Black art speaks to diverse audiences about the lived experiences of Black artists and Black people. It is an ideal way to connect to and understand the conditions under which they exist through unadulterated dialogue between artists and audiences.

Fresh off her epic pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2022, Simone Leigh was given a retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston; it traveled to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and will continue to move audiences as it travels to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2024. “Wangechi Mutu: Intertwined,” the astounding mid-career retrospective showing the dynamism of Mutu’s skills in artistic mediums including painting, sculpture, and video art, debuted at the New Museum in New York City and will move to the New Orleans Museum of Art early next year. At the Baltimore Museum of Art, “The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century” celebrated hip-hop’s 50th anniversary with almost 90 artists exhibited, including Mark Bradford, Carrie Mae Weems, and Arthur Jafa. There were also noteworthy exhibitions of Faith Ringgold, Kehinde Wiley, Charles Gaines, Amoako Boafo, Charles White, and Betye Saar.

Unfortunately, not all the exhibitions featuring work by Black artists can be covered in a single article. Unlike Leigh and Mutu’s retrospectives, which were surrounded by much hype, the artists below had major exhibitions—equally expressive of the Black experience—that deserve more notice.

Because Evans only first learned about the history of African American art as an adult, his commitment to sharing his collection with the world has the lofty ambition of helping to spread awareness to these often-overlooked artists. And that vision became a reality when he donated some 60 works to the Savannah College of Art and Design nearly two decades ago. But Evans also wants museum viewers to find pleasure in the viewing experience of these works as he as over the years. Showing the collection publicly has become “an incredible learning experience, for me and for the viewer,” he said.

Growing up in Savannah in the 1940s and ’50s, Evans didn’t visit art museums as a child, so it wasn’t until he was in the Navy in the 1960s that he developed a love for them. He had met a young lady who wanted to visit the Philadelphia Museum of Art on their first date. To prepare, Evans went to the library, where the librarian recommended that he study up on French Impressionism and take note of artists like Monet and Renoir. “It was mostly superficial,” he recalled, “but [the young lady] was duly impressed that I knew this stuff.” They visited museums up and down the Eastern Seaboard from Boston to Washington D.C. over the year and a half they were dating. But, he still hadn’t encounter art by African Americans up to this point.

“I became addicted to going to museums,” he said. “There was no question about it. It changed my whole life.” But his collecting journey didn’t begin until after he moved to Detroit where he completed his general surgery residency at Wayne State University in 1976. There, he encountered art by African American artists for the first time. One of the works that made a lasting impression were a series of gouache paintings, titled The Legend of John Brown (1941), by Jacob Lawrence that are now in the collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts. (In the 1970s, the DIA commissioned Lawrence to create a suite of silkscreen prints based on the original paintings as they had become too fragile to display.) Shirley Ann Woodson Reid, a local artist, encouraged him to purchase a complete edition of the 22 silkscreen prints.

Soon, Evans was invited to New York by a colleague who was hosting a reception for Romare Bearden, where he met the artist, his wife, and his agent. Evans asked the agent if he might be able to host a reception for Bearden at his home in Detroit, and a few months later, 300 people gathered in his home to toast Bearden, and buy art by the acclaimed collagist, which sold out. Shortly thereafter, Evans began hosting an informal artist residency at his home in Detroit, where artists like Elizabeth Catlett and many others, would stay at his home and then go to schools and colleges to meet the community. It lasted from the late 1970s until 2001, when Evans retired.

With his wife, Linda, Evans started collecting when competition for African American artworks was negligible. “At the time, the museums weren’t interested in spending any money. They were accepting gifts and they weren’t showing it anyway,” he said. His only main competition at the time came from now disgraced actor Bill Cosby, who was amassing his own significant collection of African American art. “Now, if Bill Cosby was in the audience or his curator David C. Driskell,” he added, “there was no way I was going to get it because I didn’t have the financial resources that he had.” Evans was often able to buy works directly from artists.

After his retirement, Evans began investing in real estate to revitalize the downtown area of Savannah, and he caught the attention of Barry Buxton, then the development director at Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) who invited Evans to tour SCAD’s campus. That would eventually lead to Evans gifting 62 artworks by artists as illustrious as Catlett, Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, Alma Thomas, and Edward Mitchell Bannister, among others, to the SCAD Museum of Art in 2005.

