A year later, mainstream museums are still grappling with this shift, as they have indeed historically prioritized the study, display, and preservation of objects in their care, and not the communities that surround them. Exceptions to these are community museums, which arose from a desire for museums to put people and local communities first, which can take the form of building collections or organizing exhibitions together.

In the US, the foundations of these museums date back to the late 1960s, when three now prominent community museums—the Anacostia Community Museum in Washington, D.C., (in 1967), the Wing Luke Museum in Seattle (1967), and El Museo del Barrio in New York (1969)—were founded as dedicated spaces for communities marginalized by mainstream institutions in their respective cities. 

“You had all these social movements from the Civil Rights and Black Power movements to the antiwar movement, to the Women’s movement, really challenging all kinds of American institutions, and museums were no exception to that,” Samir Meghelli, the Anacostia’s chief curator, said in 2019.

Below, a look at how these three community museums, as well as the ever-thriving National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago (founded 1987) and the recently reopened Buffalo AKG Art Museum (the sole mainstream institution discussed here), are continuing to move on the needle on the how museums can create community-centered, hyper-local programs.

That exhibition included more than 100 works, dating from 1800 to the present, by artists like Titus Kaphar, Karon Davis, Amy Sherald, Kehinde Wiley, Lyle Ashton Harris, and Shinique Smith. The goal was to tell a more expansive story of the African American experience. The museum was due for this type of reappraisal. It had been nearly 50 years since LACMA had mounted the landmark 1976 show “Two Centuries of Black American Art,” curated by David C. Driskell. And because half of the works in “Black American Portraits” had been newly acquired by the institution, the exhibition’s significance “became not just about the show itself, but also about changing the face of the collection in perpetuity,” Liz Andrews, a co-curator of the show, explained.

But, when the exhibition traveled to Spelman College in Atlanta earlier this year, the show’s focus shifted. A member of the Atlanta University Center, a consortium that also includes Clark Atlanta University and Morehouse College, Spelman is an HBCU, an abbreviation for the more than one hundred institutions of higher education that have been educating Black students, most as early as shortly after the Civil War. In contrast to LACMA, a show like “Black American Portraits” can be viewed and understood in a different and more nuanced way at a venue like Spelman, which has long been a place where Black artists—and Black female artists, in particular—have always had a home.

Andrews has long considered the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art as a place where “you can go see a solo exhibition of an artist perhaps who has not gotten her due with history until that exhibition, or an artist who is just about to blow up in the art world,” she said. In 2018, Deborah Roberts had a solo show there, while Afro-Cuban artist Harmonia Rosales’s traveling solo show will open at the museum on August 18. In September, an exhibition focused on the museum’s permanent collection will begin a five-venue national tour, starting at Vassar College.

Art consultant Jeremiah Ojo, who grew up in Atlanta and has worked with artists like Alfred Conteh, Patrick Quarm, and Nontsikelelo Mutiti, echoed Andrews’s sentiment, saying “most of modern and contemporary Black art and artists have come out of the lineage of the Atlanta University Center” even if the mainstream art world didn’t turn its attention to Atlanta until 2020, when after “the George Floyd uprising and awareness, people began to realize that Atlanta actually has a lot to say about what is going on in Black America,” Ojo added.  

The consortium has provided opportunities and developed scholarship around Black artists for decades, dating back to 1942 when artist Hale Woodruff, who also chaired the school’s art department, developed a juried exhibition—that became known as the Atlanta Annuals—exclusively for Black artists. That exhibition laid the groundwork for the unparalleled collection of work by 20th-century Black artists at Clark Atlanta University. Beginning in 1980, another juried show for Black artists from Atlanta was organized by the Atlanta Life Insurance, a Black-owned company that ended up amassing a voluminous collection of objects from artists including Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden and Elizabeth Catlett. Together, those shows were instrumental in the creation of the National Black Arts Festival in 1987, which helped solidify Atlanta as a hub for the arts.

The city has long boasted a committed group of art collectors, like Dameon Fisher, an orthodontist who has been living in Atlanta since the early days of the National Black Arts Festival and focuses on acquiring work by artists with ties to the Southeast US. Kent Kelley, the CFO for a software company, who moved to Atlanta in 2010 recently jumped on board, too, after spending the past decade traveling to New York, Los Angeles, and elsewhere in the world to buy art.

For collectors like Kelley and Fisher, the university museum collections at AUC have been pivotal to learning more about the lineage of Black artmaking. “It’s very important for these individuals who are building these collections to educate themselves on the history of African American art,” Fisher said.

Fisher said he has noticed “a big increase” in Atlanta-based collectors lately, making “two different art scenes here: an older art scene that is part of the established Atlanta where you have people who have collected over the years, and they’re predominantly silent [about what they collect], and then another group of folks who are coming out to different events and sharing things on social media.”

