Brooklyn Museum Acquires Important Collection of Works from Black Arts Movement

Among the other artists represented in this collection are Benny Andrews, Cleveland Bellow, Kay Brown, Marie Johnson Calloway, Ben Hazard, Ben Jones, Carolyn Lawrence, Dindga McCannon, John T. Riddle, and Lev T. Mills.

The Black Arts Movement grew out of the Black Power Movement and encompassed visual arts, literature, theater, poetry, music, and dance. In Chicago, where many of the artists represented in this collection worked, the movement was ignited by the creation of the Wall of Respect (1967), a collaborative work of activist public art, which inspired a drive for Black self-definition, self-determination, and nationhood. The Black arts collective AfriCOBRA, in which many of the artists in this collection participated, called for the creation of new visual images of Blackness.

The Nelson Stevens print Uhuru (1971), from this collection, will be on display in the Museum's American Identities galleries in March 2013, and a selection of at least five works will be included in the upcoming exhibition Art, Activisim, and Civil Rights in the 1960s, on view March 7 through July 6, 2014, and co-curated by Dr. Kellie Jones, Associate Professor, Department of Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University, and Teresa A. Carbone, Andrew W. Mellon Curator of American Art at the Brooklyn Museum.

David Lusenhop founded Lusenhop Fine Art, in which Melissa Azzi is a principal, in 1989 after leaving the Richmond Art Museum in Indiana, where he served as Assistant Director. Following thirteen years based in Cincinnati, Lusenhop relocated to Chicago, where he directed Robert Henry Adams Fine Art from 2002 to 2006, after which he ran a public gallery space. An independent scholar and lecturer, he is known for his research on aspects of African American Art History.