’s “Pure Pigment.” A floor installation consisting solely of a...
South African Artist David Koloane (1938-2019) The following review presents a snapshot of recent news in African American art and related black culture: South African Artist David Koloane Died at 81 A prominent figure in apartheid-era South Africa artist David Koloane (1938-2019) died June 30. “Apartheid was a politics of space more than...
THE GREATEST OF ALL TIME. If there was any question Simone Biles is the greatest athlete in the history of gymnastics, she put all doubts to rest over the weekend at the United States Gymnastics Championships in Kansas City, Mo. The world’s top gymnast pushed new boundaries, delivered ambitious routines, and clenched her sixth...
On View presents images from noteworthy exhibitions THROUGH THE LENS of self-portraiture and symbolic domestic spaces, Los Angeles-based Genevieve Gaignard explores American constructs of identity, beauty, blackness, and whiteness. She considers racial logic and racial formation. Her latest exhibition, “I’m Sorry I Never Told You That You’re Beautiful,” features mixed-media works on panel, photographic...
“Liberal Women Protest March I” (1995) by Nike Davies-Okundaye of Nigeria THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AFRICAN ART is celebrating women artists. Over the past five years, the Smithsonian museum has doubled its holdings of art by women. Showcasing some of the recent acquisitions, “I Am… Contemporary Women Artists of Africa,” opened in June. The...
FOR AN EXHIBITION in his hometown of Baltimore Derrick Adams drew on his personal history, sourcing images from a family photo album. Inspired by the decades-old images, he made a series of paintings documenting scenes from his childhood—a pair of bridesmaids in matching turquoise blue dresses, children playing in the yard with a yellow...
SHE GOT A LOT DONE. On Monday, Toni Morrison (1931-2019) died at the age of 88. The announcement of her death prompted an outpouring of laudatory tributes to the author who wrote with authority and aplomb about the lives of black people, with black women at the center of her narratives. Artists were among...
On View: ‘Paris Noir’ Exhibition at Centre Pompidou ‘Retraces the Presence and Influence of Black Artists in France from 1950s to 2000’
Jun 29, 2025
On View: ‘Michael Armitage: Crucible,’ Paintings by Kenyan British Artist Explore Migration at David Zwirner in New York
Jun 27, 2025
Fresh Out of Graduate School, Christine Sun Kim Helped to Greatly Improve Experiences of Deaf Audiences at the Whitney Museum
Jun 24, 2025
American Sign Language Videos Explore Whitney Museum’s Collection, Including Works by Simone Leigh, Archibald Motley, Diedrick Brackens, Jacob Lawrence & More
Jun 24, 2025
Picturing Freedom: Exhibition and Pulitzer Prize-Winning Book Shed Light on Harriet Tubman’s Greatest Feat, Liberating More than 700 in Combahee River Raid
Jun 19, 2025