At its core, though, the AUC is an academic center meant to train the next generation of art historians, curators, artists, and critics, which it has only been ramping up in recent years. Between 2018 and 2020, the Clark Atlanta University Art Museum participated in the Diversifying Art Museum Leadership Initiative, funded by the Walton Family Foundation and the Ford Foundation. That led to the creation of the Tina Dunkley Fellowship in American Art, a joint post-baccalaureate program with Kennesaw State University’s Zuckerman Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art meant to provide emerging curators with hands-on museum training. Spearheaded by the CAUAM’s then director Maurita N. Poole, the program’s two inaugural fellows were Nzinga Simmons and TK Smith.

Then, in 2019, the AUC launched the Art History and Curatorial Studies Collective, with art historian Cheryl Finley as the inaugural director, to train undergraduate students about a career in the visual arts. “Spelman and people like Cheryl Finley are outstanding for what they represent and how they are moving our students in Atlanta University to the center of this curatorial conversation,” said New York–based artist Derek Fordjour, who did his undergraduate studies at Morehouse.

Karen Comer Lowe, who became a curator in residence at the Spelman College Museum last year, called the program “one of the most dynamic programs for the nurturing of young Black students who want to enter museum spaces.”

Another reason that Atlanta has gotten mainstream attention as a rising arts hub in the US is the recent arrival of the UTA Artist Space, a contemporary art gallery run by Arthur Lewis and connected to the major Hollywood talent agency. After staging several pop-ups in the city, including one during the inaugural Atlanta Art Week last November, UTA Artist Space opened a permanent location in the city’s Midtown neighborhood in March.

“I personally think the spark in the [Atlanta] art scene came from UTA deciding to set up shop,” said Atlanta-based art advisor Kendra Walker, who started Atlanta Art Week. “That’s when I noticed my peers in other art cities seem more interested in the city of Atlanta as an arts hub.”

Artist Alfred Conteh said that while UTA’s arrival hasn’t necessarily changed anything on the ground in Atlanta, the city is definitely “getting some more eyes on it now,” he said. However, although Atlanta has “the largest airport in the world here, the biggest tech communities outside of California, and the entertainment industry—it’s Black Hollywood,” he wonders why an art fair hasn’t also come to town.

While an art fair might provide a financial influx into the city, several people said that although Atlanta has the AUC museums and the city’s encyclopedic one, the High Museum, the city still needs more venues to show contemporary art.

According to Conteh, Atlanta will be taken even more seriously as an arts hub when “an artist that has risen to national or international prominence through Atlanta,” he said.

As with any art hub, a delicate ecosystem consisting of artists, curators, collectors, and institutions have to work together “to wave those flags” to a national audience, Fordjour said. Together, they can “change the landscape and the trajectory of how we contextualize Southern African-American artists,” Conteh said.

Such projects, which have grown in complexity over her 20-plus-year career, typically require funding from nonprofits, a landscape that’s cumbersome to navigate. And while she wants to find collectors for her work, the gallery system, which facilitates those introductions, seemed uncomfortably opaque.

“What I noticed with some of my really smart, really talented artist friends is that there is not a lot of transparency and clarity about the relationships [with their galleries],” Gaspar told ARTnews.

But then she heard about an alternative for the next phase of her career: a pilot program for an artist accelerator. More than with the art world, accelerator programs are typically associated with Silicon Valley, where they are a primary means to develop tech businesses. Such programs are like boot camp for start-ups, providing mentorship and guidance on everything needed to launch a successful business. The most famous, Y Combinator, has produced thousands of companies in its nearly 20 years in operation, including behemoths like Airbnb, DoorDash, and Instacart.

In 2020, tech entrepreneur Joey Flores asked himself what an accelerator program could do for artists. Almost a decade earlier, Flores had graduated from Y Combinator with his online radio platform, Earbits, which promoted the work of musicians. Flores saw a parallel in tech investing and art investing when considering an artist as a one-person start-up.

“I always thought there was a space for a Y Combinator–type company in the fine art world,” he told ARTnews. “So I started looking into how it would work.”

What he came up with is Inversion Art, as Flores and his cofounder, Jonathan T.D. Neil, call the platform. The company intends to recruit artists for a three-month accelerator program, during which they will work on strategies to reach their goals with a team of advisers that includes both industry veterans and newcomers. Beyond that, Inversion will provide five years of studio management, with the option to extend, handling services that include banking, accounting, marketing, legal, and inventory management. Inversion takes a 15 percent fee on all revenue generated during the studio management period, including sales, commissions, and artist fees from institutions.

In June, the platform announced that it has signed a number of artists to two-year studio management and career planning contracts, and hired an artist liaison to support the program. The accelerator is preparing to launch next year.

When Gaspar was weighing the pros and cons of joining Inversion versus a gallery, she considered the 15 percent sales commission Inversion proposes to take versus the standard gallery commission, which is typically 50 percent. But Inversion’s financial terms are a bit more involved. For artists in the accelerator program, Inversion agrees to buy artwork from its artists that is equal to 30 percent of what their practice earned the year prior to joining the accelerator, up to $100,000, holding it for at least five years and guaranteeing a 10 percent return when it’s sold. In addition, Inversion retains an option to purchase up to $500,000 in work over the following eight years at a 15 percent discount on the market rate.

This arrangement, according to Flores, is essential to the company’s growth. “If you think of art like equity, we’re buying equity in the artists in much the same way that a start-up tech accelerator would work,” Flores said.