Though it was in need of repair at the time, the building that now houses the collection had once been a railroad depot built by African Americans, with bricks made by African Americans. These historic bricks were repurposed to make up the lower front façade of the museum building with modern concrete and glass encasing the building’s upper portion. Evans felt that the history of the building and the bricks would add a certain resonance to experience the works in person.

The building that houses the collection today is SCAD Museum of Art, which regularly features the work of contemporary African American artists in conversation with art from the Evans collection. Earlier this year, for example, emerging artist Chase Hall’s wonderfully nostalgic figurative paintings and installations were featured in the Evans Center for African American Studies in conversation with Jacob Lawrence’s paint brushes that were gifted to the museum by Evans.

In 2011, the university opened the Walter and Linda Evans Center for African American Studies to serve as a place for research and conservation for the works. Both the center and the museum have focused on preserving the legacies of figures like Jacob Lawrence and Frederick Douglass, and bringing them into the present alongside contemporary artists like Hall, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Kenturah Davis, and Nina Chanel Abney, whose exhibition “Big Butch Energy/Synergy” is currently on view in the Evans Center for African American Studies. “We are honored to continue to enrich the lives of many by illuminating these important works of art to students and SCAD Museum of Art guests,” said Daniel S. Palmer, the museum’s chief curator.

Over a 20-year period, Evans toured an exhibition of more than 70 artworks to some 50 venues, and artworks from the collection are still regularly on loan to museums around the world. That traveling exhibition including the artwork of Edward Mitchell Bannister, Richmond Barthe, Margaret Burroughs, and many other Black artists working in the 19th and 20th centuries.  

As art historian Tritobia Hayes Benjamin writes in an essay for a catalogue of the collection, “Evans has revealed his preferences for a multiplicity of stylistic approaches: figuration, portraiture, studies of domestic and social events, and narrative content central to the lives of black people. Nature is also revered in the traditional landscapes and meticulous floral arrangements of selected artists.” Benjamin notes that the 150-year span of artworks in Evans’ collection in particular shows the breadth of artistic expression.

Surprisingly, the number of artworks Evans still owns today is hard to pin down for the collector. “I can’t put a number on it. I don’t want to say thousands, and then people say, ‘You mean prints or photographs too?’ So, no I would never put a number on it,” he said. “I was buying art for my home, but also so my daughters would be able to see that African Americans were doing work on the same level as European Americans.”

When asked how he selected works to add to his collection, Evan said, “But most of what I collected was because I liked it.”

The Drexciyan mythos proposes that the unborn children of these women emerged from the womb with the ability to breathe underwater and that their descendants form the aquatic metropolis of Drexciya. As with most origin stories, the details seem implausible, but the tale is an empowering account of resistance in the face of oppression.

The creators of the Drexciya legend weren’t writers but a Detroit electronic music duo of the same name who released three studio albums between 1999 and 2002. The collaboration, comprising Gerald Donald and the late James Stinson, might have intended for their invention to be militarized, as evidenced by the album art and the music’s aggressive drumbeat. But a number of Black women artists, inspired by their creation, have seen the potential for feminine energy to be a central part of the story. These artists complicate the Drexciya myth by adding depth to the often-bellicose conceptions of its creators. In robust interrogations of the tale, the five Black women artists below employ various genres and media to depict Drexciya as a sophisticated outpost of African culture.

She approached the evening’s emcees, saying, “These two guys I met in New York told me to come here on Tuesday. I don’t know anybody.” They replied, “You know us.” It instantly felt like family, she recalled. Now, almost 30 years on, that first open mic night, in fact, proved consequential. 

A master’s in journalism from Columbia University had brought Bass to D.C., but it was her bachelor’s degree in dance from Sarah Lawrence College that led her to pursue performance art. At Sarah Lawrence, she was a student of Viola Farber, an original member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. “Through Merce Cunningham, you learn about John Cage, you learn about Robert Rauschenberg, and so this really close connection between movement, music, and visual art existed,” Bass said.

