It was a great year in Black art from New York to the San Francisco Bay. In 2023 it was featured throughout the country in a wealth of blockbuster exhibitions that garnered considerable attention, establishing Black artists as some of the most esteemed in the world.
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.
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“Kwame Brathwaite: Things Well Worth Waiting For”
Image Credit: Courtesy Art Institute of Chicago. Kwame Brathwaite’s photography produced an Afro-diasporic shift in thinking about the physical characteristics of Blackness. His 2023 exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, “Kwame Brathwaite: Things Well Worth Waiting For” (named after a review the photographer penned about Stevie Wonder’s album Songs in the Key of Life), surveys a 20-year span of the artist’s work.
Grace Deveney, curator of the exhibition, told a PBS outlet, “He’s essentially synonymous with the Black Is Beautiful movement, in developing the aesthetic that we associate with it and creating the images that allow us to look back and understand its trajectory.”
The exhibition that occupied two galleries at the museum displayed a broad swath of Brathwaite’s work, including magazine photography and articles, album covers, and color slides from the 1960s to the 1980s. Because most of Brathwaite’s work was commercial in nature, much of this material was on view in an exhibition for the first time.
In 1974 Brathwaite traveled with the Jackson Five to Africa to document their tour, and in the same year he photographed Muhammad Ali and George Foreman’s “Rumble in the Jungle” boxing match in the Democratic Republic of Congo. He was also a photographer of album covers for the iconic jazz label Blue Note Records. And he photographed legends, including Bob Marley, Thelonius Monk, Cicely Tyson, and many others.
In addition to the star power that his camera captured, he also documented the social and cultural dynamics of his time in photographs that depicted Black people as beautiful. Sadly, Brathwaite passed away five weeks after the exhibition opened.
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“Henry Taylor: B Side”
Image Credit: Ron Amstutz. Henry Taylor is known for his effervescent figurative paintings of Black families, celebrities, and people on the street. “Henry Taylor: B Side,” his first career survey, originally organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles and now on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, includes more than 130 of Taylor’s works from the 1980s to the present.
“His paintings brilliantly balance a sense of tenderness, care, and community with keen wit, pointed critique, and a sense of broad social awareness,” Scott Rothkopf, senior deputy director and Nancy and Steve Crown Family Chief Curator at the Whitney, noted in the press release announcing the opening in New York.
One striking artwork in the exhibition, The Times Thay Ain’t A Changing, Fast Enough (also featured in the 2017 Whitney Biennial), depicts the deadly interaction between Philando Castile and police officer Jeronimo Yanez during a traffic stop.
In addition to paintings, the exhibition features rarely seen drawings of patients at the Camarillo State Mental Hospital, where Taylor worked while attending art school, and “painted objects,” a grouping of artworks created by painting on everyday items like cigarette packs and cereal boxes. Through painting, drawing, sculpture, and installation, this exhibition celebrates Taylor’s penchant for artistic experimentation, as well as his social commentary.
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“Tracey Rose: Shooting Down Babylon”
Image Credit: Hai Zhang. Courtesy Queens Museum, New York. Tracey Rose is known for her performative practice that is often accompanied by photography, video, installation, sculpture, film, and digital prints. Her retrospective “Tracey Rose: Shooting Down Babylon,” an overview of the artist’s work since the 1990s, was exhibited at the Queens Museum in New York City. It was originally conceived at Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town, South Africa, and in its American iteration it became tamer with the expectation that children would be part of the Queens Museum audience.
Rose is a radical voice who speaks to issues of colonialism, gender, sexuality, race, and repatriation in the context of a post-apartheid South Africa, where she lives and works. She often uses her body as a site for protest, outrage, resistance, and discourse. In one work, Span II, performed in 1997, the artist sat in a glass box and shaved off her body hair and then knotted it in strands like rosary beads, a pointed reference to the practice in which South African authorities would place a pencil in a person’s hair to see if it slid out or stuck, thereby classifying the subject as white, colored, or Black. “Tracey’s work, for me, isn’t afraid to talk about topics such as post-apartheid South Africa, racism, all the things that are still incredibly relevant now, and especially in a U.S. context,” Lauren Hayes, director of curatorial affairs and programs at the Queens Museum, told theNew York Times.
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“Frank Bowling: The New York Years 1966–1975”
Image Credit: Don Ross. Courtesy SFMOMA. Though abstract expressionism has been considered the domain of white male artists, Frank Bowling—along with peers like Howardina Pindell, Sam Gilliam, and Jack Whitten—exists in the space as somewhat of an outlier. “Frank Bowling: The New York Years 1966–1975,” at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, was his first retrospective in more than 40 years.