Inversion is similar in some ways to an artist residency program, as it provides artists the space and resources they need to reach their potential, and access to a community of continued support after it ends. For example, the Studio Museum in Harlem’s residency program, which dates back to 1968, has launched many of contemporary art’s biggest stars, from David Hammons and Kerry James Marshall to Mickalene Thomas and Kehinde Wiley. And Studio Museum alums like Wiley and Titus Kaphar have launched their own respective residency programs.

Such programs introduce artists to the market with more developed practices and the prestige and connections gained from having participated. That kind of experience and entrée is what drives thousands of entrepreneurs to apply to Y Combinator every year and what Inversion hopes to offer artists. However, unlike Inversion, artist residencies are typically free, short-term programs that don’t offer ongoing career services or studio support.

An art world program similar to Inversion is NEW INC, a cultural incubator embedded in the New Museum in New York. It provides a cohort of artists with tools, mentorship, and professional development to cultivate projects that sit at the intersection of art, design, and technology. Recognizing the entrepreneurial acumen required to get ahead these days, NEW INC helps identify and manage “all the pieces of an artist’s emerging business,” director Salome Asega told ARTnews.

Recent alums include Stephanie Dinkins, a transmedia artist who won the inaugural LG Guggenheim Award last month, and a nonprofit called Kinfolk, which uses augmented reality to develop curricula dedicated to under-represented histories, including an AR app that creates monuments of figures from those histories.

Like NEW INC, Inversion reflects a larger shift happening in the art world, with artists approaching their practice the way major contemporary artist-entrepreneurs like Daniel Arsham and Takashi Murakami have. Artists nowadays are “more comfortable self-modeling as entrepreneurs,” Amy Whitaker, assistant professor of visual arts administration at New York University and the coauthor of The Story of NFTs, told ARTnews.

The art world has been slow to adapt to treating artists, traditional or not, as if they’re building businesses, Inversion cofounder Jonathan TD Neil told ARTnews. “Thinking about the business of your studio, thinking about the strategy, thinking about your ambitions, has been largely frowned upon by MFA programs,” he said.

As a result, “there are so many great artists who need extra help with the business side,” Kathy Battista, curator and former MA Contemporary Art Program Director at Sotheby’s Institute of Art in New York, told ARTnews.”

And while galleries are sometimes “exceptional advocates and supporters of artists in their practices, that’s not universal,” Neil said. And they also rarely get into “the nitty gritty of running artists’ studios,” painter Enrique Martinez Celaya, who joined Inversion as an adviser in 2022, told ARTnews.

Jeremiah Olayinka Ojo, an artist who runs the Brooklyn-based art consultancy Ilèkùn Wa, joined Inversion as an adviser in 2022. He saw the potential in approaching an artist’s career like a business, as it makes everyone “work together to make sure that this artist’s career is not only sustainable, but one that can project income,” he told ARTnews.

In early 2021, Ojo began working with Imo Nse Imeh, a Nigerian American painter and professor of African diaspora art, at Ilèkùn Wa. But as demand for Imeh’s work exploded, Imeh told ARTnews that he realized he needed more support than Ojo could provide, so Ojo introduced him to Inversion, where he joined the pilot program. Imeh just held a solo show at the August Wilson African American Cultural Center in Pittsburgh, a project that Neil played a substantial role in getting off the ground.

Neither Imeh nor Gaspar are emerging artists, like those typically applying for the art world’s highly competitive residency programs. Both their practices are more than a decade old. Inversion is not picking “people to incubate or support that have no track record,” Matt Greenleaf, a cofounder of venture capital firm MAGIC Fund, which has invested in Inversion, told ARTnews. Rather, Inversion is looking to work with artists “who have a proven track record, with at least a fellowship or [who] have already done their first solo exhibition.”

At the outset, Flores wanted to “design something that will serve artists as early as we can without them being totally risky bets.”

But identifying the right moment to buy into an artist’s career is tricky. The art market is fickle, most artists’ careers are not linear, and it can sometimes take an artist decades to achieve stable success.

“[Platforms that bring] an artist to a marketplace and help build that artist’s career over time sometimes suffer from the belief that there is a playbook; and playbooks do not necessarily work in the creative markets because creativity is so variable,” Alvin Hall, a broadcaster, author, and financial educator, told ARTnews. Hall is also a prolific art collector, whose vast holdings include works by Lee Friedlander, Carrie Mae Weems, and Lorna Simpson, among others.

To take some of that risk off the table, Inversion will approach each cohort like an investment portfolio or pool. In doing so, not every artist is expected to produce immediate returns, eschewing the winner-takes-all mentality by which galleries often play.

So even for artists doing “ambitious things that don’t pay off immediately,” Flores said, “they’re going to increase their artist profile. And then perhaps we make our money from the collection side.”

And similar to how Y Combinator invests in the ingenuity of its founders, their companies notwithstanding, Inversion, like Hollywood agencies, will be investing in talent, be it articulated through fine art or “making a feature film or designing a fashion line,” Battista said.

