“Today’s training is about context,” said Renee Franklin, director of community partnerships for the Saint Louis Art Museum, “and putting African-American art and artists in the historical context of American museums.”
On Friday morning, an audience of museum docents – nearly all white –attentively listened to a presentation about incorporating the black experience, whenever relevant, as they guide tours through the museum.
“With mainstream museums in America, our mission is to collect, present and preserve cultural history from around the world,” Franklin said. “So our very mission as you walk through the gallery is about inclusion. I think we would all agree there are voices that are excluded from that discourse or that conversation. “
In fact, Bridget R. Cooks wrote the book on that.
She is an art history scholar, professor of art history and African American studies at the University of California-Irvine, and author of Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Museum.
“The scarcity of information about black artists in museums is parallel to the representation of black artists in art history,” Cooks said.
“I wrote Exhibiting Blackness in the effort to create a critical framework for understanding the roles of race, power, visibility and politics of representation within American art history.”
Cooks gave the docents an overview of black art’s presence – or absence – in major art institutions, then delivered a talk for the general public on Saturday morning at the Regional Arts Commission.
“Visiting and working in mainstream museums, I found the regular omission of art on view by African and African-American people. And when there was work of African-American artists or exhibits on view, I noticed a few other things,” Cooks said.
“First, black artists are featured in museums within group exhibitions about being black. It was rare to see black artists in thematic or stylistic exhibitions. And when their art was on display, the object label for work by black artists stated that they were black.”
She started with Negro Art Week exhibition in 1927, said to be the first exhibit of African and African-American art by a major museum. A collaboration between the Chicago Institute of Art and the Chicago Women’s club (an all-white organization), the exhibit was housed in the children’s museum. Artists were asked to “conform as near as possible to the standards set by regular art museum exhibitions and exhibition gallery,” Cooks said.
Cooks discussed the assumed inferiority imposed on artists of color that persists to the present day and the struggle for black artists to coexist, express themselves and be appreciated alongside their contemporaries.
She stressed that black artists and their work must be included in mainstream museums beyond racially designated exhibits or Black History Month programs.
Franklin brought the point back home to St. Louis and its mainstream art museum.
“If we get into this as an institution – I know we don’t do this, but I’m making a point – by highlighting black artists only to the black community, then that’s not good either,” Franklin said. “Because the white students, the Asians and the elderly also need to know.”