The decade featured in the show was an exciting time in art, and Bowling’s work exemplifies that excitement. The exhibition featured 43 works through which he developed painterly techniques such as pouring, using gravity to create depth and spontaneity on his canvases. Because he was a Black artist, many expected Bowling to work on art that had political undertones. But he was drawn to abstraction and argued for his rights as a Black man to paint about matters aside from politics.
Bowling grew up in Guyana when it was still colonized by Britain, eventually moving to the colonizing nation to attend the Royal College of Art in London on a scholarship. Frustrated with the London art scene’s focus on figuration, he moved to New York in the 1960s, shortly after the Civil Rights Act became law and during the time of Vietnam protests.
“This move quickly propelled his work as he developed his large-scale ‘map paintings’ that bridge recognizable imagery in the hazy outlines of continents with vast textured expanses of color,” Marin Sarve-Tarr, assistant curator of painting and sculpture at SFMOMA, told Forbes.
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“Sonya Clark: We Are Each Other”
Image Credit: PD Rearick. Community is pivotal to Sonya Clark’s art. “Sonya Clark: We Are Each Other,” a mid-career survey of the artist’s work over the past 25 years, allows museum visitors to actively engage with a sordid American past and imagine a more collaborative future.
Clark commits to issues of history, race, and reconciliation by using a range of textile techniques including weaving, braiding, quilting, and beading to center her participatory projects. Instead of presenting herself as the sole author of her artwork, Clark aims to build community relations through it.
“Selfhood, especially when it comes to artistic practice, especially when we think about it through a Western mode, which I resist, is this self-identity, the artist as genius—I’m not calling myself a genius, but this solo person who makes this thing,” Clark explained to Forbes.
Unraveling is a performance piece in which Clark and community members unravel a Confederate flag thread by thread. She considers a replacement flag in Monumental Cloth, a replica of the dishcloth that served as Robert E. Lee’s white flag of surrender to end the Civil War; community members, too, can loom their own monumental cloths. Debuting at the Cranbrook Art Museum in Detroit, the exhibition traveled to the High Museum in Atlanta and will later move to the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City.
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“Gary Simmons: Public Enemy”
Image Credit: Sean Drakes/Getty Images. Gary Simmons confronts critical issues concerning race that are as important today as they were when he started his art career 30 years ago. “Gary Simmons: Public Enemy,” the artist’s first comprehensive career survey, was organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and is now at the Pérez Art Museum Miami. Through the lens of sports, literature, music, architecture, and urbanism, Simmons looks critically at white supremacy through 70 works comprising painting, sculpture, and video.
Since his 1993 inclusion in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Biennial, co-curated by Thelma Golden, Simmons has used conceptual art to confront how racial ideas proliferate throughout society. In the 1993 biennial, the artist exhibited one of his wall drawings, Wall of Eyes, in which cartoonish eyes referencing racist imagery were rendered by smudging chalk on a painted wall. This technique of erasure would become his signature gesture.
“His work is about collective memory—what do we forget and why,” Rene Morales, chief curator at MCA told The New York Times. Simmons entered the artworld in the early nineties after the collapse of the art market, which paved the way for politically engaged artists to emerge, as the artworld became interested in confronting the social and economic realities of that decade.
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“Lonnie Holley: If You Really Knew”
Image Credit: Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami. Self-taught artist Lonnie Holley is known for using discarded objects to create meaningful art. “Lonnie Holley: If You Really Knew,” exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami, focused on the artist’s improvisational turning of personal hardships into drawings, paintings, sculpture, photography, performance, and sound.
As one of 27 children, the 73-year-old artist spent time in foster care and in a juvenile detention facility. Holley focuses not on hardship, but on art, showing that anyone or anything can be greater than the sum of its parts. “Holley’s work is not just aesthetically compelling, but it also challenges viewers to rethink their relationships to objects, discarded items, and the environment,” MOCA curator Adeze Wilford explained to See Great Art.
The exhibition of sculpture, painting, and music included 70 works, including sculpture, drawings, and large-scale quilt paintings. Holley’s passion for inspiring social change through art has resulted in a body of work that explores US history, the environment, and his own memories. For the North Miami exhibition, Holley also curated a section dedicated to outsider artists Purvis Young, Thornton Dial, Mary T. Smith, and Hawkins Bowling. Although he is an Alabama native, it was Holley’s first retrospective in the South.