Of course, like any business to come out of Silicon Valley, Inversion has an answer to every VC’s first question: Is it scalable? Neil said the company hopes to grow its artists’ services into a “tech platform for studio management,” and plan to apply a fee of 12 to 15 percent on artists’ income as its fee. Inversion wants eventually to provide that service to thousands of artists, while directly investing in a few hundred.

Melissa Cowley Wolf, director of the Arts Funders Forum, told ARTnews that importing “a successful template from another sector” to the art world, as Inversion is doing, could give artists more agency as the value of their work and careers build.

“There is a fear that all artists have been taken advantage of,” Imeh, the painter and Inversion pilot participant, told ARTnews. With Inversion, he added, “we can all be better [off] having known each other.”

So says Bernard Kinsey in describing the impetus behind why he and his wife, Shirley, have spent the last almost 50 years amassing close to one thousand artworks and collectibles related to the African American experience: they want to bring those contributions forward. Early on in their collecting, Bernard was surprised to find out how many well-preserved pieces, dating back “two or three hundred years,” were available, he said.

Given what they’re trying to do, the Kinseys have taken what might at first seem like an unconventional approach to exhibiting their extensive holdings, which includes the work of Elizabeth Catlett, Hale Woodruff, Augusta Savage, and Alma Thomas. Since 2006, they’ve brought the collection to 39 venues, ranging from museums to airport lounges to a five-year stint at Epcot in Walt Disney World. Since February 2022, it has been on view at SoFi Stadium, the newly built home of the NFL’s two L.A. teams, the Chargers and the Rams. Opened in September 2020, the stadium is located in Inglewood, California, within blocks of where the Kinseys once lived.

At first, Shirley considered the idea of a show at a football stadium “over the top,” she said. “But when we think about what we’ve done in other places”—prioritizing that the collection is accessible to broad and diverse audiences—“it makes a lot of sense.”

The Kinseys’ relationship with SoFi stadium dates back to 2020, in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, when Bernard was invited to speak to the staff of Hollywood Park—a 300-acre sports and entertainment complex that includes the stadium—about the significance of Juneteenth. For Bernard, the only way to frame a narrative commemorating the emancipation of enslaved African Americans was to discuss the “myth of absence,” a concept proposed decades ago by historian Lerone Bennett, Jr. about the erasure of contributions made by Black Americans throughout history.

Bernard’s presentation was essentially “a virtual tour of the Kinsey collection,” he said. From there, the executives of Hollywood Park proposed the idea of mounting the collection inside the stadium—with one caveat: “to lean into the local,” said Jason Witt, senior director of community affairs and engagement at Hollywood Park. The resulting exhibition, “Continuum,” was organized by their son, Khalil, who has been working with his parents on the collection since 2009. Alongside the Kinsey collection, the show also features work by a group of contemporary artists of color, including Genevieve Gaignard, Rashaun Rucker, and Texas Isaiah, who were selected in collaboration with Rick Garzon, owner of the nearby Residency Art Gallery, which will participate in the Felix LA fair this week.

“There are some people who would say maybe the collection shouldn’t be in these places,” said Larry Earl, who has worked on the traveling exhibition since 2016, “but we feel that the mission is beyond preserving, it’s about educating.”

The Kinsey’s first student was, in fact, their son, whom they had in 1977. “When Khalil was born,” Shirley said, “we realized that we really had not learned anything about our culture very much in terms of historical and artistic endeavors.” That education has come full circle as Khalil, now 45 years old, has taken over the management of the collection as its chief curator moving forward. (Khalil is also starting his own gallery; Context Projects will open next year in the predominantly Black LA neighborhood of View Park-Windsor Hills.)

After he started elementary school, they noticed how little he learned about African American history. Over time, the collection grew alongside the Kinseys’ deep dives into this history. “For the last 35 or 40 years, I’ve read two hours a night, and principally on the whole African American historical record,” Bernard said. “Because of that, we’ve been able to really understand what the significant items are to bring into the collection.”

Bernard developed an intense interest in collecting Harlem Renaissance artists, like Norman Lewis and Charles Alston, and positioning those works to “stand within the canon of art history,” said Earl. By the mid-1980s, after having already purchased droves of historical works and objects, Shirley realized that the collection should also include the work by living artists, with an  eye toward artists who are influenced by the artists from that movement.

“What we often forget is that the context of seeing ourselves really has a unique meaning when you place that into an historical framework of time and events,” said Earl. “You begin to understand what was important to people and how they saw the world.”

The core “of what we’re attempting to do,” Khalil said, “is show that this is a much fuller picture [of African American history] than what we actually understand in American society. To do that takes us doing things that are not simply in museums.”

By working outside traditional art museums, the Kinseys can center the African American experience in ways that those museums often fail to do. So far, the collection has also traveled to places like the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, a number of universities, and the headquarters of Toyota in Plano, Texas. When the collection traveled to the Smithsonian in 2010, curator Lonnie G. Bunch III, now Secretary of the Smithsonian, credited it as a precursor to his hopes for the yet-to-be-constructed National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Part of the mission of the collection itself is “challenging institutions and education systems,” Khalil said, “to harness this story and to tell this story in a way that will bring more people into the picture.”

