"An Essential Presence" presented nearly seventy pieces from the Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African American Art, including forty-five works new to the collection and on view for the first time. Spanning the late nineteenth century to the current decade, the show features work by such celebrated artists as Henry Ossawa Tanner, Charles White, and Elizabeth Catlett. Simultaneously, it heralds groundbreaking contemporary artists like Vanessa German, William Villalongo, and Syd Carpenter. With paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints, photographs, and participatory work, this selection gives a sense of the broad range of powerful and sensitive artwork made by artists of the African diaspora over more than a century. From realism to abstraction, with humor, grace, and pathos, the works in this exhibition sample this important private collection built under the direction of PFF curator Berrisford Boothe.
The catalog essay was written by Daniel Haxall, Ph.D., Professor of Art History at Kutztown University.