It’s always something of a risk for an institution like the Saint Louis Art Museum to invite someone like Kellie Jones to speak, as SLAM did to kick off Black History Month and two current shows of abstract African-American art.
Jones has forgotten more about black abstract artists than most curators will ever learn. As the daughter of writer Hettie Jones and firebrand poet Amiri Baraka, she grew up in New York City, intimately familiar with the working African-American artists who only lately have been finding their way into major museum collections.
She visited St. Louis from New York City, the art hub of the continent. She was an African-American curator and professor visiting a museum that currently has on staff no black curators.
(However, SLAM is employing and educating Alisa Swindell as its current Romare Bearden Fellow; she and Janeen Turk assisted Andrew Walker in curating African American Abstraction: St. Louis Connections, one of the two shows up at the museum through March 23. More on the Romare Bearden Fellowship below.)
When taking the podium at the museum, Jones had made the off-handed remark that museums like SLAM are “getting up to code” in terms of access and inclusion. During the Q&A session, I asked her if the museum was up to code now or still “getting up to code.”
She said, “We’re getting there.”
Afterwards, Kendra Baker of the museum’s PR staff pulled me aside and said that Andrew Walker, SLAM’s assistant director for curatorial affairs and curator of American art, would appreciate an opportunity to answer the question about “getting up to code.”
So, I called the man. Walker spoke with great energy about the importance of collecting both contemporary African-American art and work from previous generations, which provides a needed historical context.
Walker waxed particularly rhapsodic about the museum’s most recent (2007) acquisition of work by an African American, Twilight Sounds, a 1947 painting by Norman Lewis (1909-1979).
Walker’s thoughts on Lewis’ painting should be fresh. He curated a current exhibition of the painting that places it “within the context of works by other artists experimenting with abstraction at the time.” This show also hangs until March 23 and will be reviewed in depth here before it comes down.
Being from the Show Me State, I asked to be shown more evidence about SLAM’s dedication to collecting African-American art. Baker then sent me a list of 12 exemplary pieces collected since 1995, starting with Watts 1963, a 1995 painting and collage by Kerry James Marshall. The acquisition was financed by the Museum Minority Artists Purchase Fund.
Other African-American artists whose work has been collected by the museum since 1995 include Edmonia Lewis (Portrait of a Woman, 1873), Leonardo Drew (Untitled #45, 1995), David Hammons (Untitled [Basketball Drawing], 1999), Glenn Ligon (Study for Frankenstein #1, 1992), Radcliffe Bailey, (Until I Die/Georgia Trees and the Upper Room, 1997), Lorna Simpson (Counting, 1991), Henry Ossawa Tanner (Gateway, Tangier, c.1912), Edward Mitchell Bannister (Woman Standing near a Pond, 1880) and Jerald Ieans (Allure, 1996), a local man who is long overdue for a story in the American (call me, dude).
In 1999, SLAM also acquired a 1967 collage by Romare Bearden (1911-1988) titled Summertime. Bearden has become an iconic artist who mostly worked in New York and helped to found the Studio Museum in Harlem (he also studied, briefly, at Lincoln University).
Bearden, obviously, is the namesake for the Romare Bearden Fellowship at the Saint Louis Art Museum. Both Kellie Jones and Andrew Walker made reference to this program as evidence of the museum “getting up to code.” Established in 1991, this is a “Post-Graduate Minority Fellowship” designed “to increase the diversity of professionals in museum work.”
The fellowship was conceived and funded by local philanthropists Dan and Adelaide Schlafly – parents, by the way, of Thomas Schlafly, founder and president of Schlafly Beer.
We will return to the Romare Bearden fellowship next week in the context of a profile of the current fellow, Alisa Swindell, who is speaking at the museum at 11 a.m. Tuesday, March 4 about Kota Ezawa’s video Lennon Sontag Beuys.
African American Abstraction: St. Louis Connections and Twilight Sounds are at SLAM in the Contemporary Art section through March 23. Admission to the museum is free.