And providing that inclusive look in a way that only they, as a Black family, really can—or should. By way of example, Shirley recalled an experience the family had when the SoFi exhibition first went on view. A docent for the show saw Khalil in the space and, “she just figured he was working for whoever owned this art,” Shirley said. The docent later told them that she had “thought to herself: ‘I wonder what white people are putting this up?’”

Rick Garzon thinks that the success of “Continuum,” which has drawn in large crowds, demonstrates to the people of Inglewood “what art projects and historical projects for the community could be,” he said.

The exhibition’s first section provides historical context, beginning with “the earliest document in the collection, a 1595 baptismal record for a young African boy in St. Augustine, FL,” Khalil wrote in an email, “and ending with the Brown v. Board ruling, and letters from Dr. MLK JR. and Malcolm X,” parsing out contributions African Americans have made in between. From there, the show moves into the Kinseys collection of modern and contemporary masters, with works by William T. Williams, Artis Lane, Sam Gilliam, Ernie Barnes, and Phoebe Beasley, that set up the historical and aesthetic frameworks for the final section of contemporary art by emerging artists of the likes of Samuel Levi Jones, Haili Francis, and SlauCienega.

The show demonstrates “that the work that these artists are doing now—the kind of freedoms, the expressions that they are developing stand on their shoulders and are a way of refinement in moving forward the canon of African American art—of American art,” Earl added. For Earl, the neon-sign works by Patrick Martinez, an L.A.-based artist of Filipino, Mexican, and Native American heritage, harken back to the work of the legendary Black Panther artist Emory Douglas.

In many ways, the journey to SoFi started largely by accident. After a Los Angeles Times reporter saw all the art in the Kinsey home, a 2005 article meant to focus on the house’s architecture turned into one about the family’s collecting. From there, the California African American Art Museum came calling and featured pieces from the collection in an exhibition series on African American collectors. At that point, the Kinseys realized that they had an exhibition-worthy collection.

Over the years, the collection, as it has traveled the country, has taken on a life of its own. So much so that Shirley would often say, “Okay, we’ll do this for [a few months], and then it’ll be coming back.” Seventeen years on, it never has.

Correction, February 15, 2023: An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of a curator on the Kinsey Collection. It is Larry Earl, not Earls.

Earlier this year, United Talent Agency, one of the three major talent agencies, announced that it would open a three-story exhibition space in Atlanta in early 2023. The move is not UTA’s first in the industry. In 2015, the mega-agency founded a fine-arts division and built an exhibition space in Los Angeles the following year. In addition to spearheading entertainment deals for artists looking to branch out, the agency now mounts shows for leading contemporary artists, a mix of ones they represent and ones they don’t. Among the artists to have shown there are Derrick Adams, Ai Weiwei, Petra Cortright, Ferrari Sheppard, Conrad Egyir, Enrique Martínez Celaya, and Mandy El-Sayegh.

After a solo exhibition at the UTA Artist Space in Los Angeles earlier this year, Martínez Celaya officially joined the agency. To start, he plans on pursuing the publication of his novel, and then adapting that novel into a film. The agency has also been presenting him with other opportunities that run the gamut from acting gigs to fashion collaborations.

Even though Martínez Celaya’s relationship with UTA is relatively new, he senses that the opportunities yielded from it will be broad in scope, in particular with projects that crossover into industries beyond the art world. “I have some fantastic galleries,” he said, “but I know that some of the projects that I want to do are somewhat out of the range of what a gallery can do.”

UTA’s Atlanta venture is a continuation of this type of effort, but on a larger scale. As Arthur Lewis, partner and creative director of UTA Fine Arts, told ARTnews, the overall strategy is much “bigger than just the artist space.” UTA wants to replicate what it is already doing with its artists in L.A., namely bringing Hollywood to art and art to Hollywood, while also managing deals between visual artists and Atlanta’s wide-ranging field of TV, film, music, and sports professionals. By investing in the visual arts, Lewis thinks UTA can help Atlanta become even more of “a cultural barometer for the world,” he said.

“A lot of our clients are actually there,” Lewis added. “There’s a lot of different industries there, [so] we saw it as an opportunity to further expand our entire organization.”

While UTA may have the splashiest current venture, the other two top talent agencies—Creative Artists Agency and Endeavor—have also turned their attention to visual artists. In 2016, Endeavor, led by Ari Emmanuel, a collector in his own right who once sat on the board of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, announced a partnership with Frieze, taking a majority stake in the London-based contemporary art magazine and its global art fair operations, which has expanded from London and New York to Los Angeles and Seoul in the years since the acquisition. And CAA has been brokering deals with visual artists looking to move into film and TV for more than a decade. They represented Julian Schnabel when he made The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007). The agency is also managing brand partnerships for artists and started development on an NFT platform.

The original template for the artist-Hollywood crossover may be Arthur Jafa, winner of a Golden Lion at the 2019 Venice Biennale. He rose to the top of the art world after the 2016 debut of Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death, his seven-minute video montage of the beauty and anguish of Black life, captured New York audiences with lines around the block. Screened four days after the U.S. Presidential election, the video struck a chord with those trying to process what Trump’s win meant for America—Black America, in particular. Not too long after, CAA offered to help Jafa pursue his future film, directing, and writing projects.

