The final installment of the Dixon’s Black Artists in America series will be a fitting start to the museum’s 50th Anniversary year. Comprised of three ambitious exhibitions, the first show, presented in the fall of 2021, began with the Great Depression in 1929 and ended with the emergence of the civil rights era in the 1950s. The second part picked up the story in the 1960s during the maturation of the civil rights movement and ended in the early 1970s with the growing activism of Black artists. The third iteration explores the dynamic coexistence and interplay of artistic styles and viewpoints within African American art during the last quarter of the twentieth century, from the American Bicentennial in 1976 to September 11, a tragic moment that defined the start of the new millennium.
The older artists represented in this exhibition, Romare Bearden, Elizabeth Catlett, Loïs Mailou Jones, and Jacob Lawrence, were seminal figures born in the early twentieth century who had struggled through the harrowing Jim Crow era, saw a viable and effective civil rights movement emerge in the 1950s and 1960s, and lived to witness advances in racial justice during the 1970s and 1980s that would have been scarcely imaginable during their youth, while consistently producing works that cemented their reputations as giants of African American art. Mid-career artists working between 1976 and 2001, including Emma Amos, Ernie Barnes, Barkley Hendricks, Betye Saar, and Joyce Scott, built on the successes of the older cohort and brought both affirmative and thought-provoking images of Black identity and culture into the mainstream. At the same time, notable younger artists who were born in the 1950s and 1960s, such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Willie Cole, Kerry James Marshall, Kara Walker, and Carrie Mae Weems made dramatic, even shocking, postmodern works that challenged earlier notions of respectability as they decried continuing racial injustices.
Black Artists in America: From the Bicentennial to September 11, 2001, is curated by Dr. Earnestine Jenkins, professor of Art History at the University of Memphis and will include more than fifty paintings, sculptures, and works on paper drawn from public and private collections across the country.
An accompanying catalogue with essays by Dr. Earnestine Jenkins, Dr. Julie McGee, Dr. Ellen Daugherty, and Kevin Sharp will be published by Dixon Gallery and Gardens in association with Yale University Press.