Now a major figure in the D.C. art scene who was recently a finalist for the National Portrait Gallery’s 2022 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, Bass is the subject of a collaborative exhibition, with emerging performance artist Maps Glover, at the city’s Transformer gallery. In “Double Rainbow: PRISMMMs” is documentation of one particularly compelling piece the two did together. Pretending To Be Rock (2019) shows Glover as he hangs from a harness, cold water dripping down his body, while Bass is seen on all fours, candlewax dripping onto her back. A recreation of a performance piece by Sherman Fleming but with the gender roles reversed, it was hard to view but even more difficult to ignore.

With this exhibition, Bass said she wanted to create an intergenerational dialogue. A generation older than her, Fleming was an emerging artist in D.C. when Bass moved to the city; he has since moved to Philadelphia. “Sherman was definitely this up-and-coming, hot young artist in D.C. And to hear his perspective, I don’t think he felt supported by the city, which I think contributed to him leaving” she said.  That was also her motivation behind collaborating with Glover, who is a generation younger than Bass and whom she called an “incredibly talented young artist,” adding “I worry about the younger generation being able to find affordable housing and artists spaces in D.C.”

An important part of why she does her work is because she wants artists to stay in D.C. Over the past three decades, Bass has witnessed the district’s change from a predominantly Black city to one with a more diverse ethnic landscape. The one thing that has remained constant, however, is D.C.’s invisibility in the larger artistic scene. “I feel like D.C. has incredible artists, but we don’t always get the same shine that other places do,” she said of the city that produced the Washington Color School, among whose most famous exponents, include Alma Thomas and Sam Gilliam, who have both only received mainstream attention in the past decade. She added, “The Harlem Renaissance actually started in D.C. It was a new Negro Renaissance, and D.C. was one of the hubs of that renaissance.”

As with her collaborative work, Bass’s solo work has been influential in expanding how performance art is seen within the wider art world. Her performance–cum–portrait American Woman (2021) is a video work, showing Bass, seen from head to toe, in a pristine white space, wearing a red jumpsuit with a gold belt and open-toe high heels painted with the American flag. When it was exhibited as part of last year’s Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, the video monitor was bordered with a highly baroque gold frame, a nod to the history of portraiture.

Won in 2016 by Amy Sherald, the Outwin is among the country’s most important competitions dedicated solely to supporting innovations within the field of portrait, though the National Portrait Gallery, which administers it, didn’t accept photographic entries until just a few years ago. Bass was motivated to enter the 2022 competition because of another D.C. artist, Sheldon Scott, who was a finalist with a video portrait in 2019.

Bass sees American Woman as an important step in the evolution—and expansion—of the definition of portraiture. “I see the work as representing a kind of persona that is Black women—personified or not personified. Black women are embodied through this one figure,” she said.

Over the course of her performance in front of the camera, Bass uses a chiffon American flag scarf to transform herself into different women from across history. All the while, she moves her body dramatically to give life to the narration and music that plays in the background. “When I wrap the scarf around my head one way and we hear the voice of Fannie Lou Hamer, I’m representing that sharecropper. I’m representing my grandmother,” she explained. “When I tie it around my neck, and we hear the voice of Shirley Chisolm, I represent the political ambitions and contributions [of Black women].”

She added, “It’s not a portrait of me. I don’t see that work as a self-portrait. I really see American Woman as this broad conceptual portrait.”

As part of Simone Leigh’s American Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale, Leigh and curator Rashida Bumbray invited Bass to perform American Woman as part of the exhibition’s Loophole of Retreat, a three-day gathering and symposium of Black women artists and scholars that focused on creative and intellectual labor of Black women and also included fellow artists like Firelei Báez, Ja’Tovia Gary, Grada Kilomba, Lorraine O’Grady, Okwui Okpokwasili, and Tourmaline.

Though American Woman is meant to represent a broad cross-section of Black American women, for Bass the work is a deeply personal one, inspired by her family’s own history of building wealth over the past several generations. Bass is the first person in her family who has never picked cotton. Her first solo show in 2016, “Root Work,” was a response to a story her father told her about picking cotton as a sharecropper during the Jim Crow era. From before the sun rose until after the sun set, 15-year-old Hollie Earl Bass worked at the fields, earning, at most for one day’s work, $7.50 in 1960. “All of the labor and all of the sacrifices of my parents and my parents’ parents, it’s given me the opportunity to do artistic labor and intellectual labor,” she said.