UTA’s Atlanta project, however, may signal an evolution in the complexity of such partnerships. In addition to being a major film-television hub due to its generous tax incentives, Atlanta is also home to major offices for Microsoft and Google and to the Atlanta University Center, a consortium of HBCUs that includes Morehouse and Spelman Colleges, which have long supported, studied, and collected Black art.

The city is undoubtedly “poised to host something like that,” said art adviser Jeremiah Ojo. Not only because it has “millions of people who go through the [city’s] airport connecting to every corner of the globe,” he continued, but there is also “a critical mass of other infrastructure that was built to have a bunch of people come to Atlanta.”

While UTA’s overall investment in Atlanta is still very much in the works, Lewis said that the firm will start sponsoring art events in the city later this year. Jonathan T.D. Neil, co-founder of Inversion Art, an artist service and investment agency, said that in order for its investment to have real impact on the culture of Atlanta, it “would have to be done as a concerted decade-long effort.” Part of that includes “figuring out how to convene people there from other art centers,” in a way that “drives the [cultural] conversation.”

“In recognizing that Atlanta is this epicenter for Black culture and talent, [UTA] can get in on the ground to the latest and greatest stuff that’s happening,” Ojo added.

Up until now, UTA and CAA have focused on deals for artists who are already stars, like Takashi Murakami or Ai Weiwei. Historically, these deals are the most profitable for them. But a new type of artist, whether emerging or well-known, is also beginning to rise; one who wants “to be a 360 brand,” Ojo said. Agencies can manage projects for more people eager to break into other markets, from the traditional to the one for NFTs, and everything in between.

One hurdle in this strategy is that the art world typically operates under “a scarcity model,” with a limited amount of works going to institutions or a select few top collectors, Ojo said.

For agencies, managing this idea of access could prove difficult. In Hollywood’s eyes, the art world “still feels very limiting,” Nguyen said, noting that agencies like his “want to democratize art. We’re interested in reaching the 99 percent.”

From a business standpoint, UTA’s artist space in Atlanta can operate the same way it has in Los Angeles, serving as a meeting ground for the two industries. When painter Arcmanoro Niles exhibited there two years ago, the dinner UTA organized to celebrate the show brought together “top collectors, great art people, and people in Hollywood who have an interest in art,” Lewis said. For local artists, Ojo predicted this means UTA offers the possibility to raise “the standard of what art support can look like.”

And that’s in a traditional sense and otherwise. While the agencies have been dabbling in the art world for years now, UTA’s latest efforts show a deeper commitment to the field. In that way, it’s still an open question how the agency’s involvement in the art world is really going to take shape.

In the end, Martínez Celaya predicts “there will be other models that will appear in the world,” he said, “because this is showing the possibility of what agency-type relationships can do.”

One full-service artist-representation firm, in particular, has already broken into the field. Marine Tanguy founded MTArt seven years ago with the goal of disrupting the traditional model of artist management. The boutique firm provides services like retail activations, curation, or public relations. With offices already in Paris, London, and Monaco, Tanguy is planning on opening in Los Angeles next year. One of the agency’s most recent projects involves bringing a sculpture by artist Lorenzo Quinn to the public art component of the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. The goal, Tanguy said, is to “be that full 360 where this is a house; this is what they do everything in.”

In the end, talent agents are adamant that they don’t pose a threat to art dealers. They see themselves as wanting to support various forms of storytelling. “There are so many of these young artists who are already in all of these different mediums,” said Lewis. “They’re great storytellers. And we’re looking for great diverse stories to be told.”

Correction, November 1, 2022: An earlier version of this article misstated Lorenzo Quinn’s surname. It is Quinn, not McQueen.

For one so outwardly social, Johnson doesn’t seem to care much for small talk these days. Close friends and acquaintances alike describe him as measured and thoughtful in what he says, and they tend to go out of their way to remark on how much they benefit from even run-of-the-mill conversations with him. When Mesler catches up with Johnson, the most mundane talk is liable to turn “crazy philosophical”—and, interestingly enough, to compel Mesler, who hates talking on the phone, to hop on the line with Johnson three or four times a day.

Talking to the many people in Johnson’s orbit, one gets a nagging suspicion that quite a few of his relationships defy type. Collectors of his work are also friends who regularly seek out his advice on matters unrelated to art. His studio manager, who oversees the production of the large-scale paintings for which the artist is best known, doubled as his movie producer in 2019 when Johnson made his first feature film, a contemporary adaptation of Richard Wright’s Native Son. That same studio manager’s sister starred in an adaptation of Amiri Baraka’s 1964 play Dutchman, which Johnson restaged in a sweltering bathhouse in New York.

And then there are the artists he mentors and supports. Alteronce Gumby’s nearly 10-year history with Johnson dates back to when he was a student at Hunter College. Johnson gave him one of his first artist crits, and, when Gumby went on to graduate studies at Yale, he linked up with Johnson to get tips on what to do next in his career. A coffee date in SoHo was followed by a lunch meeting in Paris some years later, when Gumby was there to do a residency, and Johnson to install a piece for a show at the Louis Vuitton Foundation.

