Museums around the United States have organised exhibitions and special events throughout February to celebrate Black History Month. If you were disappointed by the American president’s comments yesterday, turn to one of these venues instead.
The National Museum for African American History and Culture in Washington, DC celebrates Black History Month for the first time on the National Mall with a series of programmes—including two film screenings, a symposium, a chamber performance and book signings and discussions—that are free and open to the public. The programme kicked off with a screening of the 2016 film I Am Not Your Negro, in which the late author James Baldwin—in archival footage, and narrated by Samuel L. Jackson—told a history of race relations in the US through reminiscences of the civil rights leaders Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Future events include a screening of the documentary Olympic Pride, American Prejudice about the hard victories—both in sports and culture—won by Black athletes at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin.
Susan E. Cahan, the dean of arts at Yale, discusses her recent book Mounting Frustration: the Art Museum in the Age of Black Power, written after 10 years of investigative research into racial inequality in the New York art world, in the talk What Is Contemporary? at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles on Thursday, 2 February (7pm). She will speak about the politicisation of New York museums and how institutions have historically dealt with black identity and works of art created by African Americans.
The Brooklyn Museum in New York is dedicating this month’s Target First Saturday events programme, on 4 February, to Black History Month. The programme includes screening and discussion with the co-producers of Fit the Description (6:30pm), a series of video interviews between black male civilians and black male police officers; and a live design presentation by Black Gotham Experience (6pm-9pm), a group that puts on walking tours and produces graphic novels to highlight how the African diaspora has shaped the history of New York City. The design team for the upcoming graphic novel Other Side of Wall Street will turn museum visitors into “graphical art” and “display” them live.
On 23 February, the Studio Museum in Harlem in New York will host Bearing Witness as Protest (6-8:30pm), which will include a walk through of the current exhibitions The Window and the Breaking of the Window and Circa 1970 (until 5 March). A public conversation is also planned focussing on dissent in art and how bearing witness can be a form of protest, led by the artist Oasa DuVerney, whose work is currently on show. The event is part of the Harlem-wide events programme AFROPUNK The Takeover-Harlem.
The Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia’s events programme includes Deep River: The Marian Anderson Story on 4 February (1-2pm), a performance in collaboration with the Virginia Opera to tell the story of the career and civil rights advocacy of the celebrated opera singer.
Expanding Tradition: Selections from the Larry D. and Brenda A. Thompson Collection (until 7 May) at the Georgia Museum of Art at the University of Georgia in Athens is a show of around 60 works from the 19th century to the present by African American artists, including Kara Walker and Beauford Delaney. The couple donated around 100 works from their collection to the museum in 2012.
The Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Florida will stage the exhibition Spotlight: Recent Acquisitions (2 February-5 March), which shows new works by black artists in the collection, including Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s Super Blue Omo (2016), Mickalene Thomas’s Naomi Looking Forward #2 (2016) and severak works by Willie Cole.
If you can’t make it to a museum, head to the website of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas for a blog series about African American artists in its collection. The first artist featured is the sculptor Mary Edmonia Lewis, who was also honoured with a Google doodle on Wednesday.