Rashid Johnson’s Stacked Heads, from 2020, on view at Hauser & Wirth in Somerset, England.

After Gumby made a surprise visit in 2017 to the opening of Johnson’s show at the Hauser & Wirth gallery in Somerset, England, Johnson offered to include him in “COLOR PEOPLE,” a group exhibition that Johnson was curating at Mesler’s Rental Gallery in East Hampton—where Gumby’s work was ultimately displayed alongside pieces by Mary Heilmann, Robert Colescott, and Sam Gilliam. Not knowing where to stay in the Hamptons for the opening, Gumby ended up crashing at Johnson’s house. Sheree Hovsepian, Johnson’s wife, had casually offered Gumby a room, and after only a few casual encounters with Johnson, Gumby somehow got the sense that he could take her up on it.

Describing how Johnson treats people in his circle, Gumby recalled a podcast episode he’d listened to hosted by the rapper N.O.R.E. “He had Fat Joe on there, and Fat Joe was talking about how everyone who was around him during the 2000s—everyone ate,” he said. “Rashid is one of those people: If you are around him, you’re gonna eat.”

Artists at the level of success and stature that Johnson has reached tend to face an onslaught of people expecting help. Black artists, in particular, have worked inside and outside the system to formalize that help, by establishing grants, residencies, art schools, and other avenues specifically for artists of color. Johnson tends to focus his wide-ranging support in and around the New York art world—like an insider from the outside and an outsider on the inside.

He certainly does not present the picture of an introvert—which he claims to be. “My relationship to anxiety that’s illustrated in my work is not a fiction,” Johnson said, referring to his “Anxious Men” series of drawings, which he once compared to self-portraits with violent scrawls taking the place of eyes and mouths. “I think we often mischaracterize what [‘introvert’] means. Introverts are people who can go out and engage and interact, but it takes something out of them.”

Rashid Johnson’s Fatherhood, from 2015.

Despite this, Johnson is confident enough in what he has to say—in his work and otherwise—that he puts himself out there quite a lot. He sought out his first dealer, Monique Meloche, in his early 20s, asking her to represent him shortly after she opened her Chicago-based gallery two decades ago. “He was making a lot of Afro-futurist constellation abstract photographs using very culturally relevant objects like chicken bones, cotton seeds, black-eyed peas, and barber shavings,” Meloche recalled. “But there was a lot of homogeneity in it”—so Meloche agreed to represent Johnson on two conditions: “If you don’t make any more chicken bones, and if you go to grad school.”

Taking her seriously, Johnson enrolled in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He dropped out a few classes shy of graduating, however, and moved to New York in 2005 “because he had big ambitions,” Meloche remembered. “He was born and raised in Chicago. He wanted to get out of Dodge.”

Bernard Williams, a fellow Chicago artist who had befriended Johnson while they were both working with the Black-owned gallery G.R. N’Namdi, considered his move to New York particularly bold. “That’s something that I always respected with him, because he had tons of support in Chicago and probably could have done a lot of stuff out of Chicago,” Williams said. “There’s just more opportunity in New York.”

Whenever Meloche visited New York in those early days, she would invite curators and dealers interested in seeing Johnson’s work to parties in his tiny studio. “Rashid certainly had his struggles, and he had a limited budget,” said his friend and collector Daniel S. Berger. “What was so compelling to me was his tenacity and his genuine perseverance to succeed.”

In terms of “conceptual notions of Black abstraction,” Berger continued, “Rashid, along with other artists like Mark Bradford, has ignited the public’s interest.” He is also “responsible for igniting interest in some of the older African American artists who would have been forgotten—like Sam Gilliam, Alma Thomas, Ed Clark, and Norman Lewis.”

At the same time, Johnson’s influence has spread beyond his art practice to administrative roles he has taken on at the institutional level, as an adviser and a member of multiple museum boards. Twenty years ago, “there were no artists represented on museum boards,” said Meloche. “There were certainly not a lot of people of color on museum boards. So the times have caught up with his other ambitions.”

As Mesler put it, “What he’s actually done and helped to make happen—I think it’s even more than people realize.”

Rashid Johnson’s Triple Consciousness, from 2009.

When Johnson was a kid, he noticed how few Black artists were represented in museums around Chicago. Later, as a young adult, seeing exhibitions like Kara Walker’s at the Renaissance Society or Gary Simmons’s at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago helped him understand how gratifying it can be “to see Black thought and have Black awareness in these kinds of cultural institutions for a young person.”

Having his own child—he and Hovsepian have a 10-year-old son, Julius—solidified his “thinking about the future and the world that [his son and others] will continue to step into,” said Isolde Brielmaier, Johnson’s longtime friend and the recently appointed deputy director of the New Museum in New York. “He cares very deeply about the art ecosystem, particularly for those of us who are underrepresented, and he’s reached a stage in his career where he has impact and reach and influence.”

While Johnson knows that institutions are in crisis and, in some ways, even inherently flawed, he remains committed to trying to make them better. “From a pragmatic position, I grew up going to these places,” he said. “These places still have relevance. These places are still some of the spaces in which we see our recorded histories, whether they’re contemporary or ancient. I think if we’re not active in changing the discourse and dialogue and language around those spaces, we’re doing everyone a disservice.”

In 2020, as a new board member of the Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University, Johnson gave a speech about the history of cultural institutions, laying out dates and actions to illustrate which ones were more—or less—effectively embracing communities of color. While museum director Lisa Graziose Corrin listened, what resonated most with her wasn’t so much what Johnson said but how he said it. Speaking with “moral authority,” Corrin recalled, he came across to her as someone “who has been inside the system but has a unique capacity to stand outside the system and look at it very objectively.”

Of all his board positions, Johnson has been the most deeply involved with the Guggenheim Museum, which he joined in 2016. His presence there was especially significant following public allegations of internal racism issued by Chaédria LaBouvier, the guest curator of the Guggenheim’s 2019 exhibition “Basquiat’s ‘Defacement’: The Untold Story.”

As controversy swirled, “with all kinds of new truths emerging, he became the person who could help us analyze what was happening, tell us about what had happened, and then really help us devise a solution and a way forward,” said Guggenheim director Richard Armstrong. Referring to him as an “oak tree in the storm,” Armstrong explained how Johnson would sit squarely at the center of “dialogue from not only trustees but also staff, saying, ‘Here’s how to redirect that question’—not in an accusatory way but much more on the level of earned wisdom.”

Shying away from taking this much credit, Johnson downplayed his specific contribution. “I just feel like being in the room and championing diversity is a point of interest for me,” he said, “as well as making an investment and [having] involvement in other aspects of how the institution imagines itself in the landscape. I don’t want to handcuff myself to being exclusively invested in diversity.”

Navigating that double bind is common practice for Black people in the field. Like many other BIPOC folks dedicated to museum work, his focus is on the potential for museums to become sites for his cultural heritage too. Johnson said he doesn’t believe “there is a cabal at cultural institutions who sit in a circle and aspire to close the doors to Black and brown folks and women. I think that a lot of that is born by circumstances where diversity and different aspects of diversity aren’t inherently prioritized.”

Johnson’s video work Samuel in Space, from 2013, installed at Ballroom Marfa.

Johnson received a good deal of institutional support early on, particularly after Thelma Golden included him in “Freestyle,” a seminal group exhibition of Black artists at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2001. At the time, Williams was working near Johnson in a New York studio where the walls of the spaces didn’t quite reach the ceiling, so he was able to eavesdrop on a visit paid to Johnson by influential collectors Mera and Don Rubell. Asked if his friend seemed nervous, Williams laughed and said, “Not really. He was right on top of it.”

Looking back, Johnson said his advice for young artists now is to do everything their own way, for good and bad. “You can’t really mimic another artist’s approach,” he said. “I’m talking about the ways of showing your ways of being, ways of discussing your work, ways of contextualizing your work to best fit your personality.”

Limits, boxes, stereotypes, tropes—Johnson is more allergic than most to what they represent. And despite the market pressures many artists feel to stay in one lane, he has made his practice artistically varied.

In 2013, he collaborated on a project with Ballroom Marfa cofounder Fairfax Dorn, who said Johnson appreciated how her institution was “so experimental, and that we were not afraid to take risks.” Johnson produced one of his first video works there—and joined Ballroom Marfa’s board shortly after.

He made a similar move with Performa, the New York–based performance art biennial known for its experimental ethos. For the festival in 2013, he made his first foray into directing with Dutchman—and then joined Performa’s board the following year. (This past August, he was named chair.)

A still from Johnson’s feature film adaptation of Richard Wright’s Native Son.

In many ways, Johnson’s presentation of Dutchman laid the groundwork for his pivot into feature filmmaking, Native Son. A big part of why he wanted to make another version of the story, Johnson said, was to create an “autonomous Black character navigating the world with their own sensibility.” His goal was to take a narrative structure “and then turn it on its head—and produce this other Black outsider narrative.”

In Johnson’s remake, the main protagonist, Bigger Thomas, has green hair and the look and attitude of an out-and-out punk. After Barack and Michelle Obama presented themselves on a national stage as “unequivocally accomplished, brilliant, capable Black protagonists,” Johnson said, “that made me feel like we no longer needed to be protected from Bigger, as if showing him would neutralize Negro progress. Black characters can be problematic and flawed and complicated.”

Celebrated playwright Suzan Lori Parks, who wrote the screenplay for Native Son, said she and Johnson wanted the story to resonate with the “experiences Black folks live today.” From their first conversation about the project, Parks felt as if they “were on the same page.” And not knowing too much about Johnson before then, Parks was struck by how he showed profound “respect, not just for the original work but for me and for what I do.”

“A lot of brothers or sisters out there don’t know how to support each other,” Parks continued. “He’s just one of those brothers who knows how to work with a sister. And that is no small thing.”

A version of this article appears in the December 2021/January 2022 issue of ARTnews, under the title “From Outside In